New studies in Canada & Britain show people are being wrongfully convicted of the shaken baby theory.

Official studies in Canada and Britain have uncovered cases in which people were wrongly convicted based on the shaken baby theory.

As a journalist for ProPublica, I've spent more than a year scrutinizing the inner workings of the nation's system of coroner and medical examiner offices responsible for probing sudden and suspicious fatalities. In the course of that research, my colleagues and I analyzed roughly two dozen instances in which people were wrongly accused of killing babies or small children.

Questionable autopsy findings played a central role in each of these cases. Some experts, like Dr. Michael Laposata, the chief pathologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, think there are more innocent people still serving time in prison. "I don't think it's a handful," Laposata told me last year. "I think it's far more."

When children die unexpectedly, the authorities often look for unnatural causes, and rightly so; in recent decades our society has become far more vigilant about detecting and prosecuting child abuse, an admirable accomplishment.

But child deaths can pose special problems for forensic pathologists. When babies and small children die, the clues can be quite subtle. Oftentimes, doctors are hunting for microscopic indicators that a child has suffered head trauma or has been asphyxiated. Such cases require a high degree of expertise.

A key concern is that forensic pathologists may confuse the symptoms of a natural ailment for a sign of abuse. That could well be what happened with baby Etzel. There are dozens of afflictions that cause bleeding and bruising and can easily be mistaken for child abuse. One of the leading textbooks on child abuse now includes two chapters on these mimics, which range from certain forms of cancer to sickle cell anemia to trauma suffered during the birthing process.

Unfortunately, many forensic pathologists aren't prepared to deal with the complexity of child death cases. According to a 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences, only a third of the coroner and medical examiner offices in the U.S. had the equipment to do a microscopic tissue analysis. The report painted a dismal portrait of the profession, citing poor funding, a lack of decent facilities and a severe shortage of qualified doctors.
http://www.propublica.org/article/a-far-cry-from-csi