Watchdog report a two part series: "Shaken-baby science doubts grow"
Over the last 30 years, shaken-baby syndrome has come to be considered one of the most heinous forms of child abuse. Dozens of people in the Rochester area, and thousands nationwide, have been prosecuted for harming or killing small children in this way.
The scales of justice in these cases often tip on the word of doctors who say they can discern that intentional shaking took place by the nature of the injuries suffered by the young victims.
Many physicians and prosecutors remain confident in those judgments, but some critics say those doctors can be wrong. They claim innocent people have been sent to prison.
In New York, where challenging established forensic science in court is especially difficult, none of a handful of similar appeals has succeeded, Bernhard said.
She believes hers could be the first. Bernhard argues that Brittney died after jumping from a chair in Bailey’s home day care and hitting her head. She also argues that the three doctors who testified that Bailey must have shaken Sheets to death were relying on medical knowledge that has since been proved wrong.
“My feeling in René’s case is the verdict is based on science which is invalid,” said Bernhard, whose challenge also asserts Bailey recieved ineffective legal representation at her trial.
In its response to Bernhard’s legal filing, which with exhibits is nearly 350 pages in length, the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office asserts that there is no justification for overturning Bailey’s murder conviction.
The 25-page response defends the medical conclusions used to convict Bailey, and says much of the new science cited by Bernhard either isn’t new or isn’t persuasive. The document also asserts the challenge is legally deficient and re-airs trial evidence about inconsistencies in Bailey’s statements after the incident.
“There’s absolutely nothing new about what they're bringing now,” said First Assistant District Attorney Kelly Wolford. “To have the massive amount of injuries that this child had to her brain, it’s quite absurd to think this could be suffered by a (short) fall to a carpeted floor.”
If a suspect denies having done anything wrong and there are no gross signs of abuse — no broken limbs, fractured skull, dreadful bruises — the circumstances may evolve into a shaken-baby case. These are unusual crimes. There almost never are any witnesses, and rarely any physical evidence. Proof that a crime was committed derives from the conclusions drawn by physicians who say the victim suffered internal injuries that could only have been caused by an abusive adult.
The thinking behind these legal conclusions arose in the late 1960s and 1970s when physicians noted the damage to the brain of a small child that can accrue from a whiplash effect — that is, from the brain being propelled back and forth inside the skull.
If forceful enough, it was thought, such movement can break blood vessels and cause bruising and swelling of the brain, which in turn can lead to serious impairment of brain function or death.
It was widely accepted that shaken-baby conduct was likely to blame if a small child exhibited brain swelling in the absence of significant external injury or a clearly diagnosed illness.
Three specific injuries — bleeding in the retinas and in tissue surrounding the brain, and swelling of the brain — became so linked to shaken-baby syndrome that they became known in medical and criminal justice circles as simply “the triad.”
It also was widely believed that these symptoms could not result from accidents such as short-distance falls.
Further, it was argued that symptoms appeared shortly after the abuse, so the adult who was caring for the child when the injury manifested itself often became the prime suspect.
Today, some physicians, biomechanists and lawyers claim that statements such as that are unsupported, and say shaken-baby syndrome is based on theories that were never fully proved.
They believe research over the last 10-plus years has shown that the triad of symptoms can be caused by factors other than shaking a child — falls, accidental trauma, illness or disease.
“Is it a good thing to do to a baby? Absolutely not. Could it cause some sort of sub-lethal injury? I see no reason why it couldn’t,” said Dr. Peter Stephens, a North Carolina forensic pathologist who is one of the best-known critics of traditional shaken-baby science. “But the question is, can shaking alone kill infants? I don’t know.”
Stephens is one of six medical experts who prepared affidavits in support of Bailey’s action.
John Lloyd, an ergonomics researcher for the Veterans Administration in Florida, was asked several years ago by a colleague to look into the physics of shaken-baby syndrome.
He has conducted a series of experiments using crash-test manikins and sensor-laden dolls to measure the amount of force that an adult can impart.
“The results were just so far below injury thresholds that clearly, my position was that shaking was a benign event that could not cause this type of injuries in a normal infant,” Lloyd said.
In 2009, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended “shaken-baby syndrome” be set aside for “abusive head trauma,” a broader term that encompasses baby-shaking but also other forms of child abuse that leave children with neurological problems.
The academy also urged its members to consider all possibilities before coming to a conclusion.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20130630/NEWS01/306300031/shaken-baby-syndrome-brittney-sheets
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20130630/NEWS01/306300060/Shaken-baby
http://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2012/11/16/sbs-shaken-baby-syndrome-politics-and-religion-vs-new-science/