Leestma says, more simply, “These programs are like Pixar cartoons. You can do wonderful things, but is it real or a creation?”
“When you’ve been around this as long as I have, CONFESSIONS DON’T MEAN NEARLY AS MUCH as you’d think they do.”
Raul says his group has begun to verify its computer model with experimental data, but this work hasn’t been published yet.
The science behind SBS moves slowly forward. Meanwhile, Toni Blake’s office at 2nd Chair Services gets several phone calls or e-mails a day, on average, from a new set of parents or siblings or child-care workers accused of causing SBS (and wrongly so, they claim). SBS cases have been prosecuted around the world for the past 30 years. An unknown number of families have been affected. Certainly some SBS cases bring an abusing parent to justice and save children in the process. But if the skeptic argument is correct, then other SBS cases involve putting an innocent family member behind bars.
Blake tracks SBS cases for both SBSDefense.com and 2nd Chair Services. She has followed 169 shaken baby cases in which medical records were available and which occurred between 1997 and 2007. Forty-one percent of the babies survived, she reports. (Her study is unpublished.) Thirty-one cases she followed resulted in a confession involving “some form of shaking or shaking with impact,” she says. But such confessions, often used as the silver bullet to defeat SBS skeptics, became less conclusive upon further scrutiny. Thirteen of the confessions were admissions that the “abuser” had merely shaken the infant as a way to attempt to revive it. Another 15 admitted to “abuse” in a more general sense, which could have involved striking the child or hitting it against a wall or floor. Just three people in Blake’s data set admitted to abuse by shaking—and shaking only. And at least one of those three infants, she says, already had a subdural hematoma, before the shaking incident.
Scott Coffee, a public defender in Clark County, Nevada, says, “Shaken baby proponents say you have people confess to shaking babies, and that proves that shaking babies had to cause the injuries. The problem is, when you’ve been around this as long as I have, confessions don’t mean nearly as much as you’d think they do.”
Coffee, a public defender for the past 13 years, says child abuse cases often raise the stakes so high that a bias toward false confessions may be concealed within the data. When DISCOVER contacted him last summer, Coffee was working on an SBS case in which the accused abuser had been in jail for six years awaiting trial and potentially faced a first-degree murder charge. (Infanticide by abuse qualifies as first-degree murder in Nevada, Coffee says.)
The sentence Coffee’s client would be given, if he went to trial and lost, was either 20 to 50 years, 20 years to life, or life without parole. Agreeing to confess to shaking the child, Coffee says, would considerably reduce any sentence.
In July 2001 Coffee’s client was taking care of his 11-month-old son, Mike (not his real name), whom pediatrician Yazbak later described as suffering from “multiple medical problems” including malnutrition and possible blood coagulation deficiency. On July 10 Mike stopped breathing. According to Coffee, his client attempted CPR and called 911 before taking the child to a Las Vegas emergency room. Mike ultimately died on life support. Bruises were found on his abdomen and back, and paramedics had found a cut under his eyelid. Postmortem examinations revealed a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging.
With an existing criminal record that he feared would bias the trial, Coffee’s client opted to plead to shaking baby Mike. “I’m sure at some point during the failed attempt to resuscitate Mike, he was shaken, and as the local doctors were willing to testify that shaking caused the death, there wasn’t a problem getting the plea down,” Coffee said in an e-mail. In October 2007 Coffee’s client was sentenced to 10 years to life for second-degree murder.
Around the same time, the Wisconsin Law Review published a paper entitled “Shaken Baby Syndrome: Medical Uncertainty Casts Doubt on Convictions.” The paper’s author, Molly Gena, now a Milwaukee-based lawyer for Legal Action of Wisconsin, says her review of recent SBS decisions indicates the tide is beginning to turn.
“It started with the British cases,” Gena says, referring to a review ordered by the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, of 297 alleged child abuse cases, some of which were SBS convictions based only on the triad of internal symptoms: subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling. In one case, R v. Harris, the court concluded that “the mere presence of the triad on its own cannot automatically or necessarily lead to a diagnosis of [SBS].”
An SBS case in which Gena assisted as a law student (State of Wisconsin v. Audrey Edmunds) followed similar lines, with the court ruling in January 2008 that “there has been a shift in mainstream medical opinion....There are now competing medical opinions as to how [alleged shaken baby] Natalie’s injuries arose.”
Opposed though he is to the SBS skepticism that informed these recent court findings, Newberger of Harvard Medical School says he doesn’t disagree with them.
“Yes, there are competing explanations,” Newberger says. “The traditional explanation [for subdural hematomas] was that there were bridging veins that are sheared and...explode blood into the space. But does anybody really know that? That’s the issue.”
