Creators
May 7, 2024
Robert Roberson's story is a tragic one. He is sitting on
death row in Texas for killing his 2-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis by shaking
her so violently that it caused her death. John J. Lennon, an incarcerated
journalist who works with the Prison Letters Project at Yale Law School,
recently wrote about Roberson for Slate.
The theory behind Roberson's conviction is what is commonly
known as shaken baby syndrome.
Proponents of the theory of shaken baby syndrome claim that
shaking a baby produces a so-called "triad" of catastrophic injuries
exclusive to shaking — subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage and brain
swelling. The diagnosis does not require the presence of other injuries such as
bruises, grab marks or damage to the baby's neck.
Injuries from shaken baby syndrome are so severe, these
experts say, the baby would immediately collapse. According to The Appeal, the
last person with the baby — a parent, babysitter or day care worker — is the
person often accused. That person is then left to prove they're innocent of a
crime that may not have occurred.
The presence of shaken baby syndrome often pits the accused
against the testimony of physicians, who say with certainty that the baby's
injuries are comparable to those sustained from falling out of a window or
being thrown from a car, reported The Appeal. In comparison, the defendant's
explanation falls short of making an impression on an investigator or jury.
However, as with many types of forensic evidence — shaken
baby syndrome is under scrutiny. Convictions are supposed to be final, but
science is evolving. In recent years, prisoners and their lawyers have
challenged a number of forensic disciplines: from eyewitness identification, to
fingerprints as well as analysis of blood spatter, hair, bitemarks, toolmarks
and a host of other traditionally "reliable" investigative
techniques.
Since the 1980s, nearly a quarter of overturned convictions
have featured "false or misleading forensic evidence," according to
the national Registry of Exoneration.
"We believed anyone in a lab coat with letters after
their names," M. Chris Fabricant, a lawyer for the Innocence Project,
which works to overturn wrongful convictions across the country, told the
Marshall Project. "But these methods were developed by law enforcement to
solve possible crimes, not in laboratories."
A. Norman Guthkelch, a British pediatric neurosurgeon whose
1971 paper first posited the shaken baby syndrome, later reviewed a number of
cases where defendants claimed their innocence. Patrick D. Barnes, MD of the
Stanford University Medical Center, wrote in Bloomberg Law, Guthkelch was
struck by the high proportion of cases in which the child had a history of
illnesses, indicating their injuries were the result of natural causes, not
abuse. In 2015, shortly before his death, Guthkelch told The Washington Post,
"I am doing what I can so long as I have a breath to correct a grossly
unjust situation."
According to Barnes, over the last two decades, courts in at
least 12 states, including Alaska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin,
have overturned shaken baby syndrome convictions, or rejected outdated science.
Some medical organizations have pushed back, including the
American Academy of Pediatrics, which fears marginal medical theories are
gaining too much traction in the courts, allowing people who abuse infants to
go free. In 2009, according to the Boston Globe, the academy did acknowledge
the controversy brewing over the role that excessive shaking plays in creating
extreme injuries.
The academy now tells doctors to use the term "abusive
head trauma," rather than shaken baby syndrome, to indicate that traumatic
blows to the head, not just shaking, are often behind the brain swelling and
eye damage that afflict some 1,000 children each year, often causing permanent
neurological damage if not death.
But the fact remains that at least 32 people have been
exonerated for crimes based on shaken baby syndrome, according to The Guardian.
In addition, last fall, Superior Court of New Jersey Judge Pedro J. Jimenez Jr.
ruled that shaken baby syndrome was "junk science" and
"scientifically unreliable".
A definitive answer for shaken baby syndrome remains
elusive. Roberson's petition to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking review of his
shaken baby syndrome conviction was denied without explanation.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett,
Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was
released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and
follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
To visit Creators CLICK HERE
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment