Reexamining Shaken Baby Convictions

by Matt Kelley · 2009-10-09 07:20:00 UTC
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In Georgia on Tuesday, a woman named Melonie Ware was acquitted in her second trial for charges that she killed a nine-month-old infant at her in-home day care by shaking the child. It turns out the baby died of sickle cell anemia. And you’ll hear this story again soon, with a different defendant in a different state. And then again after that.

More than 200 people are convicted of shaken baby murder each year in the U.S., and new scientific research shows that many of them are innocent. The time has come for a sweeping review of these cases that could free hundreds of innocent people from prison.

I pointed in June to the new research in shaken baby cases, but it bears repeating. There is a growing body of work showing that’s it is actually impossible to shake a baby to death. There is general consensus among scientists that the triad of symptoms long believed to be exclusive to shaken baby syndrome can actually be caused by other forms of trauma. Deborah Tuerkheimer, a University of Maine School of Law professor, wrote in a new paper on Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) that "we may surmise that a sizeable portion of the universe of defendants convicted of SBS-based crimes is, in all likelihood, factually innocent."

To be sure, many people convicted of causing a child’s death through abuse actually are guilty -- they could have hit or dropped the child -- but many are not, and it's up to us to correct these injustices.

A great piece by Radley Balko in Reason Magazine examines the sweeping implications of the new research in these cases. Balko writes:

There are almost certainly a significant number of innocent people in prison today who were wrongly convicted of shaking a baby to death. The problem is that there are also likely a number of guilty people who, nevertheless, shouldn't have been convicted on the basis of science - based testimony we now know to be false. The task will be convincing both the courts and the public to risk freeing actual child killers in order to free the innocent people convicted with flawed medical testimony.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the months and years ahead. Because of the tragic nature of these infant deaths, shaken baby cases were ripe for wrongful conviction in the first place and they have a tendency to fade away quietly when a judge tosses out an appeal. This science is real, however, and it proves that we have innocent people in prison. It's time to reopen these cases.

Photo by Jessicafm

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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