The book is a masterpiece that has rendered me up-to-date on the legal issues after reading the medical literature (I am an MD/PhD clinical neuroscientist who is now involved in these kinds of cases). It primed me for my recent introduction to dealing with police and prosecutor attitudes on this issue. Many are well-intentioned people but misguided by sticking to old beliefs that are now known to be scientifically wrong. Nimble attitudes to developing science and to what is knowable must prevail. This book is required reading for every policeman, lawyer, medical doctor, biomechanics researcher, day care provider, parent, child protection worker, psychologist, social worker, prosecutor and judge who deals with the so-called shaken baby syndrome. Clarity of thought, and justice will result from this book.
As a neuropathologist and brain scientist now working in pediatric neuropathology, it was necessary for me to get up to speed on "shaken baby syndrome", something I was taught many years ago categorically involved a triad of retinal hemorrhage, subdural hemorrhage and encephalopathy (something wrong with the brain) to convict someone of shaking their baby. Luckily, I was never confronted with such a case, nor asked to testify on any case of shaken baby syndrome for had I believed the unchallenged non-scientific dogma which has reigned for far too long, I probably would have assisted helping wrongfully convict an innocent person who just happen to call 911 and ended up getting sent to jail because the baby they were calling about developed hemorrhages somewhere from whatever cause. That cause could be many things such as infectious septicemia or reperfusion hemorrhage, but was falsely believed to be indicative of shaking for the triad. This could have possibly rendered me party to a wrongful conviction. I am thankful this never happened, as it would be a nightmare. I cannot fathom how people who are medical doctors and expert witnesses such as myself can live with themselves after doing this and now reading this book. Indeed, the book recounts many who have recanted their former testimony.
Unassailable, this book goes a long way to help correct the nonsensical, unscientific, and never-proven belief that the triad (of retinal hemorrhage, subdural hemorrhage and encephalopathy) means a baby was shaken. The book does this by recounting individual cases that could not be so, but were so according to prosecutors, resulting in periods of imprisonment up to life, of people who did nothing wrong but were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and at the wrong time in our medical/scientific evolution. The book gives pause, although one cannot stop reading it once one has begun. The number of cases is heartbreaking. The lives destroyed number in the hundreds, incarcerated in jail now. One can only imagine what it is like to be separated from one's children after losing a child or someone else's child while in your care, and then going to prison and permanently losing your spouse as well as your children because of a false belief.
The magnitude of the injustice has been multiplied by the number of cases, as recounted by Tuerkheimer. I only read the book once (so far) but remember only one true case of shaking, despite nanny-cams and other cameras. These are innocent people like us, whose lives have been ruined because they happened to have a baby or a toddler under their care. I have been approached at medical/scientific congresses by delegates from other countries such as Sweden and the United Kingdom, where a similar legal problem exists. There is little chance for the justice system to spring the hundreds of innocent parents, grandparents and day care providers from jail in all these countries. What a horrendous multinational injustice in Western countries. Less well developed countries seem to not have engaged in the folly described by Tuerkheimer.
Some who are clinging to the old beliefs that an epidemic of shaking has actually led to an epidemic of the triad, may doubt that this book is on solid medical & scientific ground, but it is, despite actually being a compendium of legal miscarriages of justice.
The book describes something unique in the history of my specialty of pathology - the use of the microscope for a medical diagnosis of murder. This has never happened in the entire history of medicine. It happened here because doctors simplistically accepted that bleeding always means trauma. But bleeding can result from anything that damages cells called endothelium, and I here mention only systemic blood infection and reperfusion after cardiorespiratory arrest, as 2 other causes, because this is a book review. Autopsy results are essential here, to help the parents heal their hearts rather than put them in jail when they did nothing wrong.
As the book correctly states, let us give space between our doctor (MD and/or PhD) expert witnesses and prosecutors. Let us as a society devise a rapid way to reduce public expenditure for keeping innocent people in jail because of these hundreds of flawed convictions.
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