Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Justice System.

The modern version of the Shaken Baby Syndrome presents some rather novel aspects of the justice system.

1.         The accuser is nearly always the main suspect, i.e., the hospital.

2.         The accused are nearly always the person or persons least capable of defending themselves.

3.         The accused are nearly always prevented from accessing evidence.

4.         The so called ‘investigators’ are all part of the prosecution team.

5.         No evidence is necessary to obtain a conviction, but evidence is needed to obtain an acquittal.

6.         The accused are deemed to be guilty unless proven to be innocent.

Intriguing, isn’t it?

Let us consider the above statements.

1          Most shaken baby cases arise after hospital births. Births are traumatic and cause  damage to both child and mother. That this trauma and damage is generally unavoidable does not alter the fact that the hospital were involved with this trauma and damage. Even the ‘real’ indications of  Shaken Baby Syndrome (damage to arms and neck) could be caused during the birth process.

Therefore the hospital must be considered to be the prime suspect.

2.         A young couple are expecting a happy event. The happy event happens and the couple are deliriously happy. After a few weeks it becomes obvious to the parents that there is something wrong with the baby and they take it to the doctor or to hospital. They are obviously worried. They are then accused by the doctor of deliberately causing injuries to the child. Not accidentally, but deliberately.

The parents are then in a state of shock from which they will never completely recover.

This mental trauma is deliberately caused by people whom the couple trusted implicitly, and is normally a knee jerk reaction from the doctors. Previous medical problems or birth problems are not checked until long after the charges are made.

3.         The doctor now informs the Social Services (SS) that he has charged the parents. Any investigation is then supposed to be handled by the SS. However, they no not  have any expertise in medical matters, nor do they seem to have any investigation experience. Any experienced investigator would recover/copy all medical records  immediately before they can even start an investigation. This never happens with the SS. Months can go by before any records are made available, especially to the defence. Without full medical records the defence cannot begin to prepare their case.

4.         The Social Services normally only ‘investigate’ the parents, never do they investigate the doctors or hospital. In general, their investigations actually amount to continuous attempts to get one or other of the parents to confess to shaking the baby. Therefore the SS become part of the prosecution team.

5.         Very rarely is evidence pertaining to the cause of the injuries produced in court.   The verdict is usually arrived at by vote amongst the medical experts attending the final hearing. The voting is normally split between the paediatric ‘experts’ who vote guilty and various other experts who’s vote can be split.

However, usually the other experts votes are dependant on the information supplied by the paediatrics department of the hospital in which the birth occurred.

6.         From the instant that the doctor makes the charge against the parents there are assumed to be guilty. Added to this problem is that the SS department try to insist on secrecy between them and the parents during the claimed ‘investigations’. This normally prevents the parents from obtaining expert help. A further problem is that the defence is prevented from presenting evidence before the court case.

The problem with expert witnesses is that they may arrive at a situation were they ought to vote one way, but doing so would invalidate their decisions in previous cases. Therefore their decision making is affected by their statements made in other cases.

Shaken Baby Syndrome has nothing to do with retinal haemorrhages or brain damage. It is strictly related to damage to the arms and/or neck.

The triad of symptoms currently being claimed by paediatricians to be caused by baby shaking are actually symptoms commonly caused by birth trauma.

Damage to the child’s head during the birth process can cause subdural haematoma that in turn can cause hydrocephalus (brain swelling), which in turn can cause retinal haemorrhages.

What hospitals have done is to take the symptons of the Shaken Baby Syndrome, (which is a sensible, scientific and logical set of symptoms), added in symptoms that are common in child birth, and then deleted the symptoms actually relating to the Shaken Baby Syndrome.  Justice or corruption?

See Retinal Haemorrhages on this web site.

Author; Brian Williams.

See also; http://medicalmisdiagnosisresearch.wordpress.com/