A New Jersey appeals court last year declared that a decades-old medical diagnosis often linked to child abuse, shaken baby syndrome, amounts to junk science – a position supported by the executive director of the the San Diego-based Innocence Center.
According to attorney Michael Semanchik, a widespread belief grew in the 1980s and 1990s that many infants were being violently shaken to death by abusive parents. Medical researchers had hypothesized that certain telltale infant injuries could determine with precision that such child abuse had occurred.
“Probably the most prolific example of well-entrenched junk science is shaken baby syndrome,” Semanchik said on a recent Innocence Center podcast. “Not only did it attract widespread support from law enforcement, but it also misled the entire medical profession. It was based on faulty studies that were not properly tested for causation.”
In turn, many innocent parents or caregivers were prosecuted and given long prison sentences as a result of a medical hypothesis that was later found to be invalid and the product of circular logic, according to the Innocence Center.
In the New Jersey cases, prosecutors were barred from bringing up the syndrome in litigation involving two fathers who disputed their child abuse indictments.
U.S. hospitals report 1,300 shaken baby syndrome cases annually, according to the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome.
“Shaken baby syndrome (sometimes referred to as abusive head trauma) is a flawed medical diagnosis that has led to many wrongful convictions in the United States and around the world,” Semanchik told the Southern California Record in an email. “While some courts have disallowed the presentation of a pure ‘shaking’ allegation (especially where there is no evidence of neck damage), the reliance on this junk science persists in many places."
He said the past acceptance of this diagnosis has also affected civil litigation.
“Undoubtedly, a criminal conviction has also led to civil cases under the same flawed theory," Semanchik said.
During the Innocence Center podcast earlier this year, another legal expert on shaken baby syndrome, Katherine Bonaguidi of the San Diego County Public Defender’s Office, explained that the syndrome is characterized by subdural hematomas, retinal hemorrhaging and brain swelling. The condition was linked to abusive shaking as a result of data culled from monkey studies and human trauma studies based on circular reasoning and other flaws.
“The doctors were coming in and testifying unconditionally that these injuries were the result of abuse, and I really want to emphasize that word unconditionally, because they weren’t saying this could be the result of abuse or this probably was the result of abuse, or more likely than not, or in my experience, this is a result of abuse,” Bonaguidi said. “They were essentially saying there is no other explanation for these injuries besides abuse.”
The acceptance of the syndrome began to wane after the turn of the century, and in particular after a 2016 study conducted by the Swedish government, she said.
“They looked at all the metadata, they looked at all these other studies over the decades that had been done on the subject of shaken baby syndrome, shaken impact syndrome, abuse of head trauma, all these different names, and they looked at all these studies and they found that all of them, but for two, were deeply flawed and basically of low quality,” Bonaguidi said.
She stressed that she would never condone shaking or saying shaking is acceptable.
“What I’m saying is there’s no scientific data to show that shaking causes these injuries,” Bonaguidi said. “So a person would have to shake a child so hard to create the quantity, the amount of acceleration and deceleration necessary to cause these intracranial injuries that a neck injury would have to accompany that.”
Research in recent decades has shown that child “shortfalls” – such as falling off a lawn chair at a birthday party or a parent accidentally dropping a child at a parking lot – can in unusual instances cause the triad of injuries that were previously deemed evidence of shaken baby syndrome, she said.
So how many innocent people may now be sitting in prison as a result of convictions related to shaken baby syndrome?
“I have no idea what that number is,” Bonaguidi said. “I don’t have a good way to gauge it. I can only say, again, I shudder to think.”