April 4, 2023 • 37 mins
Warning: This episode contains details of violence against children.
Shaken baby syndrome is a hypothesis that has been around for decades, rooted in the mechanics of whiplash. Medical academics, law enforcement, and prosecutors all agree that violently shaking a baby is a form of child abuse. But Audrey Edmunds, a pregnant mother running a daycare out of her home, was wrongfully convicted of shaking a child who died in her care and served 11 years in prison. The scientific community advocated for her release after studies questioned what was known about the “tell-tale” signs of shaken baby syndrome.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This episode contains details of violence against children. Please take
care when and where you listen. It's the evening of
March first, two thousand and four in Aurora, Illinois. Twenty
three year old Noel Quavado is at home with his family.
He and his wife, Cynthia, moved here from Mexico four
years ago. Cynthia has been home all day caring for
(00:34):
their two young sons, Noel Junior, who's twenty two months,
and eight month old Alex, while their father was working.
He's a laborer at a masonry company. Baby Alex is
due for a feeding. Home from work, Noel changes his
diaper while Cynthia washes a bottle. Alex has had health
issues in the past. Just a few months earlier, they'd
(00:57):
rushed him to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing.
He is actually scheduled for a follow up appointment the
next morning, But as Noel tries to calm him, Alex
stops crying. Then he appears to stop breathing. His eyes
roll back into his head. It's any parent's worst nightmare.
(01:18):
Noel and Cynthia start to panic. They can't even feel
Alex's heart beating. They immediately call nine one one. Noel's
brother in law, who lives with them, also tries to
help by performing c p R. Thankfully, when paramedics arrive,
they manage to get Alex breathing. Once stabilized, he is
(01:38):
taken to the hospital by ambulance and put on a respirator,
but he's still in critical condition and no one knows
exactly why. Eventually, doctors make the decision to fly Alex
to a hospital with a more sophisticated pediatric I see you,
but his condition doesn't improve. Despite all efforts, eight month
(01:59):
old Alex Quavado never wakes up. One doctor thinks the
tragedy may have been related to a pre existing condition,
but two others believe there is evidence brain swelling and
bleeding that the baby had been violently shaken. This launches
an investigation in which both of Alex's parents, fresh from
(02:22):
the trauma of his death, are interrogated for hours on end.
Neither speak English well, and they are questioned separately. The
detectives push Noel, accusing him of shaking his son. He
denies it. Here's Noel talking about that interview. He's talking
on the phone, so it's a little hard to hear him.
(02:45):
I've told him, I'm telling the poor home the live
me and if you don't tell me where you get firm,
we will take a way older firm and going a
wife where you our own farm. Noel says. The detectives
threatened to put both him and his wife in jail.
If both Well and Cynthia are in prison, who will
(03:07):
take care of their other son? Noel Junior, you know
you are young individual from different country, and now you're
sitting in front of like police officers. Your son just died,
So you're scared that freed. You're shocked, you're confused. That's
private investigator Sylvia Bassja Katie So. In a moment of desperation,
(03:29):
Noel tells the detectives what they want to hear this
When I come up with idea, a line to hear
my wife free so she can get our son back.
Persinly goes okay, I and my wife home. Noel tells
them he caused his son's death. He is charged with
first degree murder. When he explains that he only confessed
(03:52):
to protect his family. Police and prosecutors don't believe him,
but eventually others do the only thing I know that
he is innocent. He did not killed the baby. He
did not want to kill the baby. And that's what
I'm sure about. I'm Molly Herman, and this is CSI
(04:13):
on trial. Two or three stains are really not enough
to call something an impacts patter from gunshot that's going
to put someone in prison the rest of her life.
Sto making up a lie was gonna get you home? Center,
What is it about a bite mark that we make
a dentist, an expert in this area, who shot at you?
(04:35):
He said, I will sit in this jail and I
will rot before I take a plea bark. The problem
with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is
that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an
awful lot of science. Episode six Shaken baby syndrome. The
(04:59):
American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, and the World Health
Organization all describe shaken baby syndrome as a leading cause
of child abuse death, and the National Center on Shaken
Baby Syndrome says hospitals report between twelve hundred and fourteen
hundred cases each year in the US, they actually believe
(05:21):
the real number of cases is even higher. In medical school,
doctors are trained to recognize the three telltale symptoms that
indicate a case of shaken baby syndrome. Subdural hematoma or
bleeding on the brain, retinal hemorrhaging or bleeding in the
back of the eye, and brain swelling. They're known as
(05:44):
the triad. Doctor Howard Dubowitz has diagnosed and studied shaken
baby syndrome for decades. A professor of pediatrics at the
University of Maryland School of Medicine, he explains the concept.
One of the reasons that young babies are especially successible
(06:06):
to shaken baby syndrome is that the neck muscles are
actually poorly developed, and interestingly, in babies, the head is
relatively large compared to the rest of the body. So
when that child is say held by the trunk or
arms and roughly vigorously shaken, that head can really bob
(06:31):
around and move back and forth or sideways or rotate,
and it's that movement especially that makes them susceptible to
the bleeding around the brain and to the brain being
injured sometimes like whooplash. The idea behind shaken baby syndrome
(06:53):
is actually rooted in the mechanics of whiplash, a biomechanical
concept developed in the nineteen sixties by traumatic brain injury
researcher doctor ayub Omaya. Doctor Ken Monson, director of the
University of Utah's Head Injury and Vessel Biomechanics Lab, explains
the history shaking baby syndrome was, I think the right
(07:17):
word is hypothesized right around nineteen seventy by a couple
of different people. It was largely based on experiments that
had been conducted on primates in the sixties where iob Omaya,
who was an aurosurgeon, had actually produced a whiplash type
event in primates and had shown without a significant head impact,
(07:39):
that they could generate bleeding on the brain. Doctor Omayah's
experiments were designed to mimic a rear end car collision
where the person's head is snapped back but doesn't hit anything.
His results caught the attention of researchers studying infant brain injury.
If whiplash could cause brain injury, maybe shaking could as well.
(08:04):
Flash forward to the nineteen eighties, researchers from the University
of Pennsylvania set out to test this hypothesis with a
biomechanical model of a baby. They said okay, Well, as
an experiment, let's build a dummy that ways essentially the
same as I think it was a two month old infant.
And so they waited the head and the torso, and
(08:26):
they attached an accelerometer to the head, and they just
asked a group of volunteers to grip the dummy by
its torso and shake it as hard as they could
to see what the maximum head acceleration was that they
could generate with their shaking. They found, unsurprisingly, if you
think about it, that the force created by a human
shaking the baby model didn't even come close to the
(08:48):
force created by a rear end car collision. More importantly,
the force or acceleration a human can create by shaking
doesn't reach the energy thresholds required to cause the three
symptoms of the triad. Over the year the field of
biomechanics has advanced, four or five studies have been essentially
(09:11):
conducted to repeat those initial experiments with more advanced stummies.
The interesting thing is that the accelerations that were measured
associated with shaking have not really changed much. Obviously, that
doesn't mean shaking a baby isn't harmful. Here's Kate Judson
the executive director of the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences.
(09:34):
You've met her in earlier episodes. Nobody should violently shake
a baby. It is abusive and nobody should do it.
But that's really different from saying that when a child
has intracrannial bleeding that they must have been shaken. Those
are really different things. Despite the biomechanical science clearly indicating
(09:56):
that there was a fundamental problem with the hypothesis of
shaken baby syndrome, it became a thing. The science was ignored,
and the hypothesis took root because at that time in America,
it found fertile soil. This is the era of movies
like Mister Mom and Working Girl, Women and Mothers moving
(10:18):
into corporate America in record numbers, and the number of
daycare facilities was rising too, along with the guilt parents
were supposed to feel about leaving their young children with
quote unquote strangers. This in part triggered a kind of
hysteria over the idea that children in daycare were being
(10:41):
ritually abused. They called it satanic panic. Award winning investigative
journalists Susan Goldsmith covers child abuse, the foster care system,
and criminal justice. People believed that there were clubs of
Satanists operating in childcare settings. Pediatricians into court and said
(11:07):
we saw physical signs of sexual abuse in these Satanic
panic cases. It went on for about a decade. There
were many, many prosecutions, people went to prison, people's lives
were ruined. The Satanic panic frenzy was ultimately debunked, but
it was powered by the same force as shaken baby syndrome.
(11:31):
What connects the two theories, syndromes, whatever you want to
call them, between Satanic panic and shaken baby syndrome as
it involves a hysteria around children being harmed. As the
hypothesis grows, so does its reach in the form of
organizations like the National Center for Shaken Baby Syndrome. My
(11:54):
name's Dryinsteinbuel. I'm the executive director of the National Center
on Shaken Baby Syndrome, American Academy Pediatrics, the World Health
Organization CDC, every single major medical organization in the world
that deals with this topic recognizes that this is a
real thing that children get shaken and abused. Ryan is
absolutely right. All of those organizations generally accept the hypothesis.
(12:16):
So we've been doing prevention work since two thousand. That
prevention work includes focusing on what they call the period
of purple crying. So this is a program that educates
moms and dads and other caregivers about infant crying, which
has been shown to be the number one trigger for
shaken baby center abuse of head trauma, and how to
(12:37):
respond to that crying when you're feeling frustrated, which is,
put the baby down in a safe place, walk away
until you can calm down or call someone so you
can have some reprieve. We do this program in hospitals,
public health offices, and home visiting programs. These advocacy efforts
in medical settings, combined with medical training, have institutionalized shaken
(12:58):
baby syndrome. Pediatrics Professor doctor Howard Dubowitz again, so typical
in a pediatric training program, this is the three year residency.
Most residents will get somewhere between maybe a week to
a month of training on this topic informally through situations
(13:21):
in the emergency department on the wards in ICU. It's
a cycle doctors training doctors on the hypothesis of shaken
baby syndrome. Kate Judson again, what's the most influential is
that childobose pediatrics has become its own board certified subspecialty.
(13:42):
So many of the people who originated these ideas and
we're really at the forefront of prosecuting these cases, are
now training the next generation of doctors. Doctor Dubowitz, I've
been working in this field about forty years. Anyone working
in pediatrics related to child abuse recognized the enormous potential
(14:07):
ramifications of diagnosing abuse, what it means for this child,
perhaps other children in the family being removed from the home,
people going to prison. It's a very very big deal,
and so we try really hard to be super careful
and to get this right. But critics argue that a
(14:30):
lot of doctors and ultimately prosecutors and juries haven't gotten
it right. That the research cited to validate the syndrome
isn't credible, that other factors like undiagnosed medical conditions can
cause those telltale signs the triad, and that because of
criminal prosecutions based on the shaken baby hypothesis, many innocent
(14:54):
people have gone to prison, people like Audrey Edmunds. It
was shortly after I had my baby that I got
a call that I was being charged with homicide and
that is when the nightmare started. My mind was just
(15:30):
racing you guys, I just I still look at me,
I get goose bumps. This is Audrey Edmonds. If you've
ever driven across the country from the East coast, you
notice that people start getting nicer as you go west.
One time, my husband and I thought we were being
carjacked in Indiana, but it was just a lady from
Whitecastle running out to our car with a burger. We forgot.
(15:53):
Audrey is that lady the nicest. She's bubbly, you can't
imagine her saying a bad word. And she's a mom
of three daughters. But she had to watch her girls
grow up from a far because she spent over a
decade in prison wrongfully convicted first degree reckless homicide. They
accused me of showing utter disregard to human life. That
(16:17):
human life was a baby left in her care. Here's
her story. In October nineteen ninety five, in one of Key, Wisconsin,
Audrey was pregnant with her youngest and running a daycare
out of her home. Seven month old Natalie Beard was
dropped off just before seven thirty am. She hadn't been
(16:39):
feeling well and had refused her morning bottle. The mom
said she'd been very fussy. She'd been up the night
before and had been ill with an ear infection. Audrey
tried to calm Natalie by feeding her. After thirty thirty
five minutes of trying to help her feed and trying
to calm her down when she didn't, that's when I
(17:00):
chose to put her in her car seat in a
different room where it was quiet, because Natalie was very
sensitive to noise and too abrupt movements. But nothing was working.
When the formula started coming out of her nose, I
instantly picked her up, held her was patting her on
the back. She was not responding. She ran outside, screaming
(17:21):
for help from her neighbors. She called nine to one.
Audrey says, she can't get any life out of Natalie.
That is when the police came, the ambulance came, and
then it accelerated into a very nightmare day. Baby Natalie
(17:43):
was life flighted to a hospital, but her condition never improved,
and sadly, at nine pm that night, she was pronounced dead.
The autopsy found that she had extensive brain damage. After
I found out that Natalie had passed away, the police
the investigators were very kind to me that the local
(18:04):
one from WannaKey, and they just came and said this
was all regular protocol, that they had to talk to me,
they had to take pictures, which they did, and I
just thought, Okay, this is what happens. But I never
ever knew that there was any suspicion of homicide of
all things. Months later, Audrey is arrested and charged with
(18:27):
first degree reckless homicide. Prosecutors presented the case that Natalie
had died from being violently shaken. Audrey was accused of
causing shaken baby syndrome. It was a total foreign term
to me. I had never even heard of it, and
when they started talking about it at the trial, I
(18:49):
was like, what in the world are you insinuating here?
This did not happen. According to experts, Natalie exhibited the
triad bleeding on the brain, retinal hemorrhaging, and brain swelling.
So it came down to Audrey's word that she cared
for and comforted Natalie against the triad, and expert after
(19:13):
expert testified that because the injuries were so severe, they
must have occurred shortly before Natalie's collapse. Here are voice
actors reading the testimony from chief medical examiner Jeffrey Jensen
and child neurologist Robert Rust. It would be my opinion
that it would be extremely unlikely, too almost impossible, that
(19:36):
there would be any period of lucidity following those types
of injuries. It's my opinion that the injuries had to
have occurred between the time that this child was dropped
off at the daycare center by her parents and the
time that the officer responded. When I heard doctors at
the trial talk about head trauma in being equivalent to
(19:57):
a fall from a two story building, I just wanted
to scream, even though the prosecution had seven people testifying
and we only had two, because my attorney said it
was just so so hard to get medical people to
talk about it because it was such a green, vague
area that even then none of them could determine that
(20:20):
anything had happened within a twenty four hour period to
this child. Natalie's medical records showed that she had been
treated in the past for symptoms that could have been
caused by a brain injury, but a juror in Audrey's
case told us it was the prosecution's expert testimony that
convinced them on November twenty sixth, nineteen ninety six, she
(20:43):
was found guilty. Her unwillingness to admit and express remorse
for a crime she did not commit factored into her
harsh sentence eighteen years in prison. Her three children had
just lost their mother, my baby, my youngest I was
(21:03):
incarcerated two days after her first birthday, and my second
one was just over almost three, and my oldest was
in kindergarten. Mm. Yeah, that's a tough day. While Audrey
sat in prison, another shaken baby case became a national
(21:23):
spectacle as Court TV broadcast the trial. But this case
revealed the cracks and the shaken baby hypothesis. British nanny
Louise Woodward was accused of shaking eight month old Matthew
Eapen to death. The evidence presented in court was the
same classic triad of symptoms that led to Audrey's conviction,
(21:47):
but Woodward had high profile experts testifying in her defense,
including doctor Ayoub Omaya. You heard about him earlier. It
was his whiplash study that was used to develop the
shaken baby syndrome hypothesis in the first place. Kate Judson again,
doctor Omiyah testified in that trial and explained that his
(22:09):
research had been misinterpreted and that really wasn't a correct
application of the work that he had done. Biomechanical engineers
analyzed the hypothesis of shaking and concluded that it was
not a likely mechanism for the injuries attributed to it,
and it was really a turning point. But a Harvard
neuro radiologist, doctor Patrick Barnes, also testified, telling the jury
(22:33):
that the baby was shaken. Woodward was found guilty, though
on appeal, her sentence was reduced and she served less
than a year. After her trial, doctor Barnes began to
question his own testimony. Patrick Barnes, in the years after
that case began to dig into the science and really
(22:56):
came to the conclusion that his prior testimony had been incorrect,
that he was wrong, and he thereafter began to publish
and dedicated portion of his career to writing those wrongs,
which is amazing. Audrey Edmonds, facing down an eighteen year sentence,
tried to keep her hopes up even when none of
(23:16):
her appeals were successful, but new scientific studies were emerging.
In two thousand and one, a study was published that
directly challenged the medical arguments used against Audrey. It was
written by doctor John Plunkett. He was a forensic pathologist
who was confused and frustrated by the idea that kids
(23:41):
with this constellation of findings often associated with shaking, had
to have been shaken. He was frustrated by that because
he thought that it was wrong. Plunkett identified eighteen cases
in which children died from accidental falls on playgrounds. He
reviewed all the medical records, autopsy reports, scene photographs, and videos,
(24:03):
and what he found was that many of those children
exhibited the exact same symptoms as kids who would normally
have been diagnosed as having been shaken, and that some
of them experienced intervals of lucidity. They were clearly injured,
but they were not comatos. They were maybe they were
walking and talking, maybe they were eating. In other words,
(24:24):
if baby Natalie's triad of symptoms were caused by an injury,
that injury could have occurred hours or even days earlier,
rather than in that narrow window of time while she
was in Audrey's care. Plunkett study got the attention of
a pathologist who testified in Audrey's case. Doctor Huntington attorney
(24:47):
Keith Findley is the co founder of the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
He learned some things about that case that undermined his
testimony at this trial, and he had actually written a
letter to the Journal of the National Association of Medical
Examiners in which he had said, basic, we used to
think we knew how to time these injuries and therefore
(25:09):
how to identify who did it. We were wrong. Keith
and his team from the University of Wisconsin Law School
were working on Audrey's wrongful conviction case. They called doctor Huntington,
Doctor Huntington, we are representing Audrey Edmonds, and he immediately
cut in and said, oh goodness, Audrey Edmonds. What are
(25:30):
we going to do about Audrey Edmonds? Thanks to doctor
Huntington and doctor Barnes, both willing to challenge their beliefs,
do more research and admit they were wrong, Audrey's conviction
was overturned. She'd been in prison for eleven years. Inmate
(25:50):
comes up to me and she goes, Audrey Edmonds, I
saw your case on the news today and your conviction
has been overturned. I screamed. I grabbed this crazy crabby
guard's arm because I, oh my gods, are you for sir?
The day she was released. Audrey's daughters were twelve, fourteen,
(26:12):
and sixteen years old. It became, to my knowledge, the
first case in the country in which a shaken baby
syndrome or abusive head trauma conviction was overturned on the
basis of new scientific evidence challenging the hypothesis upon which
the prosecution rested. Less than a year after Audrey's exoneration,
(26:36):
the American Academy of Pediatrics came forward to issue a
policy statement on shaken baby. It said pediatricians should use
the broader term abusive head trauma rather than shaken baby syndrome.
The reasoning abusive head trauma encompassed all mechanisms that could
cause injury to the head, not just shaking Kate Judson.
(27:01):
They published a new position statement in which they started
to acknowledge some of the other possible causes, though they
downplay them, you know, they really imply that they were
very rare. But using broader terminology did not substantively change anything.
People are still being convicted because the mainstream pediatric community
(27:23):
embrace still embraces the shaking baby cynerm hypothesis, and indeed
has become extremely defensive and reactionary in response to any
criticisms of the hypothesis, and so the prosecutions continue. Acquittals happen,
but so do many, many, many convictions, and thousands remain incarcerated.
(27:47):
Like Noel Quavado, the father you heard about in the
beginning of this episode, He confessed to shaking his son,
but he says he lied to protect his family before
(28:19):
I was happily married. But then Noel Cavado was taken
into custody for the murder of his eight month old son, Alex.
When interrogators threatened to arrest his wife and take away
their surviving child, he confessed to shaking his son to
protect them. When I was born, I told that he
(28:42):
was in my friend. If I lied saying that I
did it, holly to back my wife and get home
and get her from back. It may be a little
hard to understand Noel, but he said he told the
court he only lied to protect his wife and so
they'd give her back their older son. I just fer
(29:06):
I got my mother with a confession in hand. The
police investigation is all but over, Kate Judson. If you
look at the studies where they have analyzed confessions to
shaking they don't do any of the background that is
necessary to know whether the confession is a consistent with
(29:28):
the facts of the case and be a false or
coerced confession. Noel is not alone. False confessions in shaken
baby syndrome cases are surprisingly common, so people are often
extremely distraught when they're being interrogated by police because a
child has died in their care or you know, maybe
(29:48):
isn't the hospital, or has been seriously injured. They might
not know why. And even if you've done nothing as
a parent or caregiver with a child in your care,
you may feel feelings of guilt even if you didn't
do anything, and so grief, guilt, depression, fear, all of
(30:09):
these things are things that can coerce a false confession.
False confessions like Noel's reinforce the legitimacy of shaken baby syndrome.
This persists, and one of the reasons why doctors have
said they continue to rely on it is because people
have confessed to it. A thorough investigation would have revealed
a family history of illness, including Noel's brother who died
(30:31):
in infancy. At trial, a defense expert did testify that
Alex had been diagnosed with neonatal meningitis months before his death,
which may have caused a seizure that killed him. But
in two thousand and seven, Noel is convicted of first
degree murder and given a sentence of life in prison.
(30:53):
It's eventually reduced to thirty five years. Today he has
been in prison for nearly two decades. His wife, who
he lied to protect, has since divorced him and remarried.
I'm only here will almost hate the beautiful my life,
my older son. I'm glad he grew up of the
good fan and the Marines. Okay, he's cool. I'm literally
(31:17):
was part of his life. Noel continues to maintain his innocence,
and new studies continue to highlight the lack of scientific
and medical validity behind the shaken baby hypothesis. In twenty sixteen,
an extensive study by the Swedish government looked like it
might be the tipping point. It looked through thousands of
(31:39):
published medical articles, whittled it down to a thirty sum
that were really relevant, and of those they concluded that
I think it was something like twenty eight of the
papers were of low scientific quality, two were of medium
scientific quality, and zero were of high scientific quality, but
(32:02):
so far the impact has been disappointing. Kate Judson, I
think a lot of us who work on wrongful convictions
in shaken baby syndrome cases, we're really hoping that the
Swedish study would make something change in this country. That
just hasn't been the case. Certainly, you see more and
more skeptics. Those in the pediatric community, like doctor Howard Dubowitz,
(32:26):
argue that criticisms of shaken baby syndrome have a real
consequence when it comes to protecting children. There's been a
curious phenomenon now for some time where a relatively small
cadre of physicians and it's not just in the US,
some other countries have the same problem deny that this
(32:50):
diagnosis exists or that this diagnosis is being accurately reasonably applied,
And this presents I think a serious problem for us.
If this child was abused, and let's say it has
now been is recovering, that child may be returned to
(33:14):
a dangerous home situation. And those on the legal side,
like Kate Judson, can understand the hesitation for change. If
you devoted a serious chunk of your professional life to
stamping out this particular form of child abuse. It might
be very difficult to hear conflicting information. We hear that's
(33:35):
so often in child abuse cases, so we just want
to err on the side of the child. But the
truth is, if you say that someone was abused who wasn't,
then they're going to potentially miss their medical problem, or
separate them from people who love them, or disrupt their
family life. And what studies have shown is that separation
of a family, even briefly, it causes lasting trauma. So
(33:57):
it's critical to just be so careful. The ripple effects
of trauma run deep. Noel Cuvada lost the family he
sought to protect and faces possible deportation if granted clemency.
Private investigator Sylvia Bassja Katie is certain Noel is innocent.
(34:18):
She has spent the last two years trying to fight
his conviction. I realized, like, oh my god, this guy
is in prison for the crime he did not commit,
Like I want to help him. Nothing was going on
for many years, and now somebody is helping him. And
now he wants to get everything done as soon as possible,
which I understand him perfectly. He has hope. Audrey Edmund's
(34:43):
marriage ended in divorce, and after serving over a decade
in prison, the state of Wisconsin refused to grant her
any compensation, But the same outlook that allowed her to
survive prison keeps her going. One of my biggest hopes
while I was away was that with all this new
medical evidence coming to service and more and more people
(35:06):
working on these kind of cases, that it would help others.
So many are really scarred and struggling, and I feel
for him. I mean, I'm not happy, and the scar
in my life will always be there, but it fades.
(35:28):
Next time. On CSI on Trial and Arson Investigation concludes,
a Moolotov cocktail started a fire, ignoring survivors who say
there was a faulty space heater inside. The last thing
that this man said out his wife, Hey, this space
heater on fire. You dismiss it, and you just put
(35:50):
an innocent man in prison for twenty five years. CSI
on Trial is a co production of iHeart Podcasts and
School of Humans, based on the Curiosity stream series CSI
on Trial, created by Eleanor Grant and produced by the
(36:12):
Biscuit Factory. You can watch all six episodes of the
video series right now at Curiosity stream Dot com This
episode is hosted and written by me Molly Herman and
researched by Katie Dunn and myself. Our producer is Miranda Hawkins.
Jessica Metzker is the senior producer. Virginia Prescott, Jason English,
(36:36):
Brandon Barr and L. C. Crowley are the executive producers.
Sound design in mix by Miranda Hawkins, Voice acting by
Mike Coscarelli and Jeremy Thall. Special thanks to John Higgins,
Rob Burke, Rob Lyle and Brandon Craigie. If you're enjoying
(36:56):
the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app.
Check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering His Jury,
pop culture, true crime, and more. School of Humans
This episode contains details of violence against children. Please take
care when and where you listen. It's the evening of
March first, two thousand and four in Aurora, Illinois. Twenty
three year old Noel Quavado is at home with his family.
He and his wife, Cynthia, moved here from Mexico four
years ago. Cynthia has been home all day caring for
(00:34):
their two young sons, Noel Junior, who's twenty two months,
and eight month old Alex, while their father was working.
He's a laborer at a masonry company. Baby Alex is
due for a feeding. Home from work, Noel changes his
diaper while Cynthia washes a bottle. Alex has had health
issues in the past. Just a few months earlier, they'd
(00:57):
rushed him to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing.
He is actually scheduled for a follow up appointment the
next morning, But as Noel tries to calm him, Alex
stops crying. Then he appears to stop breathing. His eyes
roll back into his head. It's any parent's worst nightmare.
(01:18):
Noel and Cynthia start to panic. They can't even feel
Alex's heart beating. They immediately call nine one one. Noel's
brother in law, who lives with them, also tries to
help by performing c p R. Thankfully, when paramedics arrive,
they manage to get Alex breathing. Once stabilized, he is
(01:38):
taken to the hospital by ambulance and put on a respirator,
but he's still in critical condition and no one knows
exactly why. Eventually, doctors make the decision to fly Alex
to a hospital with a more sophisticated pediatric I see you,
but his condition doesn't improve. Despite all efforts, eight month
(01:59):
old Alex Quavado never wakes up. One doctor thinks the
tragedy may have been related to a pre existing condition,
but two others believe there is evidence brain swelling and
bleeding that the baby had been violently shaken. This launches
an investigation in which both of Alex's parents, fresh from
(02:22):
the trauma of his death, are interrogated for hours on end.
Neither speak English well, and they are questioned separately. The
detectives push Noel, accusing him of shaking his son. He
denies it. Here's Noel talking about that interview. He's talking
on the phone, so it's a little hard to hear him.
(02:45):
I've told him, I'm telling the poor home the live
me and if you don't tell me where you get firm,
we will take a way older firm and going a
wife where you our own farm. Noel says. The detectives
threatened to put both him and his wife in jail.
If both Well and Cynthia are in prison, who will
(03:07):
take care of their other son? Noel Junior, you know
you are young individual from different country, and now you're
sitting in front of like police officers. Your son just died,
So you're scared that freed. You're shocked, you're confused. That's
private investigator Sylvia Bassja Katie So. In a moment of desperation,
(03:29):
Noel tells the detectives what they want to hear this
When I come up with idea, a line to hear
my wife free so she can get our son back.
Persinly goes okay, I and my wife home. Noel tells
them he caused his son's death. He is charged with
first degree murder. When he explains that he only confessed
(03:52):
to protect his family. Police and prosecutors don't believe him,
but eventually others do the only thing I know that
he is innocent. He did not killed the baby. He
did not want to kill the baby. And that's what
I'm sure about. I'm Molly Herman, and this is CSI
(04:13):
on trial. Two or three stains are really not enough
to call something an impacts patter from gunshot that's going
to put someone in prison the rest of her life.
Sto making up a lie was gonna get you home? Center,
What is it about a bite mark that we make
a dentist, an expert in this area, who shot at you?
(04:35):
He said, I will sit in this jail and I
will rot before I take a plea bark. The problem
with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is
that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an
awful lot of science. Episode six Shaken baby syndrome. The
(04:59):
American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, and the World Health
Organization all describe shaken baby syndrome as a leading cause
of child abuse death, and the National Center on Shaken
Baby Syndrome says hospitals report between twelve hundred and fourteen
hundred cases each year in the US, they actually believe
(05:21):
the real number of cases is even higher. In medical school,
doctors are trained to recognize the three telltale symptoms that
indicate a case of shaken baby syndrome. Subdural hematoma or
bleeding on the brain, retinal hemorrhaging or bleeding in the
back of the eye, and brain swelling. They're known as
(05:44):
the triad. Doctor Howard Dubowitz has diagnosed and studied shaken
baby syndrome for decades. A professor of pediatrics at the
University of Maryland School of Medicine, he explains the concept.
One of the reasons that young babies are especially successible
(06:06):
to shaken baby syndrome is that the neck muscles are
actually poorly developed, and interestingly, in babies, the head is
relatively large compared to the rest of the body. So
when that child is say held by the trunk or
arms and roughly vigorously shaken, that head can really bob
(06:31):
around and move back and forth or sideways or rotate,
and it's that movement especially that makes them susceptible to
the bleeding around the brain and to the brain being
injured sometimes like whooplash. The idea behind shaken baby syndrome
(06:53):
is actually rooted in the mechanics of whiplash, a biomechanical
concept developed in the nineteen sixties by traumatic brain injury
researcher doctor ayub Omaya. Doctor Ken Monson, director of the
University of Utah's Head Injury and Vessel Biomechanics Lab, explains
the history shaking baby syndrome was, I think the right
(07:17):
word is hypothesized right around nineteen seventy by a couple
of different people. It was largely based on experiments that
had been conducted on primates in the sixties where iob Omaya,
who was an aurosurgeon, had actually produced a whiplash type
event in primates and had shown without a significant head impact,
(07:39):
that they could generate bleeding on the brain. Doctor Omayah's
experiments were designed to mimic a rear end car collision
where the person's head is snapped back but doesn't hit anything.
His results caught the attention of researchers studying infant brain injury.
If whiplash could cause brain injury, maybe shaking could as well.
(08:04):
Flash forward to the nineteen eighties, researchers from the University
of Pennsylvania set out to test this hypothesis with a
biomechanical model of a baby. They said okay, Well, as
an experiment, let's build a dummy that ways essentially the
same as I think it was a two month old infant.
And so they waited the head and the torso, and
(08:26):
they attached an accelerometer to the head, and they just
asked a group of volunteers to grip the dummy by
its torso and shake it as hard as they could
to see what the maximum head acceleration was that they
could generate with their shaking. They found, unsurprisingly, if you
think about it, that the force created by a human
shaking the baby model didn't even come close to the
(08:48):
force created by a rear end car collision. More importantly,
the force or acceleration a human can create by shaking
doesn't reach the energy thresholds required to cause the three
symptoms of the triad. Over the year the field of
biomechanics has advanced, four or five studies have been essentially
(09:11):
conducted to repeat those initial experiments with more advanced stummies.
The interesting thing is that the accelerations that were measured
associated with shaking have not really changed much. Obviously, that
doesn't mean shaking a baby isn't harmful. Here's Kate Judson
the executive director of the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences.
(09:34):
You've met her in earlier episodes. Nobody should violently shake
a baby. It is abusive and nobody should do it.
But that's really different from saying that when a child
has intracrannial bleeding that they must have been shaken. Those
are really different things. Despite the biomechanical science clearly indicating
(09:56):
that there was a fundamental problem with the hypothesis of
shaken baby syndrome, it became a thing. The science was ignored,
and the hypothesis took root because at that time in America,
it found fertile soil. This is the era of movies
like Mister Mom and Working Girl, Women and Mothers moving
(10:18):
into corporate America in record numbers, and the number of
daycare facilities was rising too, along with the guilt parents
were supposed to feel about leaving their young children with
quote unquote strangers. This in part triggered a kind of
hysteria over the idea that children in daycare were being
(10:41):
ritually abused. They called it satanic panic. Award winning investigative
journalists Susan Goldsmith covers child abuse, the foster care system,
and criminal justice. People believed that there were clubs of
Satanists operating in childcare settings. Pediatricians into court and said
(11:07):
we saw physical signs of sexual abuse in these Satanic
panic cases. It went on for about a decade. There
were many, many prosecutions, people went to prison, people's lives
were ruined. The Satanic panic frenzy was ultimately debunked, but
it was powered by the same force as shaken baby syndrome.
(11:31):
What connects the two theories, syndromes, whatever you want to
call them, between Satanic panic and shaken baby syndrome as
it involves a hysteria around children being harmed. As the
hypothesis grows, so does its reach in the form of
organizations like the National Center for Shaken Baby Syndrome. My
(11:54):
name's Dryinsteinbuel. I'm the executive director of the National Center
on Shaken Baby Syndrome, American Academy Pediatrics, the World Health
Organization CDC, every single major medical organization in the world
that deals with this topic recognizes that this is a
real thing that children get shaken and abused. Ryan is
absolutely right. All of those organizations generally accept the hypothesis.
(12:16):
So we've been doing prevention work since two thousand. That
prevention work includes focusing on what they call the period
of purple crying. So this is a program that educates
moms and dads and other caregivers about infant crying, which
has been shown to be the number one trigger for
shaken baby center abuse of head trauma, and how to
(12:37):
respond to that crying when you're feeling frustrated, which is,
put the baby down in a safe place, walk away
until you can calm down or call someone so you
can have some reprieve. We do this program in hospitals,
public health offices, and home visiting programs. These advocacy efforts
in medical settings, combined with medical training, have institutionalized shaken
(12:58):
baby syndrome. Pediatrics Professor doctor Howard Dubowitz again, so typical
in a pediatric training program, this is the three year residency.
Most residents will get somewhere between maybe a week to
a month of training on this topic informally through situations
(13:21):
in the emergency department on the wards in ICU. It's
a cycle doctors training doctors on the hypothesis of shaken
baby syndrome. Kate Judson again, what's the most influential is
that childobose pediatrics has become its own board certified subspecialty.
(13:42):
So many of the people who originated these ideas and
we're really at the forefront of prosecuting these cases, are
now training the next generation of doctors. Doctor Dubowitz, I've
been working in this field about forty years. Anyone working
in pediatrics related to child abuse recognized the enormous potential
(14:07):
ramifications of diagnosing abuse, what it means for this child,
perhaps other children in the family being removed from the home,
people going to prison. It's a very very big deal,
and so we try really hard to be super careful
and to get this right. But critics argue that a
(14:30):
lot of doctors and ultimately prosecutors and juries haven't gotten
it right. That the research cited to validate the syndrome
isn't credible, that other factors like undiagnosed medical conditions can
cause those telltale signs the triad, and that because of
criminal prosecutions based on the shaken baby hypothesis, many innocent
(14:54):
people have gone to prison, people like Audrey Edmunds. It
was shortly after I had my baby that I got
a call that I was being charged with homicide and
that is when the nightmare started. My mind was just
(15:30):
racing you guys, I just I still look at me,
I get goose bumps. This is Audrey Edmonds. If you've
ever driven across the country from the East coast, you
notice that people start getting nicer as you go west.
One time, my husband and I thought we were being
carjacked in Indiana, but it was just a lady from
Whitecastle running out to our car with a burger. We forgot.
(15:53):
Audrey is that lady the nicest. She's bubbly, you can't
imagine her saying a bad word. And she's a mom
of three daughters. But she had to watch her girls
grow up from a far because she spent over a
decade in prison wrongfully convicted first degree reckless homicide. They
accused me of showing utter disregard to human life. That
(16:17):
human life was a baby left in her care. Here's
her story. In October nineteen ninety five, in one of Key, Wisconsin,
Audrey was pregnant with her youngest and running a daycare
out of her home. Seven month old Natalie Beard was
dropped off just before seven thirty am. She hadn't been
(16:39):
feeling well and had refused her morning bottle. The mom
said she'd been very fussy. She'd been up the night
before and had been ill with an ear infection. Audrey
tried to calm Natalie by feeding her. After thirty thirty
five minutes of trying to help her feed and trying
to calm her down when she didn't, that's when I
(17:00):
chose to put her in her car seat in a
different room where it was quiet, because Natalie was very
sensitive to noise and too abrupt movements. But nothing was working.
When the formula started coming out of her nose, I
instantly picked her up, held her was patting her on
the back. She was not responding. She ran outside, screaming
(17:21):
for help from her neighbors. She called nine to one.
Audrey says, she can't get any life out of Natalie.
That is when the police came, the ambulance came, and
then it accelerated into a very nightmare day. Baby Natalie
(17:43):
was life flighted to a hospital, but her condition never improved,
and sadly, at nine pm that night, she was pronounced dead.
The autopsy found that she had extensive brain damage. After
I found out that Natalie had passed away, the police
the investigators were very kind to me that the local
(18:04):
one from WannaKey, and they just came and said this
was all regular protocol, that they had to talk to me,
they had to take pictures, which they did, and I
just thought, Okay, this is what happens. But I never
ever knew that there was any suspicion of homicide of
all things. Months later, Audrey is arrested and charged with
(18:27):
first degree reckless homicide. Prosecutors presented the case that Natalie
had died from being violently shaken. Audrey was accused of
causing shaken baby syndrome. It was a total foreign term
to me. I had never even heard of it, and
when they started talking about it at the trial, I
(18:49):
was like, what in the world are you insinuating here?
This did not happen. According to experts, Natalie exhibited the
triad bleeding on the brain, retinal hemorrhaging, and brain swelling.
So it came down to Audrey's word that she cared
for and comforted Natalie against the triad, and expert after
(19:13):
expert testified that because the injuries were so severe, they
must have occurred shortly before Natalie's collapse. Here are voice
actors reading the testimony from chief medical examiner Jeffrey Jensen
and child neurologist Robert Rust. It would be my opinion
that it would be extremely unlikely, too almost impossible, that
(19:36):
there would be any period of lucidity following those types
of injuries. It's my opinion that the injuries had to
have occurred between the time that this child was dropped
off at the daycare center by her parents and the
time that the officer responded. When I heard doctors at
the trial talk about head trauma in being equivalent to
(19:57):
a fall from a two story building, I just wanted
to scream, even though the prosecution had seven people testifying
and we only had two, because my attorney said it
was just so so hard to get medical people to
talk about it because it was such a green, vague
area that even then none of them could determine that
(20:20):
anything had happened within a twenty four hour period to
this child. Natalie's medical records showed that she had been
treated in the past for symptoms that could have been
caused by a brain injury, but a juror in Audrey's
case told us it was the prosecution's expert testimony that
convinced them on November twenty sixth, nineteen ninety six, she
(20:43):
was found guilty. Her unwillingness to admit and express remorse
for a crime she did not commit factored into her
harsh sentence eighteen years in prison. Her three children had
just lost their mother, my baby, my youngest I was
(21:03):
incarcerated two days after her first birthday, and my second
one was just over almost three, and my oldest was
in kindergarten. Mm. Yeah, that's a tough day. While Audrey
sat in prison, another shaken baby case became a national
(21:23):
spectacle as Court TV broadcast the trial. But this case
revealed the cracks and the shaken baby hypothesis. British nanny
Louise Woodward was accused of shaking eight month old Matthew
Eapen to death. The evidence presented in court was the
same classic triad of symptoms that led to Audrey's conviction,
(21:47):
but Woodward had high profile experts testifying in her defense,
including doctor Ayoub Omaya. You heard about him earlier. It
was his whiplash study that was used to develop the
shaken baby syndrome hypothesis in the first place. Kate Judson again,
doctor Omiyah testified in that trial and explained that his
(22:09):
research had been misinterpreted and that really wasn't a correct
application of the work that he had done. Biomechanical engineers
analyzed the hypothesis of shaking and concluded that it was
not a likely mechanism for the injuries attributed to it,
and it was really a turning point. But a Harvard
neuro radiologist, doctor Patrick Barnes, also testified, telling the jury
(22:33):
that the baby was shaken. Woodward was found guilty, though
on appeal, her sentence was reduced and she served less
than a year. After her trial, doctor Barnes began to
question his own testimony. Patrick Barnes, in the years after
that case began to dig into the science and really
(22:56):
came to the conclusion that his prior testimony had been incorrect,
that he was wrong, and he thereafter began to publish
and dedicated portion of his career to writing those wrongs,
which is amazing. Audrey Edmonds, facing down an eighteen year sentence,
tried to keep her hopes up even when none of
(23:16):
her appeals were successful, but new scientific studies were emerging.
In two thousand and one, a study was published that
directly challenged the medical arguments used against Audrey. It was
written by doctor John Plunkett. He was a forensic pathologist
who was confused and frustrated by the idea that kids
(23:41):
with this constellation of findings often associated with shaking, had
to have been shaken. He was frustrated by that because
he thought that it was wrong. Plunkett identified eighteen cases
in which children died from accidental falls on playgrounds. He
reviewed all the medical records, autopsy reports, scene photographs, and videos,
(24:03):
and what he found was that many of those children
exhibited the exact same symptoms as kids who would normally
have been diagnosed as having been shaken, and that some
of them experienced intervals of lucidity. They were clearly injured,
but they were not comatos. They were maybe they were
walking and talking, maybe they were eating. In other words,
(24:24):
if baby Natalie's triad of symptoms were caused by an injury,
that injury could have occurred hours or even days earlier,
rather than in that narrow window of time while she
was in Audrey's care. Plunkett study got the attention of
a pathologist who testified in Audrey's case. Doctor Huntington attorney
(24:47):
Keith Findley is the co founder of the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
He learned some things about that case that undermined his
testimony at this trial, and he had actually written a
letter to the Journal of the National Association of Medical
Examiners in which he had said, basic, we used to
think we knew how to time these injuries and therefore
(25:09):
how to identify who did it. We were wrong. Keith
and his team from the University of Wisconsin Law School
were working on Audrey's wrongful conviction case. They called doctor Huntington,
Doctor Huntington, we are representing Audrey Edmonds, and he immediately
cut in and said, oh goodness, Audrey Edmonds. What are
(25:30):
we going to do about Audrey Edmonds? Thanks to doctor
Huntington and doctor Barnes, both willing to challenge their beliefs,
do more research and admit they were wrong, Audrey's conviction
was overturned. She'd been in prison for eleven years. Inmate
(25:50):
comes up to me and she goes, Audrey Edmonds, I
saw your case on the news today and your conviction
has been overturned. I screamed. I grabbed this crazy crabby
guard's arm because I, oh my gods, are you for sir?
The day she was released. Audrey's daughters were twelve, fourteen,
(26:12):
and sixteen years old. It became, to my knowledge, the
first case in the country in which a shaken baby
syndrome or abusive head trauma conviction was overturned on the
basis of new scientific evidence challenging the hypothesis upon which
the prosecution rested. Less than a year after Audrey's exoneration,
(26:36):
the American Academy of Pediatrics came forward to issue a
policy statement on shaken baby. It said pediatricians should use
the broader term abusive head trauma rather than shaken baby syndrome.
The reasoning abusive head trauma encompassed all mechanisms that could
cause injury to the head, not just shaking Kate Judson.
(27:01):
They published a new position statement in which they started
to acknowledge some of the other possible causes, though they
downplay them, you know, they really imply that they were
very rare. But using broader terminology did not substantively change anything.
People are still being convicted because the mainstream pediatric community
(27:23):
embrace still embraces the shaking baby cynerm hypothesis, and indeed
has become extremely defensive and reactionary in response to any
criticisms of the hypothesis, and so the prosecutions continue. Acquittals happen,
but so do many, many, many convictions, and thousands remain incarcerated.
(27:47):
Like Noel Quavado, the father you heard about in the
beginning of this episode, He confessed to shaking his son,
but he says he lied to protect his family before
(28:19):
I was happily married. But then Noel Cavado was taken
into custody for the murder of his eight month old son, Alex.
When interrogators threatened to arrest his wife and take away
their surviving child, he confessed to shaking his son to
protect them. When I was born, I told that he
(28:42):
was in my friend. If I lied saying that I
did it, holly to back my wife and get home
and get her from back. It may be a little
hard to understand Noel, but he said he told the
court he only lied to protect his wife and so
they'd give her back their older son. I just fer
(29:06):
I got my mother with a confession in hand. The
police investigation is all but over, Kate Judson. If you
look at the studies where they have analyzed confessions to
shaking they don't do any of the background that is
necessary to know whether the confession is a consistent with
(29:28):
the facts of the case and be a false or
coerced confession. Noel is not alone. False confessions in shaken
baby syndrome cases are surprisingly common, so people are often
extremely distraught when they're being interrogated by police because a
child has died in their care or you know, maybe
(29:48):
isn't the hospital, or has been seriously injured. They might
not know why. And even if you've done nothing as
a parent or caregiver with a child in your care,
you may feel feelings of guilt even if you didn't
do anything, and so grief, guilt, depression, fear, all of
(30:09):
these things are things that can coerce a false confession.
False confessions like Noel's reinforce the legitimacy of shaken baby syndrome.
This persists, and one of the reasons why doctors have
said they continue to rely on it is because people
have confessed to it. A thorough investigation would have revealed
a family history of illness, including Noel's brother who died
(30:31):
in infancy. At trial, a defense expert did testify that
Alex had been diagnosed with neonatal meningitis months before his death,
which may have caused a seizure that killed him. But
in two thousand and seven, Noel is convicted of first
degree murder and given a sentence of life in prison.
(30:53):
It's eventually reduced to thirty five years. Today he has
been in prison for nearly two decades. His wife, who
he lied to protect, has since divorced him and remarried.
I'm only here will almost hate the beautiful my life,
my older son. I'm glad he grew up of the
good fan and the Marines. Okay, he's cool. I'm literally
(31:17):
was part of his life. Noel continues to maintain his innocence,
and new studies continue to highlight the lack of scientific
and medical validity behind the shaken baby hypothesis. In twenty sixteen,
an extensive study by the Swedish government looked like it
might be the tipping point. It looked through thousands of
(31:39):
published medical articles, whittled it down to a thirty sum
that were really relevant, and of those they concluded that
I think it was something like twenty eight of the
papers were of low scientific quality, two were of medium
scientific quality, and zero were of high scientific quality, but
(32:02):
so far the impact has been disappointing. Kate Judson, I
think a lot of us who work on wrongful convictions
in shaken baby syndrome cases, we're really hoping that the
Swedish study would make something change in this country. That
just hasn't been the case. Certainly, you see more and
more skeptics. Those in the pediatric community, like doctor Howard Dubowitz,
(32:26):
argue that criticisms of shaken baby syndrome have a real
consequence when it comes to protecting children. There's been a
curious phenomenon now for some time where a relatively small
cadre of physicians and it's not just in the US,
some other countries have the same problem deny that this
(32:50):
diagnosis exists or that this diagnosis is being accurately reasonably applied,
And this presents I think a serious problem for us.
If this child was abused, and let's say it has
now been is recovering, that child may be returned to
(33:14):
a dangerous home situation. And those on the legal side,
like Kate Judson, can understand the hesitation for change. If
you devoted a serious chunk of your professional life to
stamping out this particular form of child abuse. It might
be very difficult to hear conflicting information. We hear that's
(33:35):
so often in child abuse cases, so we just want
to err on the side of the child. But the
truth is, if you say that someone was abused who wasn't,
then they're going to potentially miss their medical problem, or
separate them from people who love them, or disrupt their
family life. And what studies have shown is that separation
of a family, even briefly, it causes lasting trauma. So
(33:57):
it's critical to just be so careful. The ripple effects
of trauma run deep. Noel Cuvada lost the family he
sought to protect and faces possible deportation if granted clemency.
Private investigator Sylvia Bassja Katie is certain Noel is innocent.
(34:18):
She has spent the last two years trying to fight
his conviction. I realized, like, oh my god, this guy
is in prison for the crime he did not commit,
Like I want to help him. Nothing was going on
for many years, and now somebody is helping him. And
now he wants to get everything done as soon as possible,
which I understand him perfectly. He has hope. Audrey Edmund's
(34:43):
marriage ended in divorce, and after serving over a decade
in prison, the state of Wisconsin refused to grant her
any compensation, But the same outlook that allowed her to
survive prison keeps her going. One of my biggest hopes
while I was away was that with all this new
medical evidence coming to service and more and more people
(35:06):
working on these kind of cases, that it would help others.
So many are really scarred and struggling, and I feel
for him. I mean, I'm not happy, and the scar
in my life will always be there, but it fades.
(35:28):
Next time. On CSI on Trial and Arson Investigation concludes,
a Moolotov cocktail started a fire, ignoring survivors who say
there was a faulty space heater inside. The last thing
that this man said out his wife, Hey, this space
heater on fire. You dismiss it, and you just put
(35:50):
an innocent man in prison for twenty five years. CSI
on Trial is a co production of iHeart Podcasts and
School of Humans, based on the Curiosity stream series CSI
on Trial, created by Eleanor Grant and produced by the
(36:12):
Biscuit Factory. You can watch all six episodes of the
video series right now at Curiosity stream Dot com This
episode is hosted and written by me Molly Herman and
researched by Katie Dunn and myself. Our producer is Miranda Hawkins.
Jessica Metzker is the senior producer. Virginia Prescott, Jason English,
(36:36):
Brandon Barr and L. C. Crowley are the executive producers.
Sound design in mix by Miranda Hawkins, Voice acting by
Mike Coscarelli and Jeremy Thall. Special thanks to John Higgins,
Rob Burke, Rob Lyle and Brandon Craigie. If you're enjoying
(36:56):
the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app.
Check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering His Jury,
pop culture, true crime, and more. School of Humans
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