November 18, 2020 • 36 mins
In the final episode of the season, Josh Dubin explores Shaken Baby Syndrome with Kate Judson, Executive Director for the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences.
Shaken Baby Syndrome isn’t a foolproof diagnosis. There are in fact many other causes for the symptoms of Shaken Baby Syndrome that do not arise from intentionally shaking a baby at all.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
At six pm, and the usual controlled cast of the
day is finally wound down. Most of your daylight hours
are filled with the sounds of giggling kids and, yes,
the occasional whining and tantrums. You've been a licensed childcare
provider for the past fifteen years and you run a
daycare center out of your house. You wave goodbye to
(00:22):
the last toddler to get picked up by his dad
from your doorway, then you head back inside. Your two
middle schoolers are sitting at the kitchen table doing their homework,
so you take advantage of the brief moment of quiet
to start getting dinner ready. But the quiet doesn't last
more than a few minutes. There's a knock on the door.
(00:43):
You're sure it's one of the kid's parents picking up
a missing toy, but your heart sinks to your stomach
when you see that it's the police. You quickly open
the door, worry that something might have happened to your husband,
who hasn't gotten home from work yet. Hi, there is
everything okay? You ask They ask you your name, and
(01:06):
they say, ma'am, do you run a daycare out of
this house?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I do. What seems to be the problem you'll need
to come with us. What do you mean I can
right now. I'm getting dinner ready for my kids. Ma'am.
You don't understand. You need to turn around and put
your hands behind your back. You're under arrest. You'll feel
the cold handcuffs tighten around your wrists. What is this
(01:33):
all about. There's a child in your care name Maria.
You know who Maria is, ma'am. She died from brain
injuries after spending the day in your care. So I'm
gonna read you your rights. You're speechless, Maria, that little
girl who spent one session at your daycare months ago.
(01:53):
You can't compute, but you're a mom, and so you
leap into action for your kids. You don't want to
scare them, so you try to prevent your voice from
cracking as you call them over. You tell your fourteen
year old look after your little brother. Call your dad,
he'll be here soon. Tell him not to worry, and
you don't worry. This is all going to work out.
(02:15):
You put on a brave face for them, and you
try not to panic as one of the officers pushes
your head down in that classic move that leads a
suspect into the back of a police car. Your world
has turned upside down in an instant. As the police
car pulls away from your house and down the street
toward the county jail. You sit in jail before your
(02:47):
trial and replay the events of the day. You watch
Maria over and over again in your head. You were
sitting on the carpet helping one of the little boys
get a train rolling on a track when there was
a knock at the door. You answered it and you
saw a smiling baby in the arms of her mother.
(03:07):
This must be Maria, you said, smiling at the toddler.
You took Maria from her mother's arms and helped the
little girl wave goodbye with her tiny hand while her
mom pulled out of the driveway. Maria was happy and
playful all day until about noon. She started crying, and
you recognize that as the telltale sign of a tired baby.
(03:31):
You put her down for a nap, and a few
hours later Maria's mom came back. Maria was still sleeping.
You watched her pick Maria up from the crib, trying
not to wake her. Maria slept on her mom's shoulder
the whole way to the car. You watched as they
pulled out of the driveway. That's everything you can remember
(03:51):
from that day, but that's not what happened. What you
didn't know is that when Maria and her mother pulled
up to their home home, Maria was slumped over in
her car seat, her head almost in her lap, and
she'd thrown up all over herself. Maria wouldn't wake up,
so her mom called nine to one one and she
(04:12):
was rushed to the hospital. The doctor said that the
baby's brain was bleeding and swollen, and her blood sugar
was high. The doctors frantically worked on her, trying to
revive her, but eventually Maria was put on life support.
She died about a week later. Approximately two months after that,
(04:36):
the police showed up at your house and arrested you.
Sitting in your jail cell, you're paralyzed by the horror
of all this. One family lost their baby, and your
kids are at home wondering if their mother will be
around to watch them grow up. Now it's the day
(04:58):
of your trial. Your lawyer doesn't dispute that bleeding and
swelling in Maria's brain caused her death, but there was
no evidence that it was caused by anything you did.
There was no evidence whatsoever that you abused Maria in
any way. She didn't have any broken bones, no injuries
to her neck or spinal column or anything like that.
(05:22):
And there was, in fact another explanation for Maria's injuries.
When she had been admitted to the hospital, her blood
sugar level was four times higher than what was considered
to be normal, and so it was possible that Maria's
brain injuries may have been caused by an undiagnosed metabolic
disorder like diabetes. But when the prosecution makes its case,
(05:43):
the pain and mystery around Maria's death is sharpened to
a fine point. A child abused specialist takes the stand
and tells the jury that Maria had bleeding and swelling
in her brain and bleeding behind her eyes. Let me
make it clear, the expert witness said, these injuries mean
that Maria incurred physical abuse associated with trauma to the head.
(06:07):
There is no other way these injuries could have occurred.
You sit there next to your defense attorney and your
heart starts beating fast, your sweating. You know what she's
saying can't be true. You've been watching kids for your
entire adult life. You would never you have never hurt
a child, and yet you know that if you were
(06:31):
a member of that jury and you heard this testimony
from this doctor, that you would probably believe it too.
You would also want to be able to hold someone
accountable for the death of this innocent child. When the
jury goes into their deliberations, you're not just worried about
the outcome of your trial. Your heart is also broken
(06:53):
for Maria's family. You know you'll never be able to
wrap your head around their grief, but you also know
that putting an innocent person in prison won't bring their
baby back. After just two days of deliberating, the jury
comes back with a guilty verdict. You bury your face
in your hands as the verdict has read. At your sentencing,
(07:17):
the prosecution reads letters from Maria's family. Her mother had
addressed one of them to you. It said, you killed
my baby? Why? Why did you do this? I beg
this coord to give you the maximum sentence possible. You
are sentenced to fifteen years in prison for manslaughter. The
(07:45):
story you just heard is loosely based on Stephanie Spurgeon's
wrongful conviction in two thousand and eight. Innocent people have
been convicted based on medical testimony which claims that three
symptoms bleeding of the brain, swelling of the brain, and
bleeding behind the eyes, indicates a form of child abuse
(08:06):
referred to as shaken baby syndrome, but this medical testimony
has proven to be problematic. With the help of the
Innocence Project and the Exoneration Project from the University of
Chicago Law School, the evidence in Stephanie's case was re
examined and she was released from prison in August twenty twenty.
(08:26):
But many others are not as lucky and continue to
serve sentences for crimes they did not commit. There's nothing
more devastating than the death of a child. When a
tragedy like that occurs, it's natural to want answers, how
did this happen, who should we hold accountable for this,
and what could have been done to prevent it. What
(08:49):
might be most difficult for juris to accept is that
the death was completely accidental, that there was nothing anyone
did to cause it and nothing could have been done
to stop it. I'm Josh Dubin, civil rights and criminal
defense attorney, an Innocent ambassador to the Innocence Project in
New York. Today on Wrongful conviction junk science. We'll explore
(09:13):
how what's known as shaken baby syndrome has been used
to falsely implicate people in crimes that they did not commit.
It turns out that shaken baby syndrome isn't a fool
proof diagnosis. There are many other causes for the symptoms
of shaken baby syndrome that do not arise from intentionally
(09:33):
shaking a baby. In nineteen sixty nine, two scientists put
a live reciss monkey under anesthesia and strapped it to
a chair made of fiberglass. The fiberglass chair was then
(09:55):
attached to roller skate wheels. When the tiny car acceler
rated and then decelerated quickly, the passenger's head that is,
the monkey's head, was flung backwards then quickly snapped forward.
Scientists wanted to study the effect of whiplash during a
car crash, so the tiny car with the little monkey
(10:18):
passenger was designed to mimic the movement of a car
during a rear end collision. Of the fifty monkeys that
took a ride in the whiplash car, nineteen of them
sustained a concussion. The study proved that direct impact from
a hard surface to the head isn't necessary to cause
traumatic brain injuries. The human brain can be injured just
(10:42):
from a head being violently jerked back and forth, causing
the brain to rattle around inside the skull. This study
had important repercussions for car safety. It's part of the
reason why cars are supposed to have headrests to prevent
brain injuries due to whiplash during an accident. But this
study also interested a British pediatric neurosurgeon named Norman Guthkelch. Now,
(11:08):
Doctor guth Kelch had been noticing infants coming into his
office with no outward signs of abuse, no bruising, no
broken bones, but they had bleeding around their brain. He
wondered if these children had been getting whiplash not from
a car crash, but from their parents and caregivers. Now,
(11:29):
at the time in Northern England, shaking babies was a
socially acceptable way of calming, quieting, and even disciplining a
fussy baby. In fact, when doctor Guthkelch saw children with
bleeding around their brain, he asked parents if they sometimes
shook their child. Many parents readily confess They would say yes,
(11:51):
Johnny wouldn't stop crying, so I gave him a good shaking.
Doctor Guthkelch suspected that shaking an infant mimicked the motion
of whiplash, and so he wrote a short two page paper.
It said that trauma to a baby's brain, even when
no other signs of physical abuse were present, may in
(12:12):
fact be caused by violent shaking. Doctor guth Kelch never
claimed that there might not be other causes of bleeding
around the brain. He simply hypothesized that shaking might be
the cause of it. His hope was that doctors who
read his study would help teach parents to handle their
infants more gently to avoid accidental harm. After doctor goth
(12:35):
Kelch's article was published, other doctors continue to research this issue.
They found that three symptoms in particular were associated with
shaking a baby. These symptoms were subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage,
and cerebral edema that is bleeding around the brain, bleeding
(12:55):
behind the eyes, and brain swelling. These thymptoms became known
as the quote classic triad, the signs that are said
to be an indicator of shaken baby syndrome. The problem
is that these three symptoms became synonymous with shaken baby
syndrome if these three symptoms were present, it was thought
(13:17):
that a parent or caretaker must have intentionally shaken their infant,
and so when parents showed up to the hospital with
a sick child who exhibited some or all of the
symptoms of the triad, their children were taken away from them.
The parents were put on trial, and they were sometimes
convicted of abusing or even killing their own child. As
(13:42):
parents started to be accused of child abuse based solely
on the hypothesis of shaken baby syndrome, doctor Gothkelch knew
he had to do something He never meant for his
short paper to be used as a tool for prosecution.
The whole point of his paper was to help parents,
not criminalize them. Doctor guth Kelch continued to fight for
(14:02):
wrongfully convicted parents and caregivers up until he died in
twenty sixteen at the ripe age of one hundred and
one years old.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
No one was really suggesting that this should be a
mechanism for prosecuting anyone. They acknowledged, and you know, pretty
clearly articulated that what they were talking about was a
hypothesis about why children might have these findings. But it
then started to be used as a paradigm for prosecution,
and that's really where it runs into trouble because instead
(14:41):
of continuing to research and look for answers, physicians and
prosecutors started to accept it without you know, looking further
into the kinds of claims that experts were making about it.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Today on our show, we're speaking with Kate Judson. Kate
is the executive director for the Center Integrity and Forensic Sciences,
and she was one of the lawyers who represented Stephanie Spurgeon,
whose story we discussed at the beginning of our show.
So to start tell us about what we should understand
(15:14):
about the difference between shaking baby syndrome as a hypothesis
rather than as a diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I think there are a lot of ways in which
it differs significantly from other medical diagnoses. So child abuse
and particularly shaken baby syndrome is much more a determination
of etiology of how somebody got the medical findings than
the medical findings themselves. So the kinds of findings that
are often attributed to child abuse in shaken baby syndrome
(15:45):
and abusive head trauma cases can be due to trauma,
but it isn't always, So there are medical conditions that
can cause these kinds of medical findings as well, and
so sometimes the evidence of actual innocence is new medical
opinion that support the idea that the child had a
disease or another kind of condition that led to their
(16:05):
medical findings, rather than any kind of trauma or abuse.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
So let's back off for a second to when this
first started to be used at trial. How did this
diagnosis become something that prosecutors were able to weaponize against defendants.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Part of what makes it seductive if you're trying to
protect children and punish wrongdoing is that it seemed at
the time very definitive. Physicians were saying, if a child
has this set of injuries, they have been abused, and
that abuse consisted of shaking, and we know that, and
(16:45):
there are no exceptions, or very very few exceptions. I mean,
in fact, at the time, there are plenty of transcripts
available where physicians said nothing else causes this, right, and
so it gives a very clear and definitive answer. Has
to wonder, in the face of such an answer, what
happened to a child who died, who previously would have
(17:06):
no explanation for their death. It's definitive, it's clear and frankly,
really effective in court, often resulting in a conviction almost
all the time. So I think that it gave people
who were involved in the criminal legal system the impression
that they were successfully locking up people who were dangerous
(17:27):
who had murdered a child. And it turns out it's
not that straightforward.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
So tell us more about other ways a child can
come to have the same kind of symptoms or the
same sort of trauma that are usually associated with shaking
baby syndrome.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
There are things like infection, serious infection, genetic disorder, problems
with blood clotting, certain kinds of tumors, certain kinds of
blood cloths, you know, like a pediatric stroke. There are
cases where the medical findings are thought to have arisen
after events like choking. But what really started to come
(18:18):
to light in twenty sixteen there was a report done
by the Swedish government that looked at medical literature that
discussed you know what is colloquially called the triad that
the combination of subdralhemotoma, rental hemorrhage, and cerebral edema, and
looked at children who were diagnosed as and studies of
children who are diagnosed as being abused based on those findings.
(18:40):
But they found was that the data was not there,
that it was very incomplete, and they recommended that the
Swedish government no longer prosecute people under that paradigm. And
the reaction that that got from, you know, child advocates
and child abuset pediatricians was simply to attack the people
who did the report. You know, there's been a real
(19:02):
lack of serious engagement around the failings in the literature
that everybody knows are there, and so that is really
a shame and that's not how science progresses, and that's
not how people get fair trials. People who who are
admirably concerned about protecting children have unfortunately written things like
(19:23):
editorials in journals, engaging in personal attacks instead of trying
to figure out how to best approach these kinds of cases.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
And that's part of what makes studying and being critical
of the shaken baby hypothesis really difficult. People often assume
that critics of shaking baby syndrome are trying to side
with child abusers, and of course that's not the case. Researchers, doctors,
lawyers who are critical of shaking baby syndrome are just
(19:55):
trying to make sure that people don't get accused of
crime they didn't commit based on misleading evidence. And on
the other side of this battle, there are well meaning
people who are trying to protect children from abuse. I
know that expert witnesses and cases involving child abuse are
(20:15):
often doctors, So tell us more about that. Who are
the doctors who testify during these cases for the prosecution
as experts?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So there are different kinds of physicians. They're not always
child abuse pediatricians, but they frequently are child abuse pediatricians.
There are about three hundred child abuse pediatricians in the
United States. It's a new subspecialty. I believe the first
child abuse pediatricians were board certified in twenty eleven, so
it's quite new. So their job is to evaluate children
(20:49):
in hospitals or clinics for child abuse and yes, to
testify in cases or to create reports for law enforcement
agencies for the courts.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So that's interesting. I guess talking about biases, I could
imagine that someone who's trained to look for child abuse
could just start seeing abuse everywhere. It's what they know,
it's what they study, it's what they look for. They think,
you know, this is a symptom that comes up with
people who are victims of abuse, so it must be abused.
(21:18):
It's you know, becomes difficult to see outside of your
own tunnel vision. And so when a medical specialty is
geared directly towards one conclusion or looking out for one thing,
of course, even with the best of intentions, it could
be easy for these doctors to get tunnel vision right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
That's a real concern when analysts are, for example, embedded
with law enforcement. When the crime lab is part of
the police department, for example, we see this role affects bias.
Analysts start to see themselves as part of the law
enforcement team rather than as an objective, independent scientist. But
the same issue was present when child abuse pediatricians are
(22:02):
part of a child abuse team, especially when those teams
involve police and investigators and prosecutors and don't involve people,
for example, from the defense bar. And since they're all
human beings, it's not unreasonable to say that the same
concerns we have about analysts housed within a police station
(22:22):
or who work very closely with police and prosecutors, that
other kinds of experts might be subject to those same biases.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I think another reason that there are so many wrongful
convictions when people are accused of abuse is that everybody involved, jurors,
the lawyers, the doctors, they don't want to get it
wrong because, let's just face it, setting a potential child
abuse are free is a scary proposition. The stakes are
(22:49):
very high in these cases.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
So really often I hear people respond to these concerns,
particularly people who are who are working in kind of
the child abuse field, respond to these concerns about wrongful
convictions by saying, well, we just want to air on
the side of the child, right, But in these kinds
of cases there's really no way to do that. Any
(23:13):
error is harmful. This idea that you can air safely
on the side of the child is a false one.
And that's because if you get this wrong. If a
child is being diagnosed as or being determined to have
been abused and they haven't been, a couple of things
can happen. One is that a child can be deprived
of a loving home and separated from loving parents and caregivers,
(23:38):
and studies have shown over and over and over again
that separating children from their family is traumatic. It is
sometimes a necessary harm, but it is always harmful.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Even from people who are just accused of child abuse
and they don't get convicted but just have to go
through the trial, that in itself can be so damaging
to children and their families.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
I mean it's anecdotal, but I pretty frequently hear from
families who say, like, we're really grateful that nobody in
our family was convicted, but our kids are still suffering
all kinds of harm and problems from the trauma that
was inflicted upon them just from even a brief separation.
So there may very well be good reason reasons to
(24:27):
separate families, But what we can't do is go to
court and say that the abuse is more definitive than
the science actually supports, if that makes sense. The other
problem is that when these cases are not medically investigated carefully,
there is the chance that a child will be classified
as having been abused when they actually have a serious illness,
(24:50):
and that is also really problematic can potentially lead to
more harm or even death because of that misdiagnosis.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It seems almost unlikely that evidence in child abuse cases
can be similar to other forensic disciplines that we've talked
about on our show. But it turns out that the
same tactics use to convict people based on faulty pattern
matching evidence, for example, is really the same thing we're
dealing with here. In instances of alleged child abuse.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
The kind of biases that we see in other kinds
of forensic sciences are certainly present here. And because there
is no gold standard criteria, no simple or single test
that allows anybody to make a diagnosis of child abuse,
you end up having to fall back on so much
subjectivity of the person examining the child and looking at
(25:45):
the facts, and what we know from pattern matching disciplines
in particular, but also things like ourson investigation, is that
the more subjectivity that is introduced into the system, the
less reliable your result can be. Sometimes when you look
at the breakdown of cases where people get wrongfully convicted
based on faulty forensic science, and a majority of them,
(26:06):
part of the faulty forensic science is that the expert
spoke to the jury with more certainty than the science warranted.
The same is true in cases with medical testimony. So
when a doctor says that a fracture or a subdural
hematoma or a retinal hemorrhage can only be caused by
child abuse, and there's no other explanation that is definitive.
(26:29):
It is convincing that is stated with more certainty than
the science can support, and that can certainly lead to
an unfair trial and a wrongful conviction.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
So, in your opinion, when something as tragic as a
baby dying happens, what can we do to make sure
that the cause of death is determined correctly so that
parents and caretakers stop being wrongfully accused based on this
shaken baby high ypothesis.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
There really should be really rigorous testing in all of
these cases, and not every case out there gets the
benefit of really careful, comprehensive testing. There's actually kind of
a famous case that a district attorney from Queen's has
used in a bunch of presentations where there was a
videotaped fall. A child fell at a mall and off
(27:25):
of just a really short fall off of a piece
of playground equipment and later died, and investigators embarked upon
an extremely complex and comprehensive medical evaluation, and when they
did that, they found that there were potentially some blood
disorders lurking within the family. And while the child who
died never definitively tested positive for a bleeding disorder. Her
(27:47):
parents were carrying genes that suggested that she may have
had one that may have contributed to her death. But
I have to tell you that it's uncommon that that
kind of testing is done. I have seen it become
more common, and hopefully it will continue to become more common.
But that's just a great example of a really thorough
evaluation clarifying that a deceased child died because of a
(28:11):
tragic accident, not because anybody hurt her.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
When I think about people convicted based on this type
of evidence, it's usually a parent that we're talking about.
Someone who has just lost their child, is going through
this unimaginable tragedy, and then to be accused of being
the one that actually inflicted this harm. It's a lot
(28:37):
to wrap your head around. It's like too much to bear.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
For parents who go through this. They have a double tragedy,
right They have the loss of the life or health
of their child, which is incredibly tragic, and then they
have this prosecution, which threatens their freedom, often threatens their
relationship with their other children. In some of these cases,
(29:02):
parents might lose custody of other children in the family.
It's horrifying.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
It's horrifying as a lawyer to it. It must be
difficult to be watching this unfold.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, it's an incredibly emotional situation. And in fact, there
are some lawyers who find these cases so disturbing and
disruptive that they do one and they never want to
do another one. You do care about that happening. I mean,
it's not easy. It's always difficult. They are very emotional,
they are very upsetting. It is difficult to be there
(29:38):
for someone who has gone through, like, like I said,
this double tragedy, right where a child that you know
that they loved and cared about is gone or very
or were very different, and then they've they've been accused
of this crime they didn't commit. It's it's it's terrible.
I think the only reason why I feel compelled to
(30:01):
keep doing it is that what has happened to these
folks is wrong and someone has to help them and
stand up for them. It's not an easy thing, but
I think it's a necessary one.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
When I agreed to host this podcast, I set out
to expose some of the many flaws that exist in
our criminal justice system. Specifically, what I wanted to do
was address what goes wrong when jurors are presented with
what they are told as science but actually turns out
to be well junk. The harms of junk science go
(30:44):
beyond innocent people having to endure the unthinkable nightmare of
being accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit.
The consequences extend even further than those people having to
endure the rawst and most cutting of human suffering, being
torn from their life and locked in a cage. In
addition to that human tragedy, junk science causes the moral
(31:08):
fabric of our judicial system to wear and tear at
the seams. It causes an entire institution of law and
order and justice to be completely undermined. In examining the
various disciplines of forensic science we've discussed this season, whether
it was our sin or blood spatter, eyewitness identification, or,
(31:33):
as in this episode, shaking baby syndrome, I knew it
would be interesting and enlightening, but I never expected it
to affect me in the profound manner that it has.
I have been in turns dumbfounded, angry, saddened, and even outraged,
a trial is supposed to be a search for the truth.
(31:56):
The word science itself is defined as the study of
the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Our
system of justice has been regarded as not perfect, but
the best way to ensure that people who are accused
of crimes get the fairest shake possible. So how is
(32:17):
our system of justice veered so far off the tracks?
How have we managed to bastardize and bludgeon What science means?
I don't know if we can ever arrive at a
clear answer. There are probably many explanations. One thing I
do know is that when human beings get involved in
any endeavor, we bring our own biases, or thirst for
(32:41):
financial gain, or hunches and quirks into the equation, and
in the process we sometimes create such a mess that
it becomes difficult to untangle the hows and whys of
it all. But I still manage to find hope and
a way forward. And here's why. If you've ever been
(33:02):
fortunate enough to meet someone that has spent time in
prison for a crime they didn't commit, one thing becomes
apparent very quickly. They are the embodiment of all that
is soaring and remarkable about the human condition. They are
a special combination of resilience, hope, forgiveness and strength. They
(33:27):
are quite simply a force of nature. So I will
continue to pour my energy, every cell in my body
into helping those who are still behind bars for crimes
they did not commit. I will fight to restore signs
to its proper definition in our courtrooms. I am propelled
(33:48):
by these men and women that represent the triumph of
the human soul. To restore one's life and freedom is
perhaps the highest service to your fellow human being. I
can't even find the words to describe what it's like
to walk someone out of a nightmare of a prison
(34:09):
cell and into the bright light of freedom, to restore
a life. The only way I can articulate it is that,
aside from marrying my wife and the birth of my children,
it is and always will be my most important contribution
to my fellow human beings. There is nothing I have
(34:32):
done in this life or could ever fathom doing, that
can ever come close. No material gain, no drug, no drink,
nothing at all that can approach the state of nirvana
that consumes your soul when you have helped save a life.
(34:52):
And I think that says a lot about who we are.
At our essence. We are meant to be of service
to one another, to heal each other, to restore each other.
Not a bad message, if I do say so myself,
at a time when it seems like we could really
use it, I encourage all of you to continue to
(35:13):
keep your voices up, write those letters to your local
prosecutors and judges, be a more conscientious juror pitching in
any way that you can. Together we can ensure that
one day there will be no more wrongful convictions. Based
on Junk Science. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production
(35:46):
of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company
Number One. Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flahm and
the team at Signal Company Number one executive producer Kevin
Wartis and senior producers Karen Krnhaber and Britain Spangler. Our
music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me
on Instagram at dubin Josh, follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast
(36:09):
on Facebook and on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on
Twitter at wrong Conviction
At six pm, and the usual controlled cast of the
day is finally wound down. Most of your daylight hours
are filled with the sounds of giggling kids and, yes,
the occasional whining and tantrums. You've been a licensed childcare
provider for the past fifteen years and you run a
daycare center out of your house. You wave goodbye to
(00:22):
the last toddler to get picked up by his dad
from your doorway, then you head back inside. Your two
middle schoolers are sitting at the kitchen table doing their homework,
so you take advantage of the brief moment of quiet
to start getting dinner ready. But the quiet doesn't last
more than a few minutes. There's a knock on the door.
(00:43):
You're sure it's one of the kid's parents picking up
a missing toy, but your heart sinks to your stomach
when you see that it's the police. You quickly open
the door, worry that something might have happened to your husband,
who hasn't gotten home from work yet. Hi, there is
everything okay? You ask They ask you your name, and
(01:06):
they say, ma'am, do you run a daycare out of
this house?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I do. What seems to be the problem you'll need
to come with us. What do you mean I can
right now. I'm getting dinner ready for my kids. Ma'am.
You don't understand. You need to turn around and put
your hands behind your back. You're under arrest. You'll feel
the cold handcuffs tighten around your wrists. What is this
(01:33):
all about. There's a child in your care name Maria.
You know who Maria is, ma'am. She died from brain
injuries after spending the day in your care. So I'm
gonna read you your rights. You're speechless, Maria, that little
girl who spent one session at your daycare months ago.
(01:53):
You can't compute, but you're a mom, and so you
leap into action for your kids. You don't want to
scare them, so you try to prevent your voice from
cracking as you call them over. You tell your fourteen
year old look after your little brother. Call your dad,
he'll be here soon. Tell him not to worry, and
you don't worry. This is all going to work out.
(02:15):
You put on a brave face for them, and you
try not to panic as one of the officers pushes
your head down in that classic move that leads a
suspect into the back of a police car. Your world
has turned upside down in an instant. As the police
car pulls away from your house and down the street
toward the county jail. You sit in jail before your
(02:47):
trial and replay the events of the day. You watch
Maria over and over again in your head. You were
sitting on the carpet helping one of the little boys
get a train rolling on a track when there was
a knock at the door. You answered it and you
saw a smiling baby in the arms of her mother.
(03:07):
This must be Maria, you said, smiling at the toddler.
You took Maria from her mother's arms and helped the
little girl wave goodbye with her tiny hand while her
mom pulled out of the driveway. Maria was happy and
playful all day until about noon. She started crying, and
you recognize that as the telltale sign of a tired baby.
(03:31):
You put her down for a nap, and a few
hours later Maria's mom came back. Maria was still sleeping.
You watched her pick Maria up from the crib, trying
not to wake her. Maria slept on her mom's shoulder
the whole way to the car. You watched as they
pulled out of the driveway. That's everything you can remember
(03:51):
from that day, but that's not what happened. What you
didn't know is that when Maria and her mother pulled
up to their home home, Maria was slumped over in
her car seat, her head almost in her lap, and
she'd thrown up all over herself. Maria wouldn't wake up,
so her mom called nine to one one and she
(04:12):
was rushed to the hospital. The doctor said that the
baby's brain was bleeding and swollen, and her blood sugar
was high. The doctors frantically worked on her, trying to
revive her, but eventually Maria was put on life support.
She died about a week later. Approximately two months after that,
(04:36):
the police showed up at your house and arrested you.
Sitting in your jail cell, you're paralyzed by the horror
of all this. One family lost their baby, and your
kids are at home wondering if their mother will be
around to watch them grow up. Now it's the day
(04:58):
of your trial. Your lawyer doesn't dispute that bleeding and
swelling in Maria's brain caused her death, but there was
no evidence that it was caused by anything you did.
There was no evidence whatsoever that you abused Maria in
any way. She didn't have any broken bones, no injuries
to her neck or spinal column or anything like that.
(05:22):
And there was, in fact another explanation for Maria's injuries.
When she had been admitted to the hospital, her blood
sugar level was four times higher than what was considered
to be normal, and so it was possible that Maria's
brain injuries may have been caused by an undiagnosed metabolic
disorder like diabetes. But when the prosecution makes its case,
(05:43):
the pain and mystery around Maria's death is sharpened to
a fine point. A child abused specialist takes the stand
and tells the jury that Maria had bleeding and swelling
in her brain and bleeding behind her eyes. Let me
make it clear, the expert witness said, these injuries mean
that Maria incurred physical abuse associated with trauma to the head.
(06:07):
There is no other way these injuries could have occurred.
You sit there next to your defense attorney and your
heart starts beating fast, your sweating. You know what she's
saying can't be true. You've been watching kids for your
entire adult life. You would never you have never hurt
a child, and yet you know that if you were
(06:31):
a member of that jury and you heard this testimony
from this doctor, that you would probably believe it too.
You would also want to be able to hold someone
accountable for the death of this innocent child. When the
jury goes into their deliberations, you're not just worried about
the outcome of your trial. Your heart is also broken
(06:53):
for Maria's family. You know you'll never be able to
wrap your head around their grief, but you also know
that putting an innocent person in prison won't bring their
baby back. After just two days of deliberating, the jury
comes back with a guilty verdict. You bury your face
in your hands as the verdict has read. At your sentencing,
(07:17):
the prosecution reads letters from Maria's family. Her mother had
addressed one of them to you. It said, you killed
my baby? Why? Why did you do this? I beg
this coord to give you the maximum sentence possible. You
are sentenced to fifteen years in prison for manslaughter. The
(07:45):
story you just heard is loosely based on Stephanie Spurgeon's
wrongful conviction in two thousand and eight. Innocent people have
been convicted based on medical testimony which claims that three
symptoms bleeding of the brain, swelling of the brain, and
bleeding behind the eyes, indicates a form of child abuse
(08:06):
referred to as shaken baby syndrome, but this medical testimony
has proven to be problematic. With the help of the
Innocence Project and the Exoneration Project from the University of
Chicago Law School, the evidence in Stephanie's case was re
examined and she was released from prison in August twenty twenty.
(08:26):
But many others are not as lucky and continue to
serve sentences for crimes they did not commit. There's nothing
more devastating than the death of a child. When a
tragedy like that occurs, it's natural to want answers, how
did this happen, who should we hold accountable for this,
and what could have been done to prevent it. What
(08:49):
might be most difficult for juris to accept is that
the death was completely accidental, that there was nothing anyone
did to cause it and nothing could have been done
to stop it. I'm Josh Dubin, civil rights and criminal
defense attorney, an Innocent ambassador to the Innocence Project in
New York. Today on Wrongful conviction junk science. We'll explore
(09:13):
how what's known as shaken baby syndrome has been used
to falsely implicate people in crimes that they did not commit.
It turns out that shaken baby syndrome isn't a fool
proof diagnosis. There are many other causes for the symptoms
of shaken baby syndrome that do not arise from intentionally
(09:33):
shaking a baby. In nineteen sixty nine, two scientists put
a live reciss monkey under anesthesia and strapped it to
a chair made of fiberglass. The fiberglass chair was then
(09:55):
attached to roller skate wheels. When the tiny car acceler
rated and then decelerated quickly, the passenger's head that is,
the monkey's head, was flung backwards then quickly snapped forward.
Scientists wanted to study the effect of whiplash during a
car crash, so the tiny car with the little monkey
(10:18):
passenger was designed to mimic the movement of a car
during a rear end collision. Of the fifty monkeys that
took a ride in the whiplash car, nineteen of them
sustained a concussion. The study proved that direct impact from
a hard surface to the head isn't necessary to cause
traumatic brain injuries. The human brain can be injured just
(10:42):
from a head being violently jerked back and forth, causing
the brain to rattle around inside the skull. This study
had important repercussions for car safety. It's part of the
reason why cars are supposed to have headrests to prevent
brain injuries due to whiplash during an accident. But this
study also interested a British pediatric neurosurgeon named Norman Guthkelch. Now,
(11:08):
Doctor guth Kelch had been noticing infants coming into his
office with no outward signs of abuse, no bruising, no
broken bones, but they had bleeding around their brain. He
wondered if these children had been getting whiplash not from
a car crash, but from their parents and caregivers. Now,
(11:29):
at the time in Northern England, shaking babies was a
socially acceptable way of calming, quieting, and even disciplining a
fussy baby. In fact, when doctor Guthkelch saw children with
bleeding around their brain, he asked parents if they sometimes
shook their child. Many parents readily confess They would say yes,
(11:51):
Johnny wouldn't stop crying, so I gave him a good shaking.
Doctor Guthkelch suspected that shaking an infant mimicked the motion
of whiplash, and so he wrote a short two page paper.
It said that trauma to a baby's brain, even when
no other signs of physical abuse were present, may in
(12:12):
fact be caused by violent shaking. Doctor guth Kelch never
claimed that there might not be other causes of bleeding
around the brain. He simply hypothesized that shaking might be
the cause of it. His hope was that doctors who
read his study would help teach parents to handle their
infants more gently to avoid accidental harm. After doctor goth
(12:35):
Kelch's article was published, other doctors continue to research this issue.
They found that three symptoms in particular were associated with
shaking a baby. These symptoms were subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage,
and cerebral edema that is bleeding around the brain, bleeding
(12:55):
behind the eyes, and brain swelling. These thymptoms became known
as the quote classic triad, the signs that are said
to be an indicator of shaken baby syndrome. The problem
is that these three symptoms became synonymous with shaken baby
syndrome if these three symptoms were present, it was thought
(13:17):
that a parent or caretaker must have intentionally shaken their infant,
and so when parents showed up to the hospital with
a sick child who exhibited some or all of the
symptoms of the triad, their children were taken away from them.
The parents were put on trial, and they were sometimes
convicted of abusing or even killing their own child. As
(13:42):
parents started to be accused of child abuse based solely
on the hypothesis of shaken baby syndrome, doctor Gothkelch knew
he had to do something He never meant for his
short paper to be used as a tool for prosecution.
The whole point of his paper was to help parents,
not criminalize them. Doctor guth Kelch continued to fight for
(14:02):
wrongfully convicted parents and caregivers up until he died in
twenty sixteen at the ripe age of one hundred and
one years old.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
No one was really suggesting that this should be a
mechanism for prosecuting anyone. They acknowledged, and you know, pretty
clearly articulated that what they were talking about was a
hypothesis about why children might have these findings. But it
then started to be used as a paradigm for prosecution,
and that's really where it runs into trouble because instead
(14:41):
of continuing to research and look for answers, physicians and
prosecutors started to accept it without you know, looking further
into the kinds of claims that experts were making about it.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Today on our show, we're speaking with Kate Judson. Kate
is the executive director for the Center Integrity and Forensic Sciences,
and she was one of the lawyers who represented Stephanie Spurgeon,
whose story we discussed at the beginning of our show.
So to start tell us about what we should understand
(15:14):
about the difference between shaking baby syndrome as a hypothesis
rather than as a diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I think there are a lot of ways in which
it differs significantly from other medical diagnoses. So child abuse
and particularly shaken baby syndrome is much more a determination
of etiology of how somebody got the medical findings than
the medical findings themselves. So the kinds of findings that
are often attributed to child abuse in shaken baby syndrome
(15:45):
and abusive head trauma cases can be due to trauma,
but it isn't always, So there are medical conditions that
can cause these kinds of medical findings as well, and
so sometimes the evidence of actual innocence is new medical
opinion that support the idea that the child had a
disease or another kind of condition that led to their
(16:05):
medical findings, rather than any kind of trauma or abuse.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
So let's back off for a second to when this
first started to be used at trial. How did this
diagnosis become something that prosecutors were able to weaponize against defendants.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Part of what makes it seductive if you're trying to
protect children and punish wrongdoing is that it seemed at
the time very definitive. Physicians were saying, if a child
has this set of injuries, they have been abused, and
that abuse consisted of shaking, and we know that, and
(16:45):
there are no exceptions, or very very few exceptions. I mean,
in fact, at the time, there are plenty of transcripts
available where physicians said nothing else causes this, right, and
so it gives a very clear and definitive answer. Has
to wonder, in the face of such an answer, what
happened to a child who died, who previously would have
(17:06):
no explanation for their death. It's definitive, it's clear and frankly,
really effective in court, often resulting in a conviction almost
all the time. So I think that it gave people
who were involved in the criminal legal system the impression
that they were successfully locking up people who were dangerous
(17:27):
who had murdered a child. And it turns out it's
not that straightforward.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
So tell us more about other ways a child can
come to have the same kind of symptoms or the
same sort of trauma that are usually associated with shaking
baby syndrome.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
There are things like infection, serious infection, genetic disorder, problems
with blood clotting, certain kinds of tumors, certain kinds of
blood cloths, you know, like a pediatric stroke. There are
cases where the medical findings are thought to have arisen
after events like choking. But what really started to come
(18:18):
to light in twenty sixteen there was a report done
by the Swedish government that looked at medical literature that
discussed you know what is colloquially called the triad that
the combination of subdralhemotoma, rental hemorrhage, and cerebral edema, and
looked at children who were diagnosed as and studies of
children who are diagnosed as being abused based on those findings.
(18:40):
But they found was that the data was not there,
that it was very incomplete, and they recommended that the
Swedish government no longer prosecute people under that paradigm. And
the reaction that that got from, you know, child advocates
and child abuset pediatricians was simply to attack the people
who did the report. You know, there's been a real
(19:02):
lack of serious engagement around the failings in the literature
that everybody knows are there, and so that is really
a shame and that's not how science progresses, and that's
not how people get fair trials. People who who are
admirably concerned about protecting children have unfortunately written things like
(19:23):
editorials in journals, engaging in personal attacks instead of trying
to figure out how to best approach these kinds of cases.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
And that's part of what makes studying and being critical
of the shaken baby hypothesis really difficult. People often assume
that critics of shaking baby syndrome are trying to side
with child abusers, and of course that's not the case. Researchers, doctors,
lawyers who are critical of shaking baby syndrome are just
(19:55):
trying to make sure that people don't get accused of
crime they didn't commit based on misleading evidence. And on
the other side of this battle, there are well meaning
people who are trying to protect children from abuse. I
know that expert witnesses and cases involving child abuse are
(20:15):
often doctors, So tell us more about that. Who are
the doctors who testify during these cases for the prosecution
as experts?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So there are different kinds of physicians. They're not always
child abuse pediatricians, but they frequently are child abuse pediatricians.
There are about three hundred child abuse pediatricians in the
United States. It's a new subspecialty. I believe the first
child abuse pediatricians were board certified in twenty eleven, so
it's quite new. So their job is to evaluate children
(20:49):
in hospitals or clinics for child abuse and yes, to
testify in cases or to create reports for law enforcement
agencies for the courts.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So that's interesting. I guess talking about biases, I could
imagine that someone who's trained to look for child abuse
could just start seeing abuse everywhere. It's what they know,
it's what they study, it's what they look for. They think,
you know, this is a symptom that comes up with
people who are victims of abuse, so it must be abused.
(21:18):
It's you know, becomes difficult to see outside of your
own tunnel vision. And so when a medical specialty is
geared directly towards one conclusion or looking out for one thing,
of course, even with the best of intentions, it could
be easy for these doctors to get tunnel vision right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
That's a real concern when analysts are, for example, embedded
with law enforcement. When the crime lab is part of
the police department, for example, we see this role affects bias.
Analysts start to see themselves as part of the law
enforcement team rather than as an objective, independent scientist. But
the same issue was present when child abuse pediatricians are
(22:02):
part of a child abuse team, especially when those teams
involve police and investigators and prosecutors and don't involve people,
for example, from the defense bar. And since they're all
human beings, it's not unreasonable to say that the same
concerns we have about analysts housed within a police station
(22:22):
or who work very closely with police and prosecutors, that
other kinds of experts might be subject to those same biases.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I think another reason that there are so many wrongful
convictions when people are accused of abuse is that everybody involved, jurors,
the lawyers, the doctors, they don't want to get it
wrong because, let's just face it, setting a potential child
abuse are free is a scary proposition. The stakes are
(22:49):
very high in these cases.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
So really often I hear people respond to these concerns,
particularly people who are who are working in kind of
the child abuse field, respond to these concerns about wrongful
convictions by saying, well, we just want to air on
the side of the child, right, But in these kinds
of cases there's really no way to do that. Any
(23:13):
error is harmful. This idea that you can air safely
on the side of the child is a false one.
And that's because if you get this wrong. If a
child is being diagnosed as or being determined to have
been abused and they haven't been, a couple of things
can happen. One is that a child can be deprived
of a loving home and separated from loving parents and caregivers,
(23:38):
and studies have shown over and over and over again
that separating children from their family is traumatic. It is
sometimes a necessary harm, but it is always harmful.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Even from people who are just accused of child abuse
and they don't get convicted but just have to go
through the trial, that in itself can be so damaging
to children and their families.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
I mean it's anecdotal, but I pretty frequently hear from
families who say, like, we're really grateful that nobody in
our family was convicted, but our kids are still suffering
all kinds of harm and problems from the trauma that
was inflicted upon them just from even a brief separation.
So there may very well be good reason reasons to
(24:27):
separate families, But what we can't do is go to
court and say that the abuse is more definitive than
the science actually supports, if that makes sense. The other
problem is that when these cases are not medically investigated carefully,
there is the chance that a child will be classified
as having been abused when they actually have a serious illness,
(24:50):
and that is also really problematic can potentially lead to
more harm or even death because of that misdiagnosis.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It seems almost unlikely that evidence in child abuse cases
can be similar to other forensic disciplines that we've talked
about on our show. But it turns out that the
same tactics use to convict people based on faulty pattern
matching evidence, for example, is really the same thing we're
dealing with here. In instances of alleged child abuse.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
The kind of biases that we see in other kinds
of forensic sciences are certainly present here. And because there
is no gold standard criteria, no simple or single test
that allows anybody to make a diagnosis of child abuse,
you end up having to fall back on so much
subjectivity of the person examining the child and looking at
(25:45):
the facts, and what we know from pattern matching disciplines
in particular, but also things like ourson investigation, is that
the more subjectivity that is introduced into the system, the
less reliable your result can be. Sometimes when you look
at the breakdown of cases where people get wrongfully convicted
based on faulty forensic science, and a majority of them,
(26:06):
part of the faulty forensic science is that the expert
spoke to the jury with more certainty than the science warranted.
The same is true in cases with medical testimony. So
when a doctor says that a fracture or a subdural
hematoma or a retinal hemorrhage can only be caused by
child abuse, and there's no other explanation that is definitive.
(26:29):
It is convincing that is stated with more certainty than
the science can support, and that can certainly lead to
an unfair trial and a wrongful conviction.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
So, in your opinion, when something as tragic as a
baby dying happens, what can we do to make sure
that the cause of death is determined correctly so that
parents and caretakers stop being wrongfully accused based on this
shaken baby high ypothesis.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
There really should be really rigorous testing in all of
these cases, and not every case out there gets the
benefit of really careful, comprehensive testing. There's actually kind of
a famous case that a district attorney from Queen's has
used in a bunch of presentations where there was a
videotaped fall. A child fell at a mall and off
(27:25):
of just a really short fall off of a piece
of playground equipment and later died, and investigators embarked upon
an extremely complex and comprehensive medical evaluation, and when they
did that, they found that there were potentially some blood
disorders lurking within the family. And while the child who
died never definitively tested positive for a bleeding disorder. Her
(27:47):
parents were carrying genes that suggested that she may have
had one that may have contributed to her death. But
I have to tell you that it's uncommon that that
kind of testing is done. I have seen it become
more common, and hopefully it will continue to become more common.
But that's just a great example of a really thorough
evaluation clarifying that a deceased child died because of a
(28:11):
tragic accident, not because anybody hurt her.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
When I think about people convicted based on this type
of evidence, it's usually a parent that we're talking about.
Someone who has just lost their child, is going through
this unimaginable tragedy, and then to be accused of being
the one that actually inflicted this harm. It's a lot
(28:37):
to wrap your head around. It's like too much to bear.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
For parents who go through this. They have a double tragedy,
right They have the loss of the life or health
of their child, which is incredibly tragic, and then they
have this prosecution, which threatens their freedom, often threatens their
relationship with their other children. In some of these cases,
(29:02):
parents might lose custody of other children in the family.
It's horrifying.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
It's horrifying as a lawyer to it. It must be
difficult to be watching this unfold.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, it's an incredibly emotional situation. And in fact, there
are some lawyers who find these cases so disturbing and
disruptive that they do one and they never want to
do another one. You do care about that happening. I mean,
it's not easy. It's always difficult. They are very emotional,
they are very upsetting. It is difficult to be there
(29:38):
for someone who has gone through, like, like I said,
this double tragedy, right where a child that you know
that they loved and cared about is gone or very
or were very different, and then they've they've been accused
of this crime they didn't commit. It's it's it's terrible.
I think the only reason why I feel compelled to
(30:01):
keep doing it is that what has happened to these
folks is wrong and someone has to help them and
stand up for them. It's not an easy thing, but
I think it's a necessary one.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
When I agreed to host this podcast, I set out
to expose some of the many flaws that exist in
our criminal justice system. Specifically, what I wanted to do
was address what goes wrong when jurors are presented with
what they are told as science but actually turns out
to be well junk. The harms of junk science go
(30:44):
beyond innocent people having to endure the unthinkable nightmare of
being accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit.
The consequences extend even further than those people having to
endure the rawst and most cutting of human suffering, being
torn from their life and locked in a cage. In
addition to that human tragedy, junk science causes the moral
(31:08):
fabric of our judicial system to wear and tear at
the seams. It causes an entire institution of law and
order and justice to be completely undermined. In examining the
various disciplines of forensic science we've discussed this season, whether
it was our sin or blood spatter, eyewitness identification, or,
(31:33):
as in this episode, shaking baby syndrome, I knew it
would be interesting and enlightening, but I never expected it
to affect me in the profound manner that it has.
I have been in turns dumbfounded, angry, saddened, and even outraged,
a trial is supposed to be a search for the truth.
(31:56):
The word science itself is defined as the study of
the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Our
system of justice has been regarded as not perfect, but
the best way to ensure that people who are accused
of crimes get the fairest shake possible. So how is
(32:17):
our system of justice veered so far off the tracks?
How have we managed to bastardize and bludgeon What science means?
I don't know if we can ever arrive at a
clear answer. There are probably many explanations. One thing I
do know is that when human beings get involved in
any endeavor, we bring our own biases, or thirst for
(32:41):
financial gain, or hunches and quirks into the equation, and
in the process we sometimes create such a mess that
it becomes difficult to untangle the hows and whys of
it all. But I still manage to find hope and
a way forward. And here's why. If you've ever been
(33:02):
fortunate enough to meet someone that has spent time in
prison for a crime they didn't commit, one thing becomes
apparent very quickly. They are the embodiment of all that
is soaring and remarkable about the human condition. They are
a special combination of resilience, hope, forgiveness and strength. They
(33:27):
are quite simply a force of nature. So I will
continue to pour my energy, every cell in my body
into helping those who are still behind bars for crimes
they did not commit. I will fight to restore signs
to its proper definition in our courtrooms. I am propelled
(33:48):
by these men and women that represent the triumph of
the human soul. To restore one's life and freedom is
perhaps the highest service to your fellow human being. I
can't even find the words to describe what it's like
to walk someone out of a nightmare of a prison
(34:09):
cell and into the bright light of freedom, to restore
a life. The only way I can articulate it is that,
aside from marrying my wife and the birth of my children,
it is and always will be my most important contribution
to my fellow human beings. There is nothing I have
(34:32):
done in this life or could ever fathom doing, that
can ever come close. No material gain, no drug, no drink,
nothing at all that can approach the state of nirvana
that consumes your soul when you have helped save a life.
(34:52):
And I think that says a lot about who we are.
At our essence. We are meant to be of service
to one another, to heal each other, to restore each other.
Not a bad message, if I do say so myself,
at a time when it seems like we could really
use it, I encourage all of you to continue to
(35:13):
keep your voices up, write those letters to your local
prosecutors and judges, be a more conscientious juror pitching in
any way that you can. Together we can ensure that
one day there will be no more wrongful convictions. Based
on Junk Science. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production
(35:46):
of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company
Number One. Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flahm and
the team at Signal Company Number one executive producer Kevin
Wartis and senior producers Karen Krnhaber and Britain Spangler. Our
music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me
on Instagram at dubin Josh, follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast
(36:09):
on Facebook and on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on
Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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