Appeals Court Upholds Shaken Baby Conviction Despite Medical Examiner Recanting Testimony

Despite an extraordinary effort by the district attorney’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, to reverse a murder conviction that its own prosecutors won more than two decades ago, the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Russell Maze’s conviction on Friday. The court said there was insufficient evidence to prove his innocence, even though the original medical examiner in the case — whose testimony helped secure the 2004 conviction — recanted last year, concluding that Maze’s son died of natural causes, not abuse.

Maze, whose case was the subject of an in-depth article last year by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, was accused of shaking his 5-week-old son, Alex, who later died.

The court’s 2-1 decision followed a sweeping, yearlong reinvestigation of the case by a special team within the DA’s office known as a conviction-review unit. After consulting with experts in pathology, radiology, neonatology and ophthalmology, the unit concluded that Alex died not from shaking but from an undiagnosed medical condition.

Maze, now 60, was arrested after Alex became nonresponsive in the spring of 1999. He has been behind bars ever since and is serving a life sentence.

Maze stood trial twice, and in both proceedings, prosecutors presented evidence they said showed Alex was a victim of shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, told jurors that internal bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Maze’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-russell-maze-shaken-baby-conviction-appeal

JUNK SCIENCE!