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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The Casey Anthony case and forensic evidence problems

    I’m not going to write any analysis of my own of the Casey Anthony case or its controversial outcome. Plenty has been written already.

    But perhaps good can come of it if it brings attention to the issue of forensic evidence used in criminal prosecutions in sad and terrible cases involving the death of a child or infant.  Forensic evidence, and sometimes just medical evidence, frequently has been the only evidence the prosecution has had to convict someone of homicide in such a case.  Medical evidence frequently has been all there was to show whether a child’s death was caused by accident or disease, or by someone’s criminal conduct.

    The investigative journalism website ProPublica recently worked on a joint project with PBS “Frontline” and National Public Radio to investigate the quality and validity of medical evidence in cases like that to produce The Child Cases, their joint report.  ProPublica said that “[o]ur reporting showed that these cases have been repeatedly mishandled by medical examiners and coroners, sometimes resulting in innocent people being wrongly accused. In the Anthony case, it's unknown if flawed forensic evidence led to a false accusation or made it impossible to convict a guilty person of a horrible crime.” http://www.propublica.org/article/casey-anthony-trial-shows-the-limits-of-forensic-science-in-proving-how-a-c

    The Child Cases report “identified nearly two dozen cases in the U.S. and Canada in which people have been accused of killing children based on flawed or biased work by forensic pathologists and then later cleared.”  http://www.propublica.org/special/the-child-cases  They are summarized on that web page.

    Some recurring problems were doctors who performed autopsies and testified in court but lacked specialized training in determining the cause of a child’s death or who failed to keep current on the relevant medical research; biased doctors who saw themselves as part of the prosecution team and looked just for evidence of guilt rather than for the truth; doctors who simply ignored evidence that contradicted their conclusions; and medical theories that were subsequently shown to be false or unscientific.  An example: “Shaken baby syndrome,” brain damage that potentially leads to death caused by violent shaking.  There may be no external signs of trauma.  There are cases where doctors have diagnosed the syndrome by finding just three symptoms:  subdural hemorrhaging (or bleeding under a layer of tissue surrounding the brain); retinal hemorrhaging (visible bleeding in the retinas of the eyes); and swelling around the brain.  And on this evidence alone, people have been convicted of homicide including murder in the death of a child.  Yet it is increasingly clear that other causes – including blood disorders and vitamin deficiencies – can mimic or duplicate exactly these symptoms.

    The PBS “Frontline” web page, with videos of the broadcast, is here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-child-cases/ National Public Radio’s reports can be heard here - http://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137454415/the-child-cases-guilty-until-proven-innocent - here - http://www.npr.org/2011/06/29/137471992/rethinking-shaken-baby-syndrome - and here -  http://www.npr.org/2011/06/30/137507575/the-child-cases-lessons-from-canada

    People have been freed after being convicted on faulty medical evidence.  But, without doubt, there are more people still who have been unjustly convicted.  With aggressive and effective legal representation and fresh evidence from qualified experts, those unjust convictions may be challenged.

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