Networked Knowledge - Media Report

This version of the report has been prepared by: Dr Robert N Moles
[Underlining where it occurs is for editorial emphasis]

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On 20 December 2007 Frances Gibb and David Brown of The Times reported “Child-killer case to be examined after key witness adds to doubts”.

They said the Attorney-General is to look into the case in which two jurors have questioned the conviction of a childminder for killing a baby in her care. The move, which follows reports in The Times yesterday, came as a prosecution witness in the trial of Keran Henderson also spoke out to say that there was no proof that the 11-month old baby, Maeve Sheppard, had been shaken. Waney Squier, a consultant neuropathologist at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, was the first expert to examine Maeve’s brain after her death.

She told The Times: “Even if you believe in shaken baby syndrome, this case does not have features to support this diagnosis. The features are far more in keeping with the baby having an older head injury and an event occurring to cause her to collapse and die. I do not know what that event was, but I am not at all sure that it was shaking. What is missing in the evidence was proof that she had been shaken, and shaken violently enough to cause the brain damage.”

Henderson, 42, a mother of two and a Scout leader, was jailed for three years after being convicted of shaking the baby so violently that she died days later, blind and irreparably braindamaged. She maintained that the baby had suffered a seizure.

“The two jurors have demonstrated the urgent need for full-scale research into the 'secrets' of the jury room”.  Frances Gibb

The office of Baroness Scotland of Asthal, the Attorney-General, said yesterday that she would look into the case “and the issues around it”. A spokesman said that this would be the first step to considering a review.

A review in 2004 by her predecessor, Lord Goldsmith, QC, of nearly 300 baby death convictions — including 88 shaken baby syndrome cases — led to three cases being referred back to the courts.

Dr Squier gave evidence for half a day in the five-week trial at Reading Crown Court where Henderson was found guilty of manslaughter by a 10-2 majority verdict. She said: “I told the court I believe this baby had both old and recent traumatic brain injury but it is impossible for a pathologist to tell precisely how this occurred and whether it was accidental or inflicted.”

She had no idea how the past head injury might have occured but it was “most likely to have been a traumatic injury”. However, a fall could do this, she said. Dr Squier has given evidence in several similar cases and believes that the syndrome is diagnosed often incorrectly. Twelve witnesses were called by the prosecution, most of them simply because they were involved in Maeve’s medical treatment.

Reforms were also urged yesterday to prevent miscarriages of justice in such cases. John Batt, a solicitor and one of the defence team who acted for Sally Clark, the mother who died this year from alcoholism and trauma after being wrongly convicted of killing two of her babies, gave warning that “experts are getting it wrong all the time and innocent families are paying the price”. He said that judges should be throwing out scientific theories such as shaken baby syndrome — as happened in August this year in the case of a child-minder, Kathy Hyatt, in Missouri. “Kathy walked — and Keran is serving three years for manslaughter. What happened? Kathy’s lawyers challenged the whole basis of shaken baby syndrome before trial.”

Sally O’Neill, QC, chairwoman of the Criminal Bar Association, who has acted in several baby-killing trials, said: “These are deeply troubling cases. It is not a question of juries not understanding experts. The jury does its best. The problem is — if the experts can’t agree between themselves, how can a jury?” She also said there was a body of opinion that prosecutions in such cases should be mounted with more rigour, particularly if a parent or childminder with no history of violence was accused .

John Cooper, a barrister who advised the family of Louise Woodward, the English au pair convicted of killing a baby in her care when in the United States, defended juries in such cases. “It comes down to the responsibility of the legal profession and the experts themselves to ensure that their evidence is understandable,” he said.

Before the trial, disputed issues should be identified so the jury could focus on as “small an area of conflict as possible. If there’s no evidence apart from the conflicting views of medical experts, the prosecution should not be brought at all.”

Mark Solon, a solicitor and the founder of the expert witness training company Bond Solon, said: “Experts are there to educate the jury to understand these complex issues — not to impress their peers, which is what many experts think their role is.”

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