Douglas Stewart Carter: Utah: From our 'Enough to make one weep' department: On Utah's death row for 40 years, he may not match the DNA profile developed for the first time in a Utah killing, the Salt Lake Tribune (Investigative Reporter Jessica Schreifels) reports, noting that: "For decades, Douglas Stewart Carter has sat on Utah’s death row while maintaining he was wrongly convicted of brutally killing a woman in 1985, a case in which prosecutors presented no physical evidence tying him to the crime. Now, for the first time, it appears DNA evidence may undercut that conviction — in a case already shadowed by allegations of police misconduct."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Neal Hamilton, another defense attorney, said in a Friday evening statement that the recent DNA developments confirm what “we’ve always known.” “Doug did not murder Eva Olesen,” he wrote.  Hamilton said this “exonerated” Carter, and it was “unconscionable” that he remains in jail and charged with aggravated murder. “It is long past time for Doug to go home,” he said."

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In a hearing last month, Deputy Utah County Attorney Erwin Petilos said Utah’s state crime lab had recently developed a suspect DNA profile from key evidence in the killing. DNA testing was not available at the time that victim Eva Olesen was killed. In court Friday, Petilos said the profile has since not matched anyone in the FBI’s national DNA database — and acknowledged that Carter’s DNA was likely already in that database because convicted offenders have been required to submit DNA samples since 1998. During the hearing, an attorney who previously worked on Carter’s case confirmed that she took part in the process of getting the inmate’s blood to those who maintain the federal offender database. Carter’s defense attorney, Richard Gale, said he’s almost certain that his client’s DNA is included."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Gale told the judge Friday that Carter, who is 71, has agreed to give a voluntary DNA sample, but added that the inmate is concerned about possible evidence tampering and wanted extra security measures put in place.  Petilos, the prosecutor, said he needed to clear those requests with Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray, who was unavailable this week as he participated in the death penalty-eligible case for the Utah man accused of fatally shooting Charlie Kirk.  “The State of Utah stole 42 years from Doug. The only consideration which [ought] to remain is how make right the theft of Doug’s life,” Hamilton said in his statement."

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Hamilton said Carter, who is Black, was convicted despite multiple people seeing a white man leave the crime scene, and blonde pubic hair allegedly being found on Olesen. He accused the Provo police department — and its lead investigator on the case, then-Lt. George Pierpont — of framing “a vulnerable young Black man.” Carter is expected to be back in court on July 31. Gale said that if his DNA sample doesn’t match what has been developed from evidence found at the scene, he planned to ask the Utah attorney general’s office to file a petition to have the judge declare Carter factually innocent. "

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PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "The Utah Supreme Court reversed Carter’s conviction and death sentence last year, after a judge found Provo investigators paid and threatened witnesses who later said they lied.  Officers built a case against Carter largely around those witnesses and a purported confession — which Carter has recently made a renewed effort to suppress."

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STORY: "A man on Utah’s death row for 40 years may not match the DNA profile developed for the first time in a Provo killing," by Reporter Jessica Schreifels, published by The Salt Lake Tribune, on July 11, 2026. (Jessica Schreifels, formerly Jessica Miller, is an investigative reporter at The Salt Lake Tribune, where she has worked since 2011. She was part of the team that won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize. She has collaborated with several national outlets for investigative projects, including FRONTLINE, American Public Media and ProPublica.)

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SUB-HEADING: "This confirms what we have always known,” Douglas Carter’s attorney said Friday evening. “Doug did not murder Eva Olesen.”

PHOTO CAPTION: "Douglas Carter appears in 4th District Court in Provo, Friday, April 3, 2026. Carter was sentenced to death for a 1985 murder, which was overturned in 2025."

GIST:  "For decades, Douglas Stewart Carter has sat on Utah’s death row while maintaining he was wrongly convicted of brutally killing a woman in 1985, a case in which prosecutors presented no physical evidence tying him to the crime. 

Now, for the first time, it appears DNA evidence may undercut that conviction — in a case already shadowed by allegations of police misconduct.

In a hearing last month, Deputy Utah County Attorney Erwin Petilos said Utah’s state crime lab had recently developed a suspect DNA profile from key evidence in the killing. DNA testing was not available at the time that victim Eva Olesen was killed.

In court Friday, Petilos said the profile has since not matched anyone in the FBI’s national DNA database — and acknowledged that Carter’s DNA was likely already in that database because convicted offenders have been required to submit DNA samples since 1998.

During the hearing, an attorney who previously worked on Carter’s case confirmed that she took part in the process of getting the inmate’s blood to those who maintain the federal offender database. Carter’s defense attorney, Richard Gale, said he’s almost certain that his client’s DNA is included.

Neal Hamilton, another defense attorney, said in a Friday evening statement that the recent DNA developments confirm what “we’ve always known.”

“Doug did not murder Eva Olesen,” he wrote.

Hamilton said this “exonerated” Carter, and it was “unconscionable” that he remains in jail and charged with aggravated murder. “It is long past time for Doug to go home,” he said.

Olesen was the aunt of the then-Provo police chief. She was killed in her home on Feb. 27, 1985, stabbed 10 times and shot in the back of her head. Her husband told police he had been out visiting a friend and found Olesen’s body partially undressed with her hands tied behind her back when he returned home.

(Olesen family) Eva Olesen was fatally stabbed and shot during a 1985 robbery of her home in Provo.

Gale told the judge Friday that Carter, who is 71, has agreed to give a voluntary DNA sample, but added that the inmate is concerned about possible evidence tampering and wanted extra security measures put in place.

Petilos, the prosecutor, said he needed to clear those requests with Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray, who was unavailable this week as he participated in the death penalty-eligible case for the Utah man accused of fatally shooting Charlie Kirk.

“The State of Utah stole 42 years from Doug. The only consideration which [ought] to remain is how make right the theft of Doug’s life,” Hamilton said in his statement.

Hamilton said Carter, who is Black, was convicted despite multiple people seeing a white man leave the crime scene, and blonde pubic hair allegedly being found on Olesen. He accused the Provo police department — and its lead investigator on the case, then-Lt. George Pierpont — of framing “a vulnerable young Black man.”

Carter is expected to be back in court on July 31. Gale said that if his DNA sample doesn’t match what has been developed from evidence found at the scene, he planned to ask the Utah attorney general’s office to file a petition to have the judge declare Carter factually innocent.

Being found factually innocent is extremely rare. Only a handful of Utahns have been declared innocent since a state law was passed in 2008 that allows convictions to be reconsidered based on new evidence. No one who was sent to Utah’s death row has ever been found factually innocent.
Misconduct allegations

Prior to the DNA results, Carter’s attorneys had recently asked for the aggravated murder case to be dismissed. They allege that investigators engaged in misconduct, lost evidence and ignored evidence pointing to other suspects, including Olesen’s husband.

The lawyers appeared frustrated at his court hearing in June, with Hamilton telling the judge that crime lab workers had developed a suspect DNA profile from evidence that prosecutors had previously said was missing — including a cutting of possible blood found on a back door and cloth found in Olesen’s bathroom.

“These are evidence we’ve previously been told the state could not locate,” Hamilton said. “We found out late Friday that this evidence not only exists, but has DNA on them.”

Despite years of appeals and re-examinations of the case, there hasn’t been a suspect DNA profile developed until recently.

The Utah Supreme Court reversed Carter’s conviction and death sentence last year, after a judge found Provo investigators paid and threatened witnesses who later said they lied.

Officers built a case against Carter largely around those witnesses and a purported confession — which Carter has recently made a renewed effort to suppress.

Police say Carter confessed to a Pierpont, but there’s no recording of that conversation. Pierpont did draft a written confession, which Carter signed. Carter’s attorneys now argue that confession was coerced, and that police took advantage of him in a moment when he was worried about potential legal ramifications for a woman he had stayed with after he left Utah following Olesen’s death.

Provo police focused on Carter as a suspect after getting two tips, according to a Utah Supreme Court ruling: that Carter was a possible suspect in a “vehicle trespass” offense near Olesen’s home shortly before the murder, and that Carter’s wife had apparently rushed home after learning of Olesen’s killing to see if Carter had been involved.

There was no physical evidence tying Carter to the crime scene, according to the ruling — but prosecutors presented at trial that unrecorded purported confession and witness testimony, including from a couple who told jurors that Carter bragged about the killing and demonstrated how he had stabbed Olesen. The couple later retracted their testimony, sharing that police had told them what to say and threatened to deport them.

Carter was convicted at a 1985 trial and sentenced to die.
Another possible suspect

His defense attorneys in a recent motion argued that the lead investigator also ignored evidence pointing to other suspects, including Olesen’s husband — who died in 2009.

They noted in their court filing that Olesen’s husband, Orla Olesen, was the first and primary suspect for the first several months after her death. His relationship with his wife was troubled, their friends told investigators, and the man “frequently spoke ill of Eva and openly discussed not needing her around,” according to the motion.

And though Olesen was killed in the couple’s living room, investigators found blood-stained cloths in their bathroom, according to the motion. Police noted that her husband appeared to be clean and freshly shaven when officers responded after he alerted authorities.

The husband took a polygraph test, according to the motion, and when the results indicated he was being deceptive, Orla Olesen allegedly stormed out of the room and called Pierpont — who was leading the investigation — to complain.

The day after the test, the county attorney told Pierpont he planned to file criminal charges against Orla Olesen, but Pierpont allegedly asked him to hold off so he could continue investigating.

Charges against Olesen never materialized, and Carter was charged instead."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/07/11/utah-new-dna-profile-could-upend/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

July 13: Diagnosis of a crime series: Investigation of the day: Part 6: Shaken baby syndrome: What they got terribly wrong! Part 6: Heather Kirkwood, a specialist in the over-diagnosis and misdiagnosis of non-accidental injuries, explains what to do when taking your child to hospital feels like landing on Mars, noting that: "Wrongful allegations of non-accidental injury are based on a lack of scientific evidence, circular reasoning and influential advocates unwilling to acknowledge obvious errors in their claims." (She specialises in cases where parents have been falsely accused.)... "Heather Kirkwood has worked pro bono with Melanie Reid and her investigations team on multiple cases. She has played a key role in securing six post-conviction victories in cases of over-diagnosis or misdiagnosis of non-accidental injuries, including four full exonerations and a plea deal for a man who was facing the death penalty. She’s also been instrumental in having high-profile criminal cases dismissed before trial and in multiple acquittals in court. Her work spans several US states, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In 2008 Ontario’s Goudge Inquiry, established after a series of wrongful convictions linked to flawed forensic pathology, exposed the devastating consequences that can flow from courts placing unquestioning reliance on expert medical evidence and called for greater scientific rigour and accountability."

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POST" "When taking your child to hospital feels like landing on Mars," by US-based attorney Heather Kirkwood, published by Newsroom, on July 7, 2026.

PHOTO CAPTION: "Innocent parents who take their children to hospital to be treated and end up being accused of abuse feel like they’ve landed on Mars. That's because the medical and legal establishments have created a new planet, writes Heather Kirkwood."

GIST: "A father told me recently he’d taken his baby to hospital because of vomiting – and found he’d landed on Mars.

He and his wife had left their baby boy briefly with their nanny when the nanny called to say he had fallen backwards from a sitting position and was now acting “funny”. The father rushed home. When he picked up the baby, the baby vomited on him. The nanny already had vomit on her shirt. He called the paediatrician, who said it was likely a virus. When the vomiting continued, he called the paediatrician again – and again. He finally took his baby to the on-call paediatrician, who sent them home. But his baby was still vomiting. The next day, he asked the paediatrican for a referral to a hospital.

At the first hospital and then the second hospital, doctors bustled in and out, looking at him strangely and giving evasive answers. They were followed by the police. The doctors had decided the baby’s vomiting was because of abuse. As he was in the nanny’s care when the symptoms arose, the nanny was the obvious suspect. But the father didn’t think the nanny had abused their baby so he and his wife became the targets of the investigation.

The father had brought his son in for vomiting – but he landed in a world in which nothing made sense. The inhabitants spoke an unknown language and did not appear to understand what he was saying. Nor could he understand what they were saying. Apart from vomiting, their baby was fine – no treatment was needed. They could have stayed home, and their baby would have been fine.

But because they didn’t stay home – because they sought medical care – their baby was taken into state care, followed by bankrupting attorney fees in a year-long battle to keep their son. Compared with others, they were fortunate: the maternal grandmother came from across the country to care for the baby. The parents had to move out of the house, but they were allowed to care for their son under the grandmother’s supervision. Travelling was out of the question, so the father left his challenging job that required travel to care for their child. Expert reports explained the baby had a difficult birth, a very large head and other characteristics that explained the findings – but they were ignored. Finally, their attorneys gave them an option: they could have a trial they were unlikely to win, or they could accept a plea bargain and keep their baby. They ultimately accepted a plea so he and his wife could regain custody of their son.

But though the couple avoided being placed on a child abuse registry or having criminal charges, the father never returned to his work. He was afraid to leave his son with anyone because they knew he was at risk for falls. And they were afraid to take him to a doctor or hospital for workups that might help explain other characteristics, including his large head, small size and continued reflux. On an out-of-state trip several years later, they panicked when their child vomited – would it be safe to take him to a doctor or urgent care? Or would the nightmare begin again?

Would they again face losing their child, not to mention crippling financial expenses and emotional trauma to get him back? Or would they even get him back?

Today, nearly five years later, they worry every time they go to a doctor. And they worry whether they should do follow-ups – follow-up CT scans, follow-up MRIs. And if so, where should they do them? Is anywhere in this country safe? Is any country safe? Is there any way to provide your child with top-notch medical care without a realistic possibility of losing him if the doctors find something that they can’t explain?

I wish I could say that this reaction is uncommon. But it’s not. One accused parent – a doctor who was cleared – found herself shaking years later when entering her own hospital with her disabled child, who was perfectly well.

Yet another mother, whose case was dismissed and the children returned, sometimes sits up all night watching her child breathe, afraid that he might be taken.

Once you land on Mars, you may escape, but the trust is gone – the trust that you live in a country in which you can take your child to the doctor for help, the trust you will be heard, the trust that the truth will emerge, the trust that the legal system works.
Defending the innocent

I am not a criminal defence attorney. My expertise was in antitrust, commercial transactions and securities fraud, but I also did quite a bit of pro bono work. And I brought the skills from my corporate work – work that required an immense number of hours and comprehensive reviews of the evidence – to my pro bono work.

My first child abuse case involved my daughter-in-law’s brother who had been convicted of harming his four-year-old daughter. When my daughter-in-law asked me to look at the case, I said that I would handle it in the same way I handled all of my work – I would gather the evidence, look at the research, talk to experts on all sides and do my best to get the right answer. If her brother was guilty, it was critical to keep him away from the children, including my grandchildren. If he was not guilty, it was important for him to rejoin the family.

As it turned out, there was no medical evidence of abuse. I wish I could say I waved a magic wand and the conviction disappeared, but it took two long years.

There was only a brief break before the same daughter-in-law brought me a second case. This one involved a claim a baby had been shaken to death. The defendant was the babysitter’s husband. He was looking after his own children as well as the three siblings (including the baby) that his wife was babysitting while his wife ran out to buy hairbows for the family Christmas photos to be taken that afternoon. When I learned of the case, the defendant had been convicted and given a 60-year sentence, yet many people in the community believed he was innocent. I agreed to look at the case.

I had never heard of shaken baby syndrome. Around 2004 I asked my son, who was at school in England, to identify the research-based findings of shaken baby syndrome so I could compare them with the hospital and autopsy findings in this case. After three months, my son said, “there is no research basis for shaken baby syndrome” as he handed me several binders of carefully summarised research papers. “Really?” I told my daughter, “$100,000 on an Oxford education and he can’t find the research basis for shaken baby syndrome – I want my money back.” But he was right. The problem wasn’t an absence of papers; the problem was that the reasoning was circular, there were no controls and there was no way to determine whether the categorisation of cases into “abuse” and “non-abuse” was correct.

After reading my petition for post-conviction relief, the prosecutor told me he knew I was honestly presenting my views but that I was mistaken about shaken baby syndrome. He said there was a great deal of evidence supporting it and it was presented by experts at a national conference held every other year. He recommended I go to the conference.

So in September 2006 I attended my first National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome Conference. I attended four days of presentations – yet I still couldn’t find the research basis for shaken baby syndrome. Nor, it seemed, could anyone else, at least from the material presented. Instead, the speakers focused on theatrics rather than substance, often bolstering their claims by misrepresenting research papers and court filings I had already read. It felt like a pep rally rather than a professional conference.

So we proceeded with the post-conviction hearing. It took days, with leading experts on both sides, to overturn a conviction that appeared to have no research basis. The child was a sick baby, not a shaken baby, and she died from well-documented natural disease processes. The father was released on bond but the prosecutors decided to retry him, this time going for the death penalty. They’d already shown how far they would go to maintain a conviction – before the hearing, they had harangued and threatened his ex-wife into changing her testimony, offering her immunity if she testified against him. When the conviction was overturned, they pulled former cellmates out to try to persuade them to say he had confessed in prison – but no one succumbed. Ultimately, the father decided to take a plea bargain for time served. He was given a 97 percent chance of acquittal – but a 3 percent chance of being found guilty was 3 percent too much. When you’ve been falsely convicted once, you know it can happen again. After nine years in prison, even a new trial would be too much for his children and parents to bear. He is now happily married, very close to his family and very grateful he did not die in prison for a crime that didn’t occur. But he still occasionally wonders whether he should have taken that 97 percent chance of acquittal.

For me this case was a turning point. I had now officially landed on Mars. What I saw at the conference showed me that shaken baby syndrome wasn’t about evidence. Instead, evidence had been supplanted by a strong, well-funded advocacy group consisting of doctors, prosecutors, government officials and even judges who were promoting claims that were not supported by evidence, likely resulting in the imprisonment of innocent parents and caretakers on a national and even global scale.

Before this case concluded, I had fallen into yet another case – and another and another and another. Each one I thought would be the last. But they kept coming. 

Getting to Mars

The obvious question is: how did we get into this situation? We are in an era of science, an era of evidence-based medicine. So how did the fact there was no research basis for shaken baby syndrome – and many other child abuse hypotheses – escape us?

In retrospect there are several factors. Many of the child abuse theories came about from a combination of renewed interest – and changing standards – in child abuse, combined with new technologies that allowed us to look inside a child’s body for evidence of concealed (“occult”) abuse.

X-rays, followed by CT scans, then MRIs were used to inspect the inside of children’s bodies for evidence of abuse. The problem is that imaging is meaningless unless it is connected to the pathology.

Some years ago, as we sat at my dining room table, I asked a neuroradiologist what a small high density area (white on the CT scan) represented. His reply: “Heather, you’re asking me to look at a tree on Bainbridge Island [across the Sound from my dining room] and tell you whether a speck of white on the tree is snow or a bird. I DON’T KNOW.”

And that should have been the approach of the early radiologists, including John Caffey, a paediatrician and self-taught radiologist who is often called the Father of Paediatric Radiology.

In 1929 Caffey, was appointed head of radiology at Babies Hospital (Columbia) in New York, and in 1946, he published an article claiming that chronic subdural hematomas and multiple fractures – findings that had long been associated with medical and nutritional issues, including rickets, scurvy and metabolic disease – were caused by trauma. In 1957, he urged radiologists to diagnose traumatic injury for a wide array of skeletal findings and to “stand [their] ground” when this diagnosis was not supported by the history, physical examination, laboratory findings or treating doctors, for the radiological diagnosis may be the “only means by which the abused youngsters can be removed from their traumatic environment and the wrongdoers punished”. In the “Battered-Child Syndrome” (1962), Dr C Henry Kempe, working with Caffey’s associates, attributed a wide array of imaging and other findings – including subdural hematoma, fracture, failure to thrive, even sudden death – to battering. If the parents did not provide a history of significant trauma, one could safely assume that the child had been battered, and he assigned doctors the responsibility for obtaining confessions or admissions from the parents or other caretakers. In 1971-1974, British paediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch and Caffey proposed that the reason the allegedly battered babies did not look battered (no external injuries) was that they had been shaken rather than beaten.

As x-rays became more sophisticated and CT scans entered the scene, more and more children were diagnosed as abused based on internal radiographic findings. Although some doctors raised objections, these diagnoses cannonballed into the medical and legal establishments as proven fact, despite the fact no one had seen such a shaking, nor was there physical evidence of such – no rib fractures, bruises, grip marks or neck injury.

In 1987, a serious attempt was made to assess the forces of shaking by Dr Ann-Christine Duhaime, a leading supporter of the shaken baby syndrome (SBS) hypothesis, and several biomechanical engineers. These experiments found that shaking fell well below the established head injury thresholds, with impact exceeding shaking by a factor of nearly 50.

The study concluded that “shaken baby syndrome, at least in its most severe acute form, is not usually caused by shaking alone. Although shaking may, in fact, be part of the process, it is more likely that such infants suffer blunt impact”. No evidence was offered on the type of impact that might occur or the forces that would be required. Instead, doctors were allowed to testify on the type of forces that might be required, without regard for accuracy, and so they did. These are reported examples given by doctors testifying in court cases:

Force equivalent to auto accident or fall off a two-storey building (1989)

Comparable to an average sized adult being rattled back and forth by a 1000 pound gorilla (1990)

Equivalent to at least at 10 foot drop and possibly a 20-30 foot fall (1992)

At least nine G forces or like he had received whiplash from a car crash at 40-60mph without the impact (prosecutor summary) (1992)

Similar to driving on Illinois Route 88 at 35mph and smashing into a concrete abutment with your face bashing against the windshield (1993)

Unrestrained baby thrown about in a 40mph car that abruptly stops (1994)

Brain rammed his skull at 30 to 60 times the normal force of gravity. Fighter pilots pass out at 6½ times the force of gravity.

Fall from a three storey building or from a blow by a baseball bat (1996)

Comparable to what would have happened if she’d been shot from a cannon and rammed into a wall (1996)

Falling out of a fifth or sixth storey window, high velocity auto accident (1997)

20 foot fall or if someone was ejected from a vehicle (1997)

Suffice to say that there was no substantiation for any of these claims.
Woodward trial

These claims went virtually unchallenged until the 1997 trial of Louise Woodward, a British au pair in Massachusetts charged with causing the death of an eight-month-old in her care.

The prosecution witnesses claimed severe shaking and forceful impact. A radiologist testified that the findings were consistent with a force equivalent to “having been dropped from a 15-storey building onto concrete”. An ophthalmologist testified that these findings were not seen even in children who had very severe impact, such as “being hit by a train or falling from five storeys”. If the forces were from impact, the forces would have to be greater than “a truck hitting a baby in a baby carriage”. If from shaking, the shaking would have to be of a “very extreme nature”, sufficient to have “ripped the retina apart internally”. A child abuse paediatrician testified that the child was shaken to “such a violent degree that it would have required as much energy as an adult could muster, sustained over a period of time approaching or exceeding a minute, possibly delivered in intervals”. He was not concerned by the absence of bruising or other signs of trauma as this was “typical” in cases of shaken baby syndrome.

This time, well-qualified defence experts, including a biomechanical engineer, pointed out that the findings, which included a chronic subdural hematoma and skull fracture, were consistent with a pre-existing condition and a short fall, with no evidence of shaking, which was biomechanically improbable based on the Duhaime study and lack of neck injury.

The jury convicted Woodward of second degree murder and imposed a life sentence but the judge reduced the verdict to involuntary manslaughter and the sentence to time served, allowing Woodward to return to England. 

What they got wrong

What we learned in the 25 years following the Woodward trial is that virtually every assumption and claim made in court by child abuse physicians over the past 50 years has been wrong.

First, shaking is a biomechanical construct – but they got the biomechanics wrong. This was confirmed in 1987 by Duhaime et al, but virtually ignored by child abuse paediatricians, paediatric radiologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics and even Duhaime herself. Instead of questioning the shaking hypothesis, shaken baby syndrome evolved into the shaken-impact hypothesis. As there was often no evidence of impact, the new hypothesis was that the infant had been thrown very hard on a very soft surface such as a pillow or mattress.

Under this new hypothesis, the estimates of the forces provided in court testimony and resulting in the separation of families and continued to be inflated and fantastical. For example:

Like being in a car accident or falling out of a three-storey window (2022)

Thrown from a horse or ejected out of an automobile (2023)

Thrown through a car windshield (2024)

Shaken, thrown against something, involved in a car crash where the car was going over 50mph, thrown off a two- or three-storey building (2025).

In contrast, biomechanical studies continued to show that the maximum force of shaking was equivalent to a one foot fall onto carpet. (Prange 2003)

Because they got the biomechanics wrong, they also got the pathology wrong. Most of the shaken baby convictions were based on a triad of pathological findings – subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage and encephalopathy (brain damage), plus or minus fractures, each of which was said to require great trauma.

They said subdural hemorrhages were caused by ruptured bridging veins, which required great force and would result in immediate unconsciousness. But we now know that nearly 50 percent of healthy asymptomatic newborns have subdural hemorrhages, with no adverse consequences whatsoever. We also know that there are many different types of subdural hemorrhages and that ruptured bridging veins are rare – most subdural hemorrhages result from leakage in the dura or capillaries. Some represent clotting (stroke) rather than bleeding. Many have natural causes, which do not require trauma.

They also got retinal hemorrhages wrong. They said (and some still say) that retinal hemorrhages represent trauma, specifically, shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma. But we also know that retinal hemorrhages are seen at birth, from lack of oxygen from any cause (including high altitudes), from Valsalva manoeuvres (including vomiting, coughing) and in infectious processes (Lopez 2010). There is no evidence to support that they are evidence of shaking or trauma.

And they got brain damage wrong. They thought that the brain damage in abused children represented diffuse traumatic axonal injury – a rupturing of axons throughout the brain, which would indeed require great force. In 2001, however, Dr Jennian Geddes et al published two studies showing that the usual finding in the brains of children who were diagnosed as abused was “global hypoxia” (lack of oxygen) rather than diffuse traumatic injury. A decade later, a leading child abuse textbook accepted that it was “becoming increasingly clear from both neuro-imaging studies and post-mortem analyses of fatal cases that the widespread cerebral and axonal damage in cases of AHT are, in fact, ischemic rather than directly traumatic in nature”. (Dias, Jenny 2011).

Because they got the biomechanics and the pathology wrong, they also got the history wrong. History is generally viewed as 75 percent of the diagnosis. But instead of listening to the history provided by the parents and caretakers, they invented a new history to go with their (incorrect) biomechanics and (invented) pathology. The actual histories often consist of sick children, difficult births, short falls or sudden unexpected infant deaths (commonly known as SIDS). In general, these histories are a good fit with what we now know: any of these children may present with the triad or its components.

The same principles apply to fractures. Fractures were an integral part of the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis, starting with Caffey and Kempe and continued by Dr Paul Kleinman (who explicitly relied on Caffey) and the generations of child abuse physicians who followed. In the 1970s, fractures were believed to be caused by shaking, causing fractures in the flailing limbs. Later, they were believed to be caused by twisting and turning the limbs. Today, fractures have largely replaced shaking as the central feature in many child abuse cases. Like other aspects of shaken baby, the diagnosis is not built around eyewitnesses, direct evidence of violence, or even confessions. Instead, it is exactly where it was in 1946, with the long-known and well-established diagnoses of nutritional deficiencies, metabolic bone disease, connective tissue disorders and/or birth-related trauma continuing to take a back seat.

That is deeply concerning for three reasons. First, the evidence base supporting many fracture diagnoses remains remarkably weak, akin to the evidence base in shaken baby syndrome (Guvencel 2019). Second, the extensive use of x-rays in routine child abuse workups is exposing infants to significant amounts of radiation while doctors search for occult injuries – injuries that have no symptoms and need no treatment – that then become the basis for allegations of abuse, child removals and criminal prosecutions. Third, fractures are routinely over-called. Time and again I have reviewed cases where doctors describe 10, 15 or even more than 20 fractures, only for independent experts to conclude that most of those “fractures” are developmental, normal anatomical variants and/or consistent with fragile bones rather than inflicted injury.

The 2025 American Academy of Pediatrics Technical Report on abusive head trauma (the new name for shaken baby) was supposed to bring clarity to this field. Instead, it broadened the diagnostic framework and added to the confusion. The original SBS “triad” has in effect become a much longer list of findings that can be combined in different ways to support a diagnosis. Vomiting and lethargy, for example, are increasingly being used as gateway symptoms of head injury. A vomiting infant may undergo a CT scan, followed by a skeletal survey, then further imaging in the effort to identify occult injuries – often abnormalities, including “fractures”, that cause no pain, require no treatment and would never have come to light had the child not entered the child protection pathway.
Lack of reliable evidence base

Over the past two decades, every major independent review that has attempted to assess the scientific foundation of shaken baby syndrome – now rebranded as abusive head trauma – has raised serious concerns.

In 2003, Australian physician Dr Mark Donohoe published a review of the shaken baby literature that concluded that the medical data as of the end of 1998 was inadequate to support standards for diagnostic assessment. Instead, there were serious data gaps, flaws of logic, inconsistency of case definition, and a serious lack of tests capable of discriminating non-accidental from natural injuries. Based on his review, he concluded that the commonly held opinion that the finding of subdural and retinal hemorrhage in an infant was strong evidence of shaken baby syndrome was “unsustainable, at least from the medical literature”.

In 2008 Ontario’s Goudge Inquiry, established after a series of wrongful convictions linked to flawed forensic pathology, exposed the devastating consequences that can flow from courts placing unquestioning reliance on expert medical evidence and called for greater scientific rigour and accountability.

In 2016, the Swedish government published the results of a two-year systematic review of the evidence base for shaken baby syndrome that encompassed nearly 4000 published abstracts and articles. The review found that that “there is insufficient scientific evidence on which to assess the diagnostic accuracy of the triad in identifying traumatic shaking”. Since the diagnosis of children as abused was based on the triad and other findings that had never been validated, the methodological errors in the shaken baby studies included circular reasoning – a problem had long been recognised not only by Donohoe and others but by leading proponents of the shaken baby hypothesis (Jenny 2002).

The courts are beginning to recognise these problems too.

In Woodward in 1997, the Massachusetts courts clearly doubted whether the medical evidence was as certain as the prosecution experts claimed. In Del Prete in 2014, after hearing from leading experts on both sides, a federal court judge described shaken baby syndrome as “an article of faith rather than a precept of science”. Most recently, in State v Nieves (2025), the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors could not rely on shaken baby syndrome evidence in upcoming trials because of concerns about the lack of reliable biomechanical and medical evidence supporting the diagnosis. On the post-conviction front, more than 40 parents or caretakers who were convicted of shaken baby/abusive head trauma have been exonerated based on flaws in the shaken baby/abusive head trauma hypothesis – flaws that have been known for decades but are still being used to convict the innocent.

Yet despite all of this, innocent parents who take their children to hospital to be treated end up being accused of abuse – and feel like they’ve landed on Mars. They feel this way because the medical and legal establishments have created a new planet – one where the evidence put forward by experts doesn’t match the families’ realities; one where nothing they hear makes sense.

As these cases keep coming, so do the conferences on shaken baby syndrome. The September 2026 Conference will be my 10th conference; it’ll be 20 years since I started attending these gatherings. And I am still waiting for the evidence.

Heather Kirkwood has worked pro bono with Melanie Reid and her investigations team on multiple cases. She has played a key role in securing six post-conviction victories in cases of over-diagnosis or misdiagnosis of non-accidental injuries, including four full exonerations and a plea deal for a man who was facing the death penalty. She’s also been instrumental in having high-profile criminal cases dismissed before trial and in multiple acquittals in court. Her work spans several US states, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand.

The entire story can be read at:

https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/07/08/when-taking-your-child-to-hospital-feels-like-landing-on-mars

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

000000000000Friday: July 17: Brian Buckle. UK. For shame! This falsely convicted man who spent 500 pounds trying to clear his name, has been rejected for compensation, BBC News, Reporters Claire Kendall and Stephen Fildes) reports, noting that: "The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) rejected Buckle's first appeal for compensation last year, prompting the former Justice Minister Alex Davies-Jones to intervene. But he recently discovered that his second appeal has also been rejected. The UK government said it acknowledged the grave impact of miscarriages of justice and was committed to helping people rebuild their lives. A long-awaited review of the criminal appeals system in England and Wales, carried out by the Law Commission, said its report on compensation would be published this year.

BACKGROUND: "The family also had to meet the costs of fighting the conviction themselves. Using inheritance money, gifts from relatives and loans, they were able to put together a fund. Every line of the prosecution's case was studied, looking for anything that could help Brian. Private investigators and forensics experts were called upon.  A major breakthrough came during analysis of the DNA samples used in the first trial, which a forensics expert re-tested. Brian's barrister knew the findings would cast doubt on the original conviction. He successfully applied for a Court of Appeal hearing where he told the three judges the DNA could have been planted. Despite this, the Buckles had been told not to get their hopes up as this was simply a preliminary hearing. Brian watched the proceedings from prison over a video link but found them difficult to follow. Then the clerk of the court spoke to him. "He said to me: 'Mr Buckle, do you know what's happening here now?' And I said: 'No, not really.'" The clerk said Brian would be released immediately: "The paperwork will be there within the hour. You're going home." The judges had quashed all 16 guilty verdicts. They cited the new DNA evidence and said they had no confidence that the jury had considered each count separately. The prison officers told Brian they had never before seen an inmate released immediately as a result of such a decision. But any hopes this was the end of Brian's fight faded a few days later when the Crown Prosecution Service announced it was seeking a retrial. In May 2023, Brian was back in court fighting for his freedom a second time. Now, however, Brian's legal team had a much more detailed defence and access to the newly uncovered forensic evidence. Three weeks into the trial, the jury began deliberating. After just one hour and 20 minutes, the court usher told Brian the verdicts were in.  "All I could think about at that point was, 'What if I go back to prison?'" Brian recalls. "And then the foreman [went] through the 16 counts, and every single count - not guilty." After two trials and more than five years in prison, Brian was a free man."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66928735

----------------------------------------------

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Buckle, from Fishguard, was convicted of historical child sex abuse in 2017 and sentenced to 15 years in prison.  His family, including his wife Elaine, vowed to fight for his freedom as they were convinced of his innocence. A five-year legal battle resulted in the Court of Appeal finding Buckle's conviction unsafe and he was immediately released from prison.  In a retrial at Swansea Crown Court in 2023, Buckle's barrister Stephen Vullo KC produced new forensic evidence and witnesses, which resulted in a swift unanimous verdict of "not guilty".

--------------------------------------------

Brian Buckle was acquitted after DNA evidence used against him at his original trial was found to be flawed

------------------------------------------------

PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The MoJ  (Ministry of Justice) said it would consider the Law Commission review's findings before deciding on any action in this area."

--------------------------------------------

PASSAGE THREE  OF THE DAY: "Andrew Malkinson, who served more than 17 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape, had his conviction overturned due to DNA evidence which proved he did not commit the crime. But was left destitute while waiting for compensation.  Widespread media attention of Malkinson's case resulted in him receiving an interim payment in February 2025. He described the system as "not fit for purpose".     

---------------------------------------------

STORY: "Falsely convicted man who spent £500k clearing his name is rejected for compensation," by Reporters Claire Kendall and Stephen Fildes, published by CBC News, on July 4, 2026."

SUB-HEADING: "Brian Buckle spent five years in prison for crimes he did not commit."

GIST: "A man who was falsely convicted and spent more than five years in prison has said he felt "sick" to learn that his compensation claim has been rejected again.

Brian Buckle, from Pembrokeshire, was completely cleared of the sex abuse charges he was jailed for, but the struggle to clear his name cost him £500,000.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) rejected Buckle's first appeal for compensation last year, prompting the former Justice Minister Alex Davies-Jones to intervene. But he recently discovered that his second appeal has also been rejected.

The UK government said it acknowledged the grave impact of miscarriages of justice and was committed to helping people rebuild their lives.

A long-awaited review of the criminal appeals system in England and Wales, carried out by the Law Commission, said its report on compensation would be published this year.

Buckle, from Fishguard, was convicted of historical child sex abuse in 2017 and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

His family, including his wife Elaine, vowed to fight for his freedom as they were convinced of his innocence.

A five-year legal battle resulted in the Court of Appeal finding Buckle's conviction unsafe and he was immediately released from prison.

In a retrial at Swansea Crown Court in 2023, Buckle's barrister Stephen Vullo KC produced new forensic evidence and witnesses, which resulted in a swift unanimous verdict of "not guilty".

Brian and his wife Elaine, who remained convinced of her husband's innocence

But proving his innocence cost Buckle and his family £500,000, and the impact on his mental health has been severe.

"I suffer with PTSD, I'm on medication, I'm just always on edge," he said.

"As a family it's been really hard, it's the most horrendous thing I've ever had to go through."

After Buckle was rejected for miscarriages of justice compensation in 2024, his MP, Ben Lake, hosted a debate in Westminster to raise the issue.

Buckle's case was also mentioned in the House of Commons, and former justice minister Davies-Jones said she wanted to restore his faith in the criminal justice system.

When the MoJ then agreed to review Buckle's application for compensation, Buckle, Vullo and Lake were hopeful that the support they had received from the government would make a difference.

But in April, the MoJ told Buckle that despite a further review, compensation could not be awarded as his claim did not meet the criteria against the statutory test.

Confusingly for Buckle, the letter also said: "We would want to highlight that this decision does not affect the fact that Mr Buckle's conviction was quashed, nor does it cast doubt on the outcome of the appeal."
'Not fit for purpose'

Lake, who has campaigned for his constituent for the past two years, said the case was one of the clearest injustices he had come across in his nine years as an MP.

He said he was "so disappointed" by the outcome, as he hoped the review would have resulted in a payout "for what the state has done to Brian".

"I'm not going to let this lie. If that means that I'm to drag ministers to the House of Commons or Westminster Hall, and table questions until they finally do the right thing, then so be it."

Buckle's compensation claim was rejected due to a subtle but important change in the law in 2014.

Previously, compensation was paid out if the claimant had established, beyond reasonable doubt, that any reasonable jury could not convict on the evidence provided.

In Buckle's retrial the jury found him "not guilty" after hearing new witnesses and forensic evidence, which would have made him eligible for a payout.

But since 2014, compensation is only paid to those who can prove they did not commit the crime, which Vullo said was impossible as no DNA or CCTV evidence exists to conclusively prove Buckle's innocence.

"If you were to ask me to draft a piece of legislation that would ensure that almost everybody was turned down for compensation, I'd draft something similar to this [current law]," said Vullo.

"It's not by mistake, it's intentional," he claimed.

An MoJ assessment on the impact into the law change at the time stated that the intended effect was to lessen the burden on taxpayers.

Miscarriages of justice compensation has become an increasingly contentious issue.

In 2024, the Law Commission was asked by the UK government to include compensation and support for the wrongly convicted in its ongoing review of criminal appeals for England and Wales.

Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own compensation schemes for miscarriages of justice.

The Post Office Horizon computer system scandal has been described as one of the UK's most widespread miscarriages of justice.

Four separate compensation schemes have been established for victims to receive pay-outs, as they would not have been eligible under the scheme which rejected Brian's application.

Andrew Malkinson, who served more than 17 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape, had his conviction overturned due to DNA evidence which proved he did not commit the crime. But was left destitute while waiting for compensation.

Widespread media attention of Malkinson's case resulted in him receiving an interim payment in February 2025. He described the system as "not fit for purpose".

The Law Commission published provisional proposals in February 2025 which included reversing the 2014 law change so the wrongly convicted would only have to prove their innocence on the balance of probabilities, rather than beyond reasonable doubt.

It has now announced that due to the considerable public interest in the findings, the section on compensation has been prioritised and will be published first, at the end of 2026.

Buckle hopes that any change will be applied retrospectively to include him and others who have been affected, and restore his faith in the criminal justice system.

Davies-Jones said she was deeply sorry to hear that Buckle's application had been unsuccessful again and recognised there were wider questions about the compensation scheme.

The MoJ said it would consider the Law Commission review's findings before deciding on any action in this area."

The entire story can be read at:


PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

July 12: Diagnosis of a crime series; Investigation of the day; Part 5: Zita and Ravi: New Zealand: Newsroom Podcast series, Shaken baby syndrome and so much more: Joris de Bres authored this story for Newsbreak,..."I am the parent of two daughters with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bones, and I am the grandparent of another. My wife and I know what it is like to take a child with an unexplained fracture to a hospital with no bruising, especially when the underlying condition hasn’t been diagnosed. There is a spoken or unspoken suspicion you have hurt the child. It was a common experience of parents of children with osteogenesis imperfecta. There were cases internationally where such parents or carers had their children taken from them and were charged, convicted and imprisoned for child abuse. I know the hospital checked with our GP after one of our daughters had two successive skull fractures as an infant before their brittle bone condition had been diagnosed. Perhaps we were lucky that we were Pākehā professionals with an address on Auckland’s North Shore. I am always alert to news stories of parents whose babies are taken from them because of unexplained fractures. I heard of one such case in 2017...."

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "Finally, after seven years apart, the whole family was reunited and able to live together once again.  But as I told them at the outset, the real obstacle to achieving justice was what was called by the Judge at her trial, the Court of Appeal, the Parole Board, the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Immigration Tribunal, the “overwhelming medical evidence” that she had injured her daughter. This “overwhelming” evidence was that their eight-week-old baby could only have suffered her brain injury by what is called abusive head trauma, previously known as shaken baby syndrome, and that her multiple rib fractures could only have been caused by squeezing.  All unnoticed by midwife, Plunket nurse and GP before her admission to hospital despite thorough examinations."

--------------------------------------------

PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The diagnosis of abusive head trauma is regarded as medical orthodoxy in New Zealand hospitals, but it has increasingly been challenged internationally as unscientific and responsible for the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of parents and carers. In Zita and Ravi’s case, their baby had a severe vitamin D deficiency (which can affect bone mineralisation and may increase the risk of fractures), and Zita’s labour and delivery had been traumatic.  Nevertheless, the Starship doctors dismissed other possible explanations and within the first 24 hours after she was admitted to hospital diagnosed the baby’s injuries as non-accidental. As one international medical expert said in the Fractured podcast “They rush to judgment and there’s nothing for them to lose if they make a false allegation and ruin a family because there’s no consequence. They’re completely immune to any accountability.”

---------------------------------

PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "When doctors tell Oranga Tamariki, the police and the courts that they believe it is a ‘non-accidental injury’ case, the parents or caregivers are deemed to be guilty unless they can prove otherwise.  mThis is a reversal of the normal principle of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. The proof of guilt offered by the state is the medical evidence.  But doctors are not qualified to diagnose a crime, nor is it appropriate for them to do so."

--------------------------------------------

PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "Those who are responsible for child protection or prosecution (Oranga Tamariki, the police and the courts) largely base their decisions to take children or prosecute parents on this medical advice, even though there are no witnesses and there is no external evidence of injury, and the parents have no idea what’s wrong with their baby or how the injuries happened. Recently, the New Jersey Supreme Court in the US went so far as to disallow evidence by a medical expert who was to testify “not only about the injuries observed on a child through medical examinations and tests, but also that the only explanation for those injuries is child abuse,” finding that the evidence was “unreliable and inadmissible at trial”.

--------------------------------

 That type of evidence is no longer permitted in the state of New Jersey and increasingly challenged successfully elsewhere.

STORY; 'Wrongfully accused, wrongfully convicted and still waiting for justice," by Joris de Bres, published by Newsroom, on July 7, 2026. (Joris de Bres was NZ’s Race Relations Commissioner from 2002-2013. He was previously a general manager at DoC and head of industrial relations in the NZ Public Service Association.)

SUB-HEADING: "Former Race Relations and Human Rights Commissioner Joris de Bres urges the NZ medical establishment to reexamine its rigid handling of wrongful child abuse convictions."

COMMENT: "The story of young Indian migrants Zita and Ravi* and their infant daughter was the subject of last year’s podcast series Fractured by Newsroom investigative journalists Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner."

GIST: "This article is about how I first came to hear of Zita and Ravi’s plight and became a voluntary advocate for them in their struggle against the many arms of the state. 

I am still involved, together with Reid and Sumner, in seeking justice for them.

I am the parent of two daughters with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bones, and I am the grandparent of another. 

My wife and I know what it is like to take a child with an unexplained fracture to a hospital with no bruising, especially when the underlying condition hasn’t been diagnosed. 

There is a spoken or unspoken suspicion you have hurt the child. 

It was a common experience of parents of children with osteogenesis imperfecta. 

There were cases internationally where such parents or carers had their children taken from them and were charged, convicted and imprisoned for child abuse. 

I know the hospital checked with our GP after one of our daughters had two successive skull fractures as an infant before their brittle bone condition had been diagnosed. 

Perhaps we were lucky that we were Pākehā professionals with an address on Auckland’s North Shore.

I am always alert to news stories of parents whose babies are taken from them because of unexplained fractures. 

I heard of one such case in 2017. 

A young South African migrant couple had their second child taken by Oranga Tamariki at birth, because they were still under suspicion of having injured their first, also taken from them as a baby. 

I became their voluntary advocate.

The elder child turned out to have a type of osteogenesis imperfecta, although the Starship doctors maintained that wasn’t the cause. 

Police charges were ultimately dropped, and both children were returned to their parents. 

But their family life had been completely upended and they had paid thousands of dollars in legal fees. 

I  published stories about them and ‘the baby with the broken bones.’

Ravi contacted me because he found my articles online in his search for an explanation for his daughter’s injuries.

 He was desperate. 

His wife, Zita, was in prison, convicted of injuring their daughter with reckless disregard. 

Their daughter, now four years old, had been taken by Oranga Tamariki at nine weeks and put in foster care. 

Ravi was only allowed to see her once a month. Zita wasn’t allowed to see her at all.

Zita faced deportation at the end of her sentence because she was now a convicted criminal.

 Ravi also faced also being thrown out of the country because he was on a partnership visa, cancelled because of his wife’s conviction, and their daughter would be kept in New Zealand under the care of the state.

It is also worth explaining that even though Ravi was found not guilty in the trial, he was not given back custody of his child – Oranga Tamariki seemingly considered that because Zita continued to maintain her innocence and he supported her, he was complicit.

All the while, their daughter was in the care of someone of a different ethnicity and religion, living in a different town. 

Struggling with his limited English, Ravi had to engage with the hospital, Oranga Tamariki, the police, the courts, Corrections, Immigration NZ, the Parole Board, the Immigration Tribunal, even the Ombudsman. 

He was unable to work because his visa had not been renewed. 

He and Zita had nowhere left to turn and they felt utterly defeated and desperate. 

I agreed to help

. Step by step over the next three years we made progress. It was incredibly frustrating.

 A loving mother had been demonised, her husband was not trusted.

 I appealed to social workers, chief executives, Members of Parliament, ministers. Every step was hard fought and often I felt I was banging my head against a brick wall.

Nevertheless, for Ravi, there was a gradual improvement in access, a successful appeal to the Immigration Tribunal against immediate deportation and eventually his daughter was able to come and live with him and his sister.

For Zita, the improvement was being able to see her daughter on video from prison (after zero contact for two years) and being released on parole. 

Despite an imminent threat of deportation, we were able to get this halted. 

Finally, after seven years apart, the whole family was reunited and able to live together once again. 

But as I told them at the outset, the real obstacle to achieving justice was what was called by the Judge at her trial, the Court of Appeal, the Parole Board, the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Immigration Tribunal, the “overwhelming medical evidence” that she had injured her daughter.

This “overwhelming” evidence was that their eight-week-old baby could only have suffered her brain injury by what is called abusive head trauma, previously known as shaken baby syndrome, and that her multiple rib fractures could only have been caused by squeezing. 

All unnoticed by midwife, Plunket nurse and GP before her admission to hospital despite thorough examinations.

The diagnosis of abusive head trauma is regarded as medical orthodoxy in New Zealand hospitals, but it has increasingly been challenged internationally as unscientific and responsible for the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of parents and carers.

In Zita and Ravi’s case, their baby had a severe vitamin D deficiency (which can affect bone mineralisation and may increase the risk of fractures), and Zita’s labour and delivery had been traumatic. 

Nevertheless, the Starship doctors dismissed other possible explanations and within the first 24 hours after she was admitted to hospital diagnosed the baby’s injuries as non-accidental.

As one international medical expert said in the Fractured podcast “They rush to judgment and there’s nothing for them to lose if they make a false allegation and ruin a family because there’s no consequence. They’re completely immune to any accountability.”

When doctors tell Oranga Tamariki, the police and the courts that they believe it is a ‘non-accidental injury’ case, the parents or caregivers are deemed to be guilty unless they can prove otherwise. 

This is a reversal of the normal principle of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

 The proof of guilt offered by the state is the medical evidence. 

But doctors are not qualified to diagnose a crime, nor is it appropriate for them to do so. 

Those who are responsible for child protection or prosecution (Oranga Tamariki, the police and the courts) largely base their decisions to take children or prosecute parents on this medical advice, even though there are no witnesses and there is no external evidence of injury, and the parents have no idea what’s wrong with their baby or how the injuries happened.

Recently, the New Jersey Supreme Court in the US went so far as to disallow evidence by a medical expert who was to testify “not only about the injuries observed on a child through medical examinations and tests, but also that the only explanation for those injuries is child abuse,” finding that the evidence was “unreliable and inadmissible at trial”.

 That type of evidence is no longer permitted in the state of New Jersey and increasingly challenged successfully elsewhere.

While the authorities in Zita’s case were convinced by the medical evidence of Starship doctors (no alternative medical evidence was presented by the defence at trial or in the Court of Appeal), I was not. 

But I didn’t know how to challenge it. Zita and Ravi had already spent upwards of $100,000 on lawyers to challenge the various authorities and had no money and no hope.

A year after I became involved, the situation was still bleak. 

The prospect of both Ravi and Zita being deported without their daughter loomed. 

As a last resort I contacted Newsroom’s senior investigative reporter Melanie Reid, known to me from her reporting on the uplift of Māori babies by Oranga Tamariki, which had led to a number of reviews and major policy and structural changes in Oranga Tamariki in relation to whānau Māori. 

I sent her an 80-page narrative I had written about Ravi and Zita’s nightmare journey.

Reid and her colleague Bonnie Sumner began to delve into their story and found a few previous cases in New Zealand in which the state’s evidence of shaking and squeezing of babies had been successfully challenged by overseas experts. 

These families had lawyered up and one case won on appeal. 

But the reality was grim for other parents who were accused and had their children removed. 

Some were convicted and sent to jail, because, as with Zita, no alternative medical evidence was presented at their trial. 

At least one such parent is still in prison today.

Reid and Sumner began contacting overseas experts who had testified in big international cases and somehow, I don’t know quite how, they managed to persuade them to look at the medical evidence that led to Zita’s conviction pro bono.

They obtained the medical files, CT scans and x-rays that were relied on by Starship and sent them overseas for review. 

The months ticked by but finally their reports started to come through. 

 They came from a professor of neurosurgery at Bergen University in Norway, a professor with expertise in genetics and biochemistry from the University of Amsterdam, an obstetrician/gynaecologist from Los Angeles who had pioneered the method of foetal monitoring during labour, and a neuropathologist and professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

They disputed the diagnoses and considered the baby’s fractures and brain injury were likely due to extremely low vitamin D and birth trauma (Zita had had a long and painful birth, with both forceps and ventouse suction). They questioned whether some of the fractures were even fractures at all.

Now we had four reports from highly qualified international experts saying this was an ‘overcall’ and not due to abuse, and that there were other obvious medical issues that had been overlooked or wrongly discounted. 

Reid, Sumner and I together lodged a new application for a review of Zita’s conviction with the Criminal Cases Review Commission in July 2024. It was accepted for review, a thorough assessment is well advanced and a full investigation will hopefully follow.

In light of the application, Associate Immigration Minister Chris Penk last year allowed Zita, Ravi and their daughter to remain in New Zealand for a further 18 months while the Criminal Cases Review Commission assessed it. 

That time is nearly up, but a finding by the commission is a long way off. They will again be liable for deportation in September unless they are granted a further reprieve.

This issue goes beyond Ravi and Zita’s individual case. 

Their story, as told in the investigative podcast series Fractured, has already brought many other cases to light. 

Reid and Sumner have been contacted by some 20 families in response. 

They have told the stories of another three in a further podcast series, Diagnosis of a Crime, which includes the case of a professional athlete. 

He was tried on similar charges in Dunedin and was found not guilty by a jury after Reid and Sumner secured international experts to appear for the defence to challenge the ‘diagnosis’ of abuse.

This is clearly a systemic issue and needs to be inquired into independently to put right past injustices and prevent future ones. 

We are all rightly concerned about child abuse, but we must also care for those who are wrongfully accused of it.

It can’t just be left to parents to try to challenge this on an individual basis. 

They are traumatised by the taking of their children, police interviews and court proceedings. 

Their children are often traumatised by being taken from their families and placed in foster care. 

They fear societal censure and shame through being accused of child abuse. 

They don’t have the knowledge or resources to hire overseas experts. 

They live in a small country where doctors who know them and believe them are reluctant to go up the medical establishment. 

They may even, like Ravi and Zita, be in a foreign country with another language. 

They cannot explain why their child was injured, but they know they did not, and never would, hurt them. 

While internationally these diagnoses are increasingly challenged, the medical establishment in New Zealand remains unmoved.

Zita, Ravi and their daughter must be allowed to stay in New Zealand until the Criminal Cases Review Commission has completed its review of Zita’s conviction. 

And an independent inquiry must be conducted to hear the parents’ stories and critically examine the validity of the scientific and legal basis on which such prosecutions are being brought. 

Otherwise, there is a real risk that more parents will be wrongfully convicted and more children will be unnecessarily removed from their parents by the state.

*Not their real names.""

The entire story can be read at:
https://newsProom.co.nz/2026/07/07/wrongfully-accused-wrongfully-convicted-and-still-waiting-for-justice/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

Jimmie "Chris" Duncan: Death Row: Louisiana: Question of the day: (Nola.com): (From our 'I couldn't agree more!" department); "When a man serves 28 years on death row for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit, and then two courts find him “factually innocent” under a law passed five years ago by a conservative, tough-on-crime legislature, he shouldn’t be subjected to yet another trial. Indeed, a new trial could be unconstitutional. So why is a prosecutor in Monroe saying he intends to charge and try the man again?" Read on!

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "I wrote about this case for the first time one year ago this week, when the trial-court judge found that “bite mark” evidence used to convict Duncan was based on junk science and that several other evidentiary claims were extremely dubious — including the very notion that the girl had been sexually assaulted, with medical analysts now saying otherwise. Suffice it to say that by now, the near-certain truth is what Duncan has claimed all along: The little girl, who had a history of seizures, had another seizure and drowned while briefly left alone in a partially filled bathtub. As state Supreme Court Justice Cade Cole wrote for the unanimous court, “Had the ‘new’ evidence, in light of all relevant evidence, been presented at trial, no rational juror would have found Duncan guilty of the first degree murder of Haley beyond a reasonable doubt.”

-----------------------------------------

PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The legislators got the policy mostly right, and all the judges on the state Supreme Court got the facts and law right. Chris Duncan has suffered long enough for leaving a child unattended while he washed dishes in a nearby room. Let this man finally live free without further persecuting him — and perhaps amend the law to remove the chance for prosecutors to retry men already found factually innocent."

--------------------------------------------

COMMENTARY: "Quin Hillyer: Louisiana courts shouldn’t play double jeopardy with a freed man’s life," by Columnist Quin Hillyer, published by Nola.com, on July 11, 2026.

GIST: "When a man serves 28 years on death row for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit, and then two courts find him “factually innocent” under a law passed five years ago by a conservative, tough-on-crime legislature, he shouldn’t be subjected to yet another trial.

Indeed, a new trial could be unconstitutional.

So why is a prosecutor in Monroe saying he intends to charge and try the man again?

On June 29, the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower-court ruling that Jimmie “Chris” Duncan had been wrongly convicted on a horrid charge of raping and murdering his girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter in 1993. To be clear, this decision didn’t involve letting Duncan off on some procedural technicality; this was a slew of judges finding the original conviction itself was factually mistaken.

I wrote about this case for the first time one year ago this week, when the trial-court judge found that “bite mark” evidence used to convict Duncan was based on junk science and that several other evidentiary claims were extremely dubious — including the very notion that the girl had been sexually assaulted, with medical analysts now saying otherwise.

Suffice it to say that by now, the near-certain truth is what Duncan has claimed all along: The little girl, who had a history of seizures, had another seizure and drowned while briefly left alone in a partially filled bathtub. As state Supreme Court Justice Cade Cole wrote for the unanimous court, “Had the ‘new’ evidence, in light of all relevant evidence, been presented at trial, no rational juror would have found Duncan guilty of the first degree murder of Haley beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Cole, by the way, is far from a judicial leftist: He was the Louisiana College Republican state chairman and a member of the Federalist Society.

Nonetheless, Steve Tew, the district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, told Kaitlyn Maness of the Ouachita Citizen on Wednesday that he wants to retry Duncan for murder, although he isn’t sure which “degree” of murder he wants to charge.

Yes, that is within Tew’s authority under Act 104 of the 2021 legislative session, through which Duncan secured his post-conviction release based on being “factually innocent.” That act explicitly says a new judgment in the convict’s favor “shall not prevent (him) from being retried for the offense.” And Louisiana’s legal definition of forbidden “double jeopardy” says double jeopardy doesn’t apply when “judgment has been arrested” on the convict’s “own motion.”

Well, I’m no expert on strange wrinkles in “double jeopardy” jurisprudence, but this idea of retrying someone whom multiple courts have found to be factually innocent seems to violate the letter of, and certainly the spirit of, the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. To quote it: “Nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”

Either way, why is Tew hellbent on further punishing Duncan? The man had no criminal record before the tragic event; eight judges decided the most essential “evidence” against him is junk and the other supposedly incriminating testimony has been convincingly refuted. And all the relevant family members of the victim, including the child’s mother, believe Duncan is innocent.

Surely no jury, 33 years after little Haley Oliveaux’s death, would find Duncan guilty of anything worse than some sort of manslaughter charge based on carelessness. Louisiana law says the maximum prison term for “negligent homicide” is 10 years. Duncan has already served three times that long, most of it under a death sentence.

Again, what’s the point?

There’s a crucial principle at play here, one at the heart of modern American conservatism. Namely, the American framers’ whole point in designing so many “checks and balances” in government is that safeguards and redress always should be available — because all government officials, including prosecutors, can make mistakes. That’s the essence of conservatives’ desire to limit government’s power: to protect citizens from government’s error or abuse.

That, too, is why Louisiana’s conservative lawmakers this very decade passed Act 104: to give convicts a chance to show that newly understood facts now exonerate them.

The legislators got the policy mostly right, and all the judges on the state Supreme Court got the facts and law right. Chris Duncan has suffered long enough for leaving a child unattended while he washed dishes in a nearby room. Let this man finally live free without further persecuting him — and perhaps amend the law to remove the chance for prosecutors to retry men already found factually innocent."

The entire commentary can be read at: 

https://share.google/OzQuQjAR8KBVnoxCw

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

July 11; Diagnosis of a crime: series; Investigation of the day: (Part 4): From our 'point well made' department: This entry in Newsroom's Diagnosis of a Crime Series, by Investigative Reporter Bonnie Sumner, is sensibly headed, "It's time doctors stopped acting as detectives." As the sub-heading tells us: For decades, a small group of specialists at Starship Hospital’s child protection unit have played a central role in some of NZ’s most serious physical child abuse cases. Their opinions trigger police investigations, child removals, criminal prosecutions and prison sentences. In many cases, their medical findings are treated as the starting point for everything that follows. But what happens if some findings are wrong?"

DIAGNOSIS OF A CRIME PODCAST: (Episdes): 

https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/10/04/diagnosis-of-a-crime-melanie-reids-new-podcast-investigation/

--------------------------------------------------------------

BACKGROUND: "Over the past three years, Reid and her team have been investigating a series of cases involving allegations of non-accidental injury in infants, covered extensively in two podcasts, Fractured and Diagnosis of a Crime, on Newsroom’s investigative podcast arm, Delve. They obtained the medical files, scans and x-rays used to accuse and convict parents of causing the injuries, then engaged internationally recognised specialists in radiology, orthopaedics, pathology, genetics, obstetrics and neurology from England, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia and the US to review them. These experts were asked a simple question: do the medical findings support the conclusions reached by the New Zealand doctors? In all of the cases, the answer was no."

---------------------------------------

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Captured in the season finale of Melanie Reid’s latest award-winning investigative podcast, Diagnosis of a Crime, the recent criminal trial of a professional athlete marked what may be the first time the opinions of New Zealand hospital paediatric doctors were seriously challenged in court by international medical experts. The evidence heard during the trial, and the result, has drawn attention to a developing global controversy that has been likened to Satanic Panic, a moral hysteria fuelled by pseudo-science that gripped institutions around the world in the 1980s and 1990s and led to dozens of wrongful convictions. (In New Zealand, this played out in the Christchurch Civic Creche case.)"

------------------------------------

STORY: "What is going on at Starship’s child protection unit?," by Reporter Bonnie Sumner, published by Newsroom, on  July 6, 2026.  (Bonnie Sumner is part of the Newsroom Investigates  Reporting Team.)

SUB-HEADING: "For decades, a small group of specialists at Starship Hospital’s child protection unit have played a central role in some of NZ’s most serious physical child abuse cases. Their opinions trigger police investigations, child removals, criminal prosecutions and prison sentences. In many cases, their medical findings are treated as the starting point for everything that follows. But what happens if some findings are wrong?"

GIST: "It took three weeks of evidence, 30 witnesses and four hours of deliberation for a jury to reach a verdict that will reverberate far beyond the Dunedin courthouse it was delivered in.

Captured in the season finale of Melanie Reid’s latest award-winning investigative podcast, Diagnosis of a Crime, the recent criminal trial of a professional athlete marked what may be the first time the opinions of New Zealand hospital paediatric doctors were seriously challenged in court by international medical experts.

The evidence heard during the trial, and the result, has drawn attention to a developing global controversy that has been likened to Satanic Panic, a moral hysteria fuelled by pseudo-science that gripped institutions around the world in the 1980s and 1990s and led to dozens of wrongful convictions. (In New Zealand, this played out in the Christchurch Civic Creche case.)

Over the past three years, Reid and her team have been investigating a series of cases involving allegations of non-accidental injury in infants, covered extensively in two podcasts, Fractured and Diagnosis of a Crime, on Newsroom’s investigative podcast arm, Delve.

They obtained the medical files, scans and x-rays used to accuse and convict parents of causing the injuries, then engaged internationally recognised specialists in radiology, orthopaedics, pathology, genetics, obstetrics and neurology from England, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia and the US to review them.

These experts were asked a simple question: do the medical findings support the conclusions reached by the New Zealand doctors?

In all of the cases, the answer was no.

In the first case a mother, Zita, was sent to prison for two years and seven months after she was convicted of injuring her baby following a diagnosis of non-accidental injury from Starship. Overseas experts the Delve investigations unit engaged concluded her daughter’s injuries were likely the result of severely low vitamin D and a prolonged, traumatic birth.

In a second case a young father is currently serving a six-year prison sentence based on a hip fracture and 19 back rib fractures to his one-year-old son. Three independent international specialists have found the hip fracture is consistent with an accident in the shower the father had described, and that there is no evidence of 19 rib fractures.


In a third case a farming couple from Central Otago lost custody of their newborn twins for two years after Starship’s lead paediatrician at the time, Dr Patrick Kelly, told them there were fractures to one of their eight-week-old babies, which became the turning point for the abuse diagnosis. Again, overseas experts found no evidence of those fractures.

In a fourth case, Reid and her team looked into the case of the pro athlete charged with causing multiple rib fractures to his four week old son, described by Starship as likely from “squeezing”. However the jury heard from international experts that the baby’s fractures were likely due to his severely low vitamin D levels and precipitous (very rapid) birth.

In case five, the South Island parents of a baby born with cerebral palsy after a traumatic and poorly managed birth had to sleep in a caravan on their property while their children remained under 24-hour watch inside the house after hospital doctors diagnosed non-accidental rib fractures in their newborn. The baby underwent at least three instances of CPR, but this was dismissed as the cause. The parents are still unsure if a criminal case is pending.

And in a sixth case, a mother lost custody of her twin boys following a diagnosis of non-accidental injury from Starship when they were eight weeks old . They have been in four foster homes over the past two years. The severely traumatic birth is being investigated by the team as a potential medical misadventure case and the cause of the babies’ injuries.

(You can read about each of these more in depth at the end of this article.)

There are striking similarities across these cases:
They all involve infants (children one year old and younger), most of them very young babies.In almost every case, there is a history of traumatic birth.The parents are all highly engaged and proactive with medical professionals, taking their infants to numerous visits with health professionals before hospital admission.Before taking their infants to hospital, there were no outward signs of anything wrong, such as bruising.In every case, the diagnosis of non-accidental injury came after a paediatric review of x-rays and CT scans.The parents are all confused and bewildered, saying they have no idea what’s wrong with their infants.Severe vitamin D deficiency is a recurring feature in many of the cases.

Another common thread the investigation has identified after reviewing medical files, court transcripts and expert reports was the repeated use of language that appeared to embed assumptions about how injuries occurred.

Across multiple cases, doctors described injuries as being “not from normal handling of a child”, comparable to a “car accident”, or consistent with a baby having been “thrown against a wall” or “squeezed” – emotive descriptions that can influence how a case is understood by police, social workers, lawyers and juries.

And involved in almost all of them is a small group of specialists from Starship’s child protection unit, Te Puaruruhau.

Set up in 2002 to bring together police, Oranga Tamairki and medical staff, it was led by paediatrician Dr Patrick Kelly for 25 years.

Since at least 2010, serious concerns have been raised that Te Puaruruhau had reached conclusions without considering all the evidence, and in many cases families say they’ve been treated like criminals.

(If you take your sick child to hospital and you’re referred to the unit, there is a high chance you will be suspected of abuse – it was explained by a Starship paediatrician in Zita’s court case that approximately a third of their cases fall into an unexplained category, a third are highly concerning or diagnostic of child abuse and a third involve no concern, meaning if you have a child admitted to Starship Hospital with an injury and they are referred to Te Puaruruhau, there is a 66 percent chance your child’s injury could be deemed to be either caused by child abuse or an unknown cause.)

However, the cases investigated by Delve raise the question: If internationally respected medical experts can look at the same scans and medical files and reach fundamentally different conclusions to the New Zealand doctors, what is going on?

Is New Zealand’s child protection system identifying abuse, or has it, in some instances, crossed the line from diagnosing injuries to diagnosing crimes, with the result being children taken from their homes and placed in foster care, and parents being wrongfully accused, and in some cases convicted and imprisoned?

Access to justice

The Delve team’s investigation began after they engaged a group of international specialists to review the case of an Indian immigrant family, featured in the podcast Fractured, who all concluded the medical evidence underpinning the case was flawed.

That finding led the team to a telling observation. In many cases, a number of New Zealand doctors appeared in court, often with little or no challenge to their opinions.

In the criminal trials of the mother featured in Fractured, and the father currently in prison in Auckland, Justin*, neither had a medical expert testify on their behalf.

As Justin’s mother told Reid in an interview, “You’re at the mercy of Starship because they are the so-called experts. The judge in my son’s case said, ‘You either believe the medical experts from Starship with 40 years’ experience, or you don’t’. And the jury were like, well, how do you go against the medical experts from Starship? [My son] didn’t stand a chance. He had no show.”

She said there were no opposing views to the experts from Starship.

“What struck us was the lack of access to justice,” Reid says. “These doctors were appearing in courts around the country and their evidence was often being accepted without any meaningful challenge. We started asking ourselves a simple question: what would happen if that evidence was actually tested in court?”

That test would come with the Dunedin trial of a pro athlete accused of causing rib fractures to his infant son. By the time Delve looked into the case, the father, known as Dan, had been charged and was four months from trial with no medical experts testifying for his defence.

Reid said the only way to determine whether there was a broader problem was to engage independent international specialists to review the same scans, medical records and evidence being relied upon in court.

“By that stage we had already seen multiple cases where overseas experts were reaching very different conclusions. In one case, fractures described as ‘definitely there’ by Starship experts in court, were simply found not to be there at all. We kept coming back to the same question: how can this be?”

Multiple families described a similar experience. Parents said non-accidental injury diagnoses were often made within hours of arriving at hospital, while alternative explanations, including birth trauma and other medical conditions, were not fully explored. When international specialists later reviewed the same evidence, they reached very different conclusions.

The result was a courtroom battle of a kind rarely seen in New Zealand. For three weeks, the opinions of 12 medical witnesses for the Crown – including Starship’s lead radiologist Dr Russell Metcalfe – were challenged by three experts from the US.

The trial exposed what can happen when the medical evidence underpinning allegations of abuse is subjected to the same level of scrutiny as any other evidence before a jury.

Reid says the Dunedin trial raises uncomfortable questions about other cases where families have had no access to independent or alternative medical reviews.

“What does this mean for all the other cases where parents haven’t had access to multiple independent medical experts? Most families are lucky if they can afford one.”

She points to the cost of mounting a defence. International expert reviews are a minimum $10,000 per specialist, placing them beyond the reach of many families already facing legal bills, child protection proceedings and criminal investigations.

“If the Crown can call five or six experts, how are ordinary parents supposed to contend with that?” she said. “What we’ve learned is that if you don’t have credible alternative medical evidence, the court may never hear the other side of the scientific and medical debate, and that, as we have witnessed in our investigations, this can mean a one-way ticket to prison for the accused.”

Reid believes the issue is not simply financial but systemic.

“Too often, lawyers don’t understand how critical that independent evidence is. If the medical evidence goes unchallenged, the outcome can be largely predetermined. That’s why access to independent experts isn’t a luxury in these cases – it’s fundamental to a fair process.”

Investigating these cases also raised another issue: even when parents found specialists in New Zealand who supported them and believed there were potential medical causes for the injuries, they weren’t prepared to speak up about the Starship doctors or go up against them in court.

She points to something one of the international experts, neuropathologist Professor Roland Auer, said in an interview about why such professionals wouldn’t stand up for these families. “They don’t want extra work. They don’t want trouble. Most scientists and doctors have an allergy to court for those reasons. Time, danger, effort, don’t need the money. They’ve got a job and they just don’t like lawyers and journalists.”

Reid says what all of this shows is that the traditional court route doesn’t work if parents can’t get access to experts.

“It appears many lawyers who represent parents in this country are also unaware of what’s happening – even when they use specialists from overseas, they often rely on the same network of doctors, trained within the same system, going to the same conferences and using the same playbook, which treats certain injuries as being highly indicative of abuse.”

This lack of access to justice pushed Reid and her team to seek independent reviews of the cases from outside New Zealand. Those experts have now produced formal reports in five separate cases, almost all on a pro-bono basis.

Reid and her team secured three international experts to give evidence during the Dunedin trial of the pro athlete; facilitated five expert reviews, which are central to the formal application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the Fractured case; secured multiple experts for the legal team representing young imprisoned father Justin in his Court of Appeal proceedings; and are working with international specialists on the other cases.

This approach has attracted criticism from some quarters, with suggestions that journalists should not be engaging experts or testing medical evidence. Reid rejects that view.

“It shouldn’t be our job to help young parents find international experts, but we’ve done it to show that there is a fundamental flaw in the judicial system when doctors effectively diagnose crimes. In New Zealand, a small crew of doctors end up having an enormous influence. Too often there is no one on the other side to test their conclusions.”

Reid said: “The status quo can’t continue. The consequences are simply too profound for families, for children and for public confidence in our medical, policing and judicial systems.”
Flawed science

So how can New Zealand radiologists be diagnosing fractures that overseas radiologists say don’t exist? Why are potential birth injuries and metabolic bone issues being diagnosed as non-accidental injuries within hours of distressed parents turning up to hospital with their infants? And why are independent obstetrical reviews of these cases not being immediately requested by the paediatricians?

According to a growing number of international scientists, lawyers and medical specialists, the answer lies in the theories underpinning these diagnoses.

Described by international scientist Professor Chris Brook, who appears in Season 2 of Diagnosis of a Crime, as “one of the biggest public health and legal disasters of our era”, the foundation of these diagnoses is a belief that certain injuries are ‘highly indicative’ of abuse.

In practice this means when these paediatric doctors see particular injuries, there is little room for alternative explanations.

One of those injuries is unexplained rib fractures in infants.

For decades, studies have reported that unexplained infant rib fractures are strongly associated with abuse. The consequence is that once rib fractures are identified, the diagnostic process can quickly become focused on proving abuse rather than systematically exploring alternative explanations.

Critics like Brook, who has co-authored studies on the subject, argue this creates a problem known as circular reasoning. He says the paediatric doctors and child abuse specialists who believe certain injuries can be indicative of abuse are following flawed science.

“Everything in science has a level of uncertainty attached to it and they completely bulldoze that. So much of their literature is aimed at the courts, not at a scientific community. It’s aimed at showing that their belief system meets the requirements of the court system.

“They have to show that it’s in published literature. So they turn their belief into a publication. So this is the essence of circular reasoning. They take their belief and they make it look like science, and then they publish a paper that has an abstract, a methodology, and a conclusion. But really, the input belief is just coming out the other end through circular reasoning.”

In simple terms, circular reasoning occurs when the conclusion is built into the evidence used to support that conclusion – cases are classified as abuse because they contain certain findings, such as rib fractures, and those same cases are then used to prove that rib fractures are highly predictive of abuse. The diagnosis helps create the data, and the data is then used to validate the diagnosis.

The debate over rib fractures sits within a much larger international dispute surrounding shaken baby syndrome, now more commonly referred to as abusive head trauma (the subject of the Fractured podcast).

First proposed in the 1970s by British neurosurgeon Dr Arthur Norman Guthkelch and later promoted by paediatric radiologist Dr John Caffey, the theory centred on the idea that a combination of brain swelling, bleeding around the brain and retinal haemorrhages – known as ‘the triad’ – could be diagnostic of violent shaking.

However, Guthkelch later warned that birth trauma, accidental injuries and natural disease processes could also produce the same findings, describing the original theory as a hypothesis rather than an established scientific fact.

In 2014, a two-year review commissioned by the Swedish government concluded that key studies underpinning shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma relied on circular reasoning and lacked sufficient scientific reliability.

In the US, the New Jersey Supreme Court recently upheld a ruling preventing prosecutors from presenting certain shaken baby syndrome testimony in upcoming trials, after a lower court likened aspects of the diagnosis to unreliable “junk science”.

And just this month, Florida introduced a new law designed to help prevent the wrongful removal of children from parents when medical conditions such as rickets, vitamin D deficiency or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome can mimic signs of child abuse. The law gives families time to obtain medical evaluations and second opinions before parents can be arrested or children removed.

Investigations by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia and The New York Times in the United States have raised similar concerns about an over-reliance on contested diagnoses, the lack of challenge to a small circle of expert witnesses and the life-altering consequences when they are wrong.

The six cases under review by Reid and her investigations team sit within a growing body of international reporting and litigation challenging the foundations of certain child abuse diagnoses.

Critics say this raises a bigger issue of the well-documented harm caused by removing infants from loving families.

Lady Tureiti Moxon, chairperson at the National Urban Māori Authority and managing director of Waikato health services provider Te Kōhao Health, says this is a systemic issue.

“We are relying on a system that has obviously got it wrong a number of times. This is not an isolated mistake; it is a pattern of systemic failure. The court has treated expert opinion as unquestionable fact, and that trust has been catastrophically misplaced,” said Moxon.

“Families have been torn apart, tamariki separated from their parents, and whānau have lost years of their lives in prison all based on evidence now in serious doubt. Access to justice should not depend on whether a family can afford their own expert. No family’s future should hinge on a single opinion. You cannot build a just system on a foundation of injustice and this must stop.”

Decades of concerns

Concerns about overreach from Starship’s child protection unit, Te Puaruruhau, have been around for more than a decade.

In a case from 2010, an Auckland district court judge criticised Starship doctors for concluding that a father injured his baby daughter without considering all the evidence.

The judge found the father not guilty and reprimanded the medical staff, sparking a high-level meeting between the Crown and Starship management to discuss the “potentially far-reaching” implications of the verdict and how doctors differentiate between accidental and non-accidental head injuries.

That same year, former health and disability commissioner Robyn Stent, described the specialist care and protection unit of Starship hospital, as “out of control” after her family member brought her three-month-old baby to hospital with an unexplained blister-like bump on his head.

Starship doctors were adamant the haematoma was non-accidental and had no medical explanation, and she was suspected of abusing her baby (it was eventually accepted the haematoma was caused during a difficult caesarean birth).

Stent said at the time people needed to be profiled.

“There is no doubt we have excessive numbers of child deaths as a result of abuse,” Stent said. “But that doesn’t mean you treat every person as a criminal.” She felt the unit was being treated like a police station.

“It’s just appalling.”

Other similar local cases have occurred since then, some of which we have already covered.

Dr Patrick Kelly has been a central figure in the creation of New Zealand’s child abuse diagnosis framework. He helped establish, and then for 25 years, led, Te Puaruruhau until late 2023.

He has been a senior lecturer and taught the undergraduate curriculum on child abuse in Auckland University’s medical school’s department of paediatrics, has been the co-author of the Ministry of Health training package for GPs on the recognition of child abuse, and he remains the convener of an annual training course for paediatricians and others specialists on the assessment of suspected physical abuse in children.

The Delve team has repeatedly gone to Kelly and his employer, Health NZ, over the past three years to ask them to identify the fractures international experts have said don’t exist, and whether there is a systemic issue of misdiagnosing or over-diagnosing non-accidental injury in Te Puaruruhau.

They consistently provide the same response, that “it would not be appropriate for Health New Zealand to comment on a specific case in which our clinicians have provided evidence”. And, “We have the utmost confidence in the expertise, impartiality and integrity of our paediatric radiologists and child protection teams who provide expert evidence.”

You can read more about the Delve team’s ongoing attempts to get answers from Health NZ here.

The six cases

Case 1 – Zita: An Indian immigrant couple brought their eight-week-old baby to hospital with seizures. In less than 24 hours Starship doctors diagnosed the baby’s head injuries and fractures as non-accidental. The mother was convicted and sent to prison for two years and seven months and their daughter was put into four different foster homes. On the mother’s release, both parents faced imminent deportation, which would leave their child in NZ under the care of the state. The Delve investigations team engaged four international specialists to review the scans and medical files, and they found the baby’s severely low vitamin D levels and traumatic birth were not adequately considered as the cause of the baby’s injuries.


Since Melanie Reid and her team got involved, with the help of former race relations and human rights commissioner Joris de Bres, they have made a formal submission to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has been accepted for review and paves the way for a potential referral to an appeal court. They also approached Associate Minister of Immigration Chris Penk, who intervened, cancelling their imminent deportation order, and more than six years after being uplifted by the state, their daughter was finally returned to their custody.

Case 2 – Justin: What began as a hospital visit for a hip injury became a non-accidental injury case that ended in a six-year prison sentence. The Auckland father took his one-year-old son to hospital after a near-fall in the shower. Although the infant appeared uninjured at the time, his parents became concerned the following day and sought medical help. Doctors initially missed the injury, diagnosing a torn muscle and sending the family home (their usual doctor was away and they saw a locum). Two days later, out of the blue they received a call from their GP practice saying they needed to bring their son to Starship immediately or Oranga Tamariki would be called. They raced across the Harbour Bridge where further imaging revealed a fractured hip requiring surgery and a spica cast.

During the infant’s admission, doctors concluded the child also had 19 rib fractures and diagnosed non-accidental injury. The father was charged and then convicted of causing grievous bodily harm and is currently more than two years into a six-year prison sentence. Four international specialists have subsequently reviewed the same scans and found the so-called rib fractures don’t exist. Other specialists have concluded the hip fracture is consistent with the father’s description of the shower accident.

Case 3 – The Farmers: A Central Otago farming couple’s lives were turned upside down after one of their eight-week-old twin boys was flown to Starship Hospital with seizures and bleeding on the brain. The baby, who wasn’t born until almost an hour and a half after his twin, experienced breathing difficulties shortly after birth and his parents repeatedly raised concerns about his health in the weeks that followed. Initially, doctors in Dunedin considered whether his condition was linked to a birth injury or a rare brain disorder and the parents believed they were finally getting answers.But once at Starship, the focus shifted to the healthy twin, who was taken to hospital in Dunedin to see if he could provide any clues as to what was wrong with his twin brother. A full body x-ray was performed and the mother says she was told by Dr Patrick Kelly at Starship that whether they were formally accused of causing the second twin’s head injury all depended on what showed up in the x-ray of the first twin. The turning point came when doctors concluded twin one had fractures to his knees and a possible hip fracture. The parents lost custody of both babies and spent more than two years battling police, Oranga Tamariki and the courts, a fight they say cost them nearly $300,000 and ultimately their farm business. When the Delve team obtained the medical records and imaging and engaged independent international specialists to review the case, those experts concluded there was no evidence of the fractures in the knees or hip of twin one, the very fractures that had become the deciding factor in the diagnosis of non-accidental injury and the removal of the children.

Case 4 – Pro athlete: A professional athlete endured almost two years of police investigations, child protection scrutiny and ultimately a three-week criminal jury trial after being accused of causing multiple rib fractures to his four-week-old baby. The infant had been born following a rapid delivery and was later found to have a severe vitamin D deficiency. When the baby was taken to hospital, doctors concluded the injuries were non-accidental and police launched a criminal investigation. The father and his wife, a nurse, maintained there must be medical explanations that had not been adequately explored.

As part of its investigation, the Delve team engaged international experts in paediatric radiology, orthopaedic surgery and obstetrics to review the medical evidence. Their conclusions differed significantly from those of the New Zealand doctors, with experts challenging the fracture findings and arguing that the baby’s birth history, severe vitamin D deficiency and other possible medical explanations had not been adequately considered. At the pro athlete’s trial, the international experts also told the jury that two of the fractures occurred after the baby’s hospital admission, while he was under 24-hour watch. The case ultimately became the focus of the second season of Diagnosis of a Crime and provided a rare opportunity for the evidence underpinning such allegations to be rigorously tested in court.


Case 5 – Jo*: In a small South Island town, the parents of a baby who has cerebral palsy due to a traumatic, poorly managed birth were placed under intensive child protection supervision after doctors identified rib fractures and diagnosed them as non-accidental.

Not long after his birth, the baby had sustained a femur fracture, resulting from his father tripping and falling onto the infant’s leg. His parents immediately took him to the local hospital, which, because of the baby’s fragile physical state, had him flown to the larger public hospital in Christchurch. Doctors there found the baby’s femur fracture was consistent with the accident described, but when an x-ray also found rib fractures of various ages they concluded these were likely caused by non-accidental injury.

The infant had suffered significant birth trauma and has required multiple rounds of CPR (a known cause of rib fractures in infants), yet Oranga Tamariki relied primarily on the opinion of a Christchurch paediatrician and failed to consult the extensive network of health professionals caring for the child. The family says the state intervention has caused significant harm to their baby, and they are currently still under investigation by police.


Case 6 – Hunter*: A Waikato mother who endured a highly traumatic birth with twin boys. Her waters broke at 34 weeks and the hospital sent her home. At 36 weeks she returned but after labouring for 15 hours she wouldn’t dilate past 5cm and was sent for an emergency c-section. She felt the whole procedure. It was then discovered doctors had left in some of the cervical stitches from a previous procedure so she was unable to birth naturally.

The mother lost 2.3 litres of blood and had emergency surgery. The babies remained in hospital for three weeks. At eight weeks old, the mother brought them to hospital with suspected seizures. They were flown to Starship, where they were told their head injuries – one to the left side of the head, the other to the right side – were non-accidental. The babies were uplifted by Oranga Tamariki and have been in four different non-kin foster homes over the past two years. The mother is allowed a supervised visit with her sons once every three weeks.

Since Reid and her team began their inquiry, more than 20 families have contacted them with similar stories, with more getting in touch every week.

“This isn’t about people who abuse their kids – it’s about people who don’t. And the podcasts have shown, step by step, what can happen to innocent families,” says Reid. “I understand there needs to be a process to assess infant injuries, but as we all learned in the Dunedin trial, suspicion is not evidence.”

*Not their real names

Listen to both seasons of Fractured and both seasons of Diagnosis of a Crime on our podcast channel Delve. Since 2023, Delve has produced more than 130 episodes across four award-winning investigative podcast series. With almost 8 million downloads, Delve sits in the top 1 percent most downloaded podcasts in the world. Diagnosis of a Crime won Best Podcast at the 2026 Media Awards and Best True Crime Podcast at the 2026 NZ Radio and Podcast Awards. Fractured was also a finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast at both the 2025 and 2026 NZ Radio and Podcast Awards. Made with the help of NZ On Air.

The entire story can be read at: 
https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/07/06/what-is-going-on-at-starships-child-protection-unit/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;