"THE CHILD CASES"; AFTERMATH. (1); ELLEN GRAY; PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS; INSIGHTFUL COLUMN;

"Messy and emotional is the lifeblood of TV, where the Anthony case seems to be the one daytime drama no one's ready to see canceled. But emotions can wreak havoc with the dispensing of actual justice, as PBS' "Frontline" demonstrates tonight in "The Child Cases," a look at how lax standards for investigating the deaths of children can - and does - sometimes lead to the conviction of innocent people.

"The mind-set is prosecutorial . . .. They get caught up in the anger, the emotion, the despair," says Dr. Jon Thogmartin, a chief medical examiner in Florida who reversed his predecessor's findings in two child-death cases because, he says, the injuries recorded as evidence were in some instances "imagined.""

TV CRITIC ELLEN GRAY: PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS;

A GUIDE TO NPR/FRONTLINE/PROPUBLICA'S "THE CHILD CASES."

http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/06/child-cases-guilty-until-proven.html

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"We didn't really need the ratings-grabbing trial of Casey Anthony - the Orlando, Fla., woman accused of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, in 2008 - to tell us that the death of a child, any child, is a messy, emotional business," the Philadelphia Daily News column by Ellen Gray published earlier today under the heading, "Cases' probes suspicious child deaths" begins.

"We certainly didn't need HLN's Nancy Grace, whose zeal to see Anthony convicted may exceed even the prosecution's," the column continues.

"Messy and emotional is the lifeblood of TV, where the Anthony case seems to be the one daytime drama no one's ready to see canceled. But emotions can wreak havoc with the dispensing of actual justice, as PBS' "Frontline" demonstrates tonight in "The Child Cases," a look at how lax standards for investigating the deaths of children can - and does - sometimes lead to the conviction of innocent people.

"The mind-set is prosecutorial . . .. They get caught up in the anger, the emotion, the despair," says Dr. Jon Thogmartin, a chief medical examiner in Florida who reversed his predecessor's findings in two child-death cases because, he says, the injuries recorded as evidence were in some instances "imagined."

As complicated as determining cause of death in an adult can be - a situation not helped by the fact that many medical examiners aren't board-certified in pathology - it can be harder in children, he tells "Frontline."

"It's gonna take less disease to kill a kid than it does an adult," he says. "And whatever you're looking for is going to be smaller and less."

The result of a joint investigation with NPR and the independent investigative-news organization ProPublica, "The Child Cases" includes experts who argue that a variety of conditions can mimic the symptoms of child abuse, and looks at the changing science behind "shaken baby syndrome," a postmortem diagnosis once routinely used to explain the suspicious deaths of infants that seems to be falling out of favor.

Faced with snapshots and videos of tiny, once-smiling children, we can't be blamed for wanting a tidy explanation for their deaths, and for many people, scientific explanations might not cut it.

That's where Ernie Lopez comes in.

Lopez, an Amarillo, Texas, man who was convicted and sentenced to 60 years for one of the most heinous crimes imaginable - the aggravated sexual assault of a 6-month-old girl he was babysitting - puts a human face on a problem that ProPublica's A.C. Thompson says turned up in more than 20 cases examined in the U.S. and Canada: people prosecuted for killing children, based on what appears to have been faulty medical evidence.

Many of those people were eventually cleared, though not before undergoing years of legal nightmares, up to and including imprisonment. (One woman spent 13 months in jail, accused of killing a child who apparently died of natural causes.)

Lopez hasn't yet been even that lucky.

Already imprisoned for eight years in connection with the death of tiny Isis Vas, the daughter of a local doctor, he's awaiting a decision by a Texas appeals court on a new trial after a judge ruled last year that he'd received ineffective counsel at his first one.

Ineffective probably barely begins to describe a defense that reportedly didn't put up a single medical expert to counter the prosecution's witnesses, whose findings "Frontline's" interviewees counter effectively tonight while suggesting an alternative explanation for Isis' death that seems far more credible.

That Lopez also comes off as a more sympathetic presence than Anthony shouldn't matter - justice, after all, is supposed to be blind - but this being television, it does, of course."

The story can be found at:

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/television/124624044.html

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:

http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;