"The law school at the
University of Michigan is receiving a $250,000 federal grant to develop
expertise to challenge certain child-abuse convictions. The school's Innocence Clinic will use the money to work on convictions in so-called shaken-baby cases. In 2015, the Michigan Supreme Court unanimously
overturned a murder conviction in Calhoun County. The court said Leo
Ackley's rights were violated by a defense attorney who did a poor job
in failing to vigorously challenge the evidence. The death involved a
young girl.The court said the prosecutor produced no witnesses who said Ackley was abusive."
http://www.wtol.com/story/33328071/u-m-law-school-gets-grant-to-take-look-at-shaken-baby-cases
See University of Michigan release at the link below: "The U.S.
Department of Justice has awarded the Michigan Innocence Clinic with a
nearly $250,000 grant to support the defense of clients who were
wrongfully convicted of shaken baby syndrome (SBS). The University of Michigan Law School clinic plans to use two-year
grant funding for two purposes: hiring an off-site consultant to serve
as the clinic's SBS fellow, and retaining experts required to properly
evaluate and litigate cases involving SBS-related evidence. The
Innocence Clinic took its first two SBS cases in late 2009, and achieved
its first SBS exoneration in 2010 when client Julie Baumer was retried
and found not guilty. The clinic since has filed post-conviction
applications for relief in state and federal court in several more SBS
cases. SBS is a general medical diagnosis often used to convict
defendants, mostly parents or caregivers, of child abuse based on the
presence of certain medical symptoms. Research in recent decades has
suggested that the impact of these allegedly "tell-tale" symptoms has
been misunderstood and potentially misused in some criminal cases. Many
of the same symptoms once thought to be necessarily indicative of abuse
have since been found to have many non-abuse causes. Innocence Clinic
director David Moran and assistant director Imran Syed have both
published law review articles addressing the shift in SBS-related
science. A major 2015 Michigan Supreme Court decision in an SBS
case partly inspired the Innocence Clinic to seek funding for an SBS
fellow. In People v. Ackley, a unanimous decision authored by
former Michigan Law professor Bridget McCormack, the state Supreme Court
made clear that SBS remains a controversial diagnosis, and defendants
have the right to present favorable experts at trial. Syed stated that
the decision was groundbreaking, and made it newly possible for an
entire category of potentially innocent people to seek relief. It also
deepened the Innocence Clinic's focus on SBS cases. "We have been
able to accomplish a lot on behalf of our few SBS clients to this point,
but with a dozen or so potentially promising cases now on our radar, we
simply don't have the capacity to handle these cases without some
specialized help," says Syed, a clinical assistant professor of law and
assistant director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic. "These cases
involve a great deal of scientific testimony, reports, and research.
That requires considerable time and effort to evaluate and litigate
properly." In January 2016 alone, for example, the clinic
identified 11 additional inmates who had been convicted on potentially
flawed SBS evidence, and mailed out applications to those 11 people.
Once received, the applications are being evaluated to determine whether
discredited science was used and whether the inmate presents a viable
innocence claim. If so, the cases will be investigated further, a long
process that involves consultations with a variety of experts in order
to identify wrongful convictions involving SBS. The grant was awarded through the Justice Department's Wrongful Conviction Review Program."
https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/mic_sbs_grant_100516.aspx