-------------------------------------------
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.
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;
