Hundreds of "Shaken Baby Syndrome" convictions in doubt

From reasononline: In January 2008, a Wisconsin appeals court granted a new trial to Audrey Edmunds, a 45-year-old woman who had been sentenced in 1995 to 18 years in prison for murdering Natalie Beard, an infant in her care. The ruling was significant, because medical experts said Beard died as a result of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), a diagnosis that grew increasingly common in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Wisconsin appellate court was the first in the country to recognize increasing doubts about the reliability of SBS diagnoses. And: In a compelling article published this month in the Washington University Law Review, DePaul University law professor Deborah Teurkheimer argues that the medical research has now shifted to the point where U.S. courts must conduct a major review of most SBS cases from the last 20 years. And: Last year, Discover magazine published a provocative article laying out much of this new research. Notably, the magazine found several specialists who have since changed their minds after testifying for the prosecution in multiple SBS cases. (At a post-conviction hearing for Edmunds, all of her defense experts said that when the case was tried in 1995, they would have testified for the prosecution.) One of those specialists is Ronald Uscinski, a student of Ayub Ommaya, the scientist whose research on monkeys in the late 1960s is thought to be the origin of the SBS diagnosis. When Uscinski went back and reexamined the study, he found no support for the way Ommaya’s research is currently being being used in the courtroom. "When I put all of this together, I said, my God, this is a sham,” Uscinski told Discover. "Somebody made a mistake right at the very beginning, and look at what’s come out of it."     This is another reason to always be suspicious of arguments based upon scientific consensus. Real science is never settled. It is always waiting for the "one man" that Einstein said was all that was needed to prove him wrong.   It is always provisional, always waiting for new evidence that may change everything.   Consensuses can be as much about fashion and group think as it is about sober consideration of evidence.   They can be wrong. But once they have become the established orthodoxy they are very difficult to overturn. Too many people and too many organisations and other bodies have by then invested too much into them to let go of them easily.

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