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The Shaken Baby Syndrome Myth renamed "Abusive Head Trauma" or "Non-Accidental Injury"
1. SBS
"MYTH" WEBSITE SUMMARY SUBJECT: A SUMMARIZED HISTORY OF SBS THEORY (This article doesn't reflect all of the newer evidence and controversy that has led to many top scientists denying that SBS is a true condition as described, autopsy errors and fraud, and other types of crisis involving past and current convictions, unproven science, battling expert witnesses and contradictory studies) http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2011-2012/diagnosis murder/history.html A History of Shaken Baby Syndrome 1. Bleeding between the brain and skull (subdural hematoma) VIRGINIA JASPERS • Many of the theories surrounding SBS came out of the case
of Virginia Jaspers from the 1950s. HENRY KEMPE • Kempe published an article that concludes all children with
subdural hematomas and retinal hemorrhages were abused by shaking
"The battered child syndrome" Journal of the American Medical
Association, 1962. NORMAN GUTHKELCH • In 1971 a two-page article was published in the British Medical
Journal entitled "Infantile Subdural Hematoma and Its Relationship
to Whiplash Injuries." JOHN CAFFEY • In 1946 he describes four cases of children who had subdural
hematomas and long bone fractures in his article "Multiple Fractures
in the Long Bones of Infants Suffering from Chronic Subdural Hematoma,"
published in Radiology. AYB OMMAYA • His research on the impact of adults suffering subdural hematoma
as a result of automobile whiplash resulting from a rear-end collision
is published in his article in 1968 and used by Caffey and others
in support for possible explanations of subdural hematoma in babies. POINTS TO PONDER • Caffey admits that his conclusions of infants suffering from
the effects of whiplash without any external trauma to the head and
the face presents a contradiction." ANN-CHRISTINE DUHAIME • In 1987, Dr Duhaime a pediatric neurosurgeon in the United
States, used model dolls fitted with accelerometers, and then shook
them in an attempt to resolve this dilemma. MICHAEL PRANGE • The results from Duhaime's experiment are again repeated
by Bioengineer Dr. Michael Prange and his team and published in the
Journal of Biomechanical Engineering in 2003, entitled "Anthropomorphic
Simulations of Falls, Shakes and Inflicted Impacts in Infants." SUBDURAL HEMATOMA & RETINAL HEMORRHAGE • Much of the focus in SBS lies in explaining what causes subdural
hematoma and retinal hemorrhages in babies. Ground-breaking cases in Shaken Baby Syndrome AUDREY EDMUNDS • In 1995, Audrey Edmunds, a mother of two at the time, looked
after some of the neighborhood children in her house. LOUISE WOODWARD • In 1997, Louise Woodward then 19 years old from England,
was an au pare working in Boston. SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME REVIEW BY WANEY SQUIER (AN UPDATE) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/magazine/06baby-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&hpw#h[] (the following is an excerpt taken from a longer article that began with a specific case history) A dozen years ago, the medical profession held that if the triad of subdural and retinal bleeding and brain swelling was present without a fracture or bruise that would indicate, for example, that a baby had accidently fallen, abuse must have occurred through shaking. In the past decade, that consensus has begun to come undone. In 2008, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, after reviewing a shaken-baby case, wrote that there is “fierce disagreement” among doctors about the shaken-baby diagnosis, signaling “a shift in mainstream medical opinion.” In the same year, at the urging of the province’s chief forensic pathologist, the Ontario government began a review of 142 shaken-baby cases, because of “the scientific uncertainty that has come to characterize that diagnosis.” In Britain, after one mother’s shaken-baby conviction was overturned, Peter Goldsmith, then attorney general, reviewed 88 more cases. In 2006, he announced doubts about three of the convictions because they were based solely on the triad; in the other cases, Goldsmith said, there was additional evidence pointing to the defendant’s guilt. A small but growing number of doctors warn that there can be alternate explanations — infections or bleeding disorders, for example — for the triad of symptoms associated with shaken-baby syndrome. Across the country, the group of lawyers that has succeeded in exonerating hundreds of people based on DNA evidence is now mounting 20 to 25 appeals of shaken-baby convictions. “No one wants child abuse,” says Keith Findley, a lawyer for the Wisconsin Innocence Project. “But we should not be prosecuting and convicting people in shaken-baby cases right now, based on the triad of symptoms, without other evidence of abuse. If the medical community can’t agree about all the conflicting data and research, how is a jury supposed to reach a conclusion that’s beyond a reasonable doubt?” Much of the science of shaken-baby syndrome dates from the late 1960s, when a neurosurgeon named Ayub Ommaya conducted a brutal animal experiment to figure out how much acceleration it took to cause a head injury. Ommaya took more than 50 rhesus monkeys and strapped each one into a chair mounted on wheels, leaving their heads unsupported. He placed the chair on a 20-foot-long track, and an air-powered piston sent the monkeys zooming into a wall. Fifteen emerged with some kind of cerebral hemorrhage. Eight of those also had injuries to the brain stem or cervical cord. Ommaya’s experiment involved neither shaking nor infants. Still, two pediatric specialists, John Caffey and A. Norman Guthkelch, each wrote a paper that pointed to the work as evidence that unexplained subdural bleeding in babies could occur without direct impact to the head and with or without a visible neck injury. In the 1980s, the term “shaken-baby syndrome” came into broad use, and a national prevention and awareness campaign was set in motion. As the diagnosis of shaken-baby syndrome took hold in medicine, and prosecutors began to bring charges based on it, doctors testified that shaking could generate the same terrible force as throwing a child from a second-story window. It turned out they were wrong. In 1987, a neurosurgeon named Ann-Christine Duhaime published a paper that included the autopsy results of 13 babies with symptoms associated with shaken-baby syndrome. In all of them she found evidence of trauma that was actually caused by impact. She teamed up with biomechanical engineers to create infant-sized dummies equipped with sensors to measure acceleration.“We shook them as hard as we could, and we thought something was wrong, because the accelerations we measured were unexpectedly low,” Duhaime says. Instead, the force level shot up when the testers released the dummies after shaking them, even if they hit a soft surface like a bed or a couch. Later experiments confirmed this finding and have made some doctors and biomechanical engineers skeptical that shaking alone can cause severe brain damage or death. At the same time, the experiments have not ruled this out, Duhaime says. Among other things, the dummies are not live children, and while their heads and necks can exhibit the effects of acceleration, impact on brain tissue is still hard to model. Many doctors who treat child abuse say that decades of clinical observation, as well as confessions, show that it’s possible for shaking alone to cause the triad of subdural and retinal bleeding and brain swelling. A 2009 position paper from the American Academy of Pediatrics, written by Cindy Christian, recommends that doctors use the more general term “abusive head trauma” but also calls shaking an “important mechanism” of such trauma. Many doctors who testify for the defense agree that shaking could in theory cause the triad of symptoms but only if there is an injury to the neck or spinal cord, “where the breathing center is,” as one doctor puts it. It’s the absence of signs of this kind of an injury that makes some shaken-baby cases particularly fraught. In 1993, Audrey Edmunds left her job as a secretary and started caring for children in her home near Madison, Wis. Like Trudy Rueda, Edmunds says that a baby she was taking care of, 7-month-old Natalie Beard, suddenly collapsed while drinking a bottle of milk; Natalie was propped up with the bottle in a car seat while Edmunds was out of the room getting her two daughters and another child ready for preschool. In the hospital, a CT scan showed that Natalie had the triad of shaken-baby symptoms but no spinal-cord injury. The baby died, and the doctors agreed that Edmunds, who was pregnant with her third child, had to be responsible. She was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. At Edmunds’s trial, a librarian testified that she once heard a thump and then the cries of a child who was with Edmunds, but she didn’t see what had happened. Edmunds denied ever harming a child in her care. Her neighbors testified to her calm around children. Natalie “was a real fussy baby,” one said, “but Audrey was very patient with her.” Another day care provider in the neighborhood said, “I looked up to Audrey . . . when I started doing my day care.” Still, the prosecution’s medical experts said that only Edmunds’s
violence could explain Natalie’s injuries. A forensic pathologist,
Robert Huntington, testified that the baby most likely had been abused
at some point during the two hours before her collapse — which
was when she was with Edmunds. The jury convicted Edmunds, and she
was sentenced to 18 years; she went to prison two days after her youngest
daughter’s first birthday. Huntington’s change of heart reflects a new explanation for the manifestation of brain injury in babies. In a 2001 study, the British neuropathologist Jennian Geddes found that most babies with the triad of shaken-baby symptoms suffered not from a rupture of the nerve fibers of the brain but rather from a lack of blood caused by oxygen deprivation to the brain’s cells. The rupture of the brain’s nerve fibers is immediate and produces instant coma; the effects of oxygen deprivation can be slower and more subtle. This can explain how a child with the triad of shaken-baby symptoms could, for some period of time, seem fussy or lethargic or stop eating or sleeping well. In 2005, Christian co-wrote a study that concluded, “Although infrequent, young victims of fatal head trauma may present as lucid before death.” This possibility introduces questions about whether the last person to care for a child before he or she stops breathing is necessarily guilty of abuse. In most cases of assault or murder, jurors could weigh this doubt in light of other evidence — witness testimony, perhaps, or the motive the defendant would have had to commit the crime. In shaken-baby cases, however, this kind of additional evidence is often absent. Doubts raised about the medical testimony loom large because it’s so central to the prosecution. At Edmunds’s hearing for a new trial, five doctors joined Huntington on the side of the defense. Opposing them were four doctors for the prosecution. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruled in January 2008 that the disagreement among the physicians represented a shift in medical opinion and warranted a new trial: a jury would have to hear both sides. Edmunds called her daughters to tell them she was coming home. Six months later, prosecutors dropped the charges against her. Audrey Edmunds’s successful appeal was built on a foundation laid by defense lawyers a decade earlier in the first big courtroom fight over shaken-baby syndrome. In that case, prosecutors in Massachusetts charged an English au pair, Louise Woodward, with the murder of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen, who stopped breathing in her care. Matthew had the triad of shaken-baby symptoms, along with a skull fracture. Woodward, who was 19, told the police that she shook Matthew lightly when she couldn’t wake him from a nap. Prosecutors decided that the shaking must have been violent. They also said that to cause the skull fracture, Woodward must have smashed Matthew’s head on a hard surface at a velocity of more than 25 miles per hour. Woodward’s lead counsel was Barry Scheck, who went on to found the Innocence Project at Cardozo law school with Peter Neufeld. He enlisted seven medical experts, including Ommaya, the neurosurgeon who experimented with the rhesus monkeys, and Ronald Uscinski, a colleague. The defense’s theory was that Matthew’s skull fracture was three weeks old when he died, and that because of it, a slight jarring could have caused his fatal bleeding. Scheck didn’t try to explain how the fracture happened. “We didn’t know, so we didn’t claim anything,” he told me. But the defense experts testified that because tests showed no swelling at the site of the fracture, it had to be old. The prosecution, for its part, lined up the doctors who treated Matthew at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Among them was Patrick Barnes, then a pediatric radiologist at Children’s. He had written, with another doctor, a chapter in a textbook that embraced the traditional theory of shaken-baby syndrome and shared the assumptions that pointed to Woodward’s guilt. Barnes testified for the prosecution at the trial, saying Matthew’s brain scans showed his injuries were a result of shaking as well as a skull fracture. The prosecutors also asked Barnes to help them prepare for their cross-examination by briefing them on what to expect from the defense’s doctors. He spent evenings watching Court TV tapes of their testimony. He heard doctors from fields other than pediatrics — biomechanics, neurosurgery and neuropathology — discuss scientific findings about traumatic brain injury that contradicted his belief in the traditional method for diagnosing shaken-baby syndrome. He started to question his assumptions. “I’d been in lockstep with the child-abuse establishment for 20 years,” he told me. “For the first time, I saw that there were well-qualified experts on the other side giving opinions I’d never heard, that I knew nothing about.” Woodward’s case ended in a stalemate. After the jury found
her guilty of second-degree murder, the judge reduced the conviction
to involuntary manslaughter and released her for time served. But
a lasting legacy of that case was the eventual conversion
of Patrick Barnes from an upholder of the medical orthodoxy surrounding
shaken-baby cases to one of its strongest critics. Trudy Rueda’s lawyer asked Barnes to review Noah Whitmer’s brain scans before her trial. Barnes wasn’t able to testify because of a scheduling conflict, but he says the scans indicate that the baby had a thrombosis — a blood clot within a blood vessel. The prosecution’s doctors saw the thrombosis, too, but they claimed it was a result of abuse. To Barnes, the clotting suggested infant stroke, which can be triggered by an infection. He says the fact that Noah was not taking a bottle or napping normally in the days before he was hospitalized suggests that his condition could have been subtly deteriorating during that time. “It’s a very striking pattern,” Barnes says of the thrombosis. “The baby not eating well may reflect the process which starts this. Usually, it’s not a process that happens acutely and the baby crashes. It can start relatively slowly.” Barnes also testified at Audrey Edmunds’s hearing challenging her conviction. He said that it was difficult to know for sure what had happened to Natalie Beard based on her scans; at the time of her death, hospitals were using CT scans, rather than also using M.R.I.’s, which provide more detail. But he did say that he saw the possibility of a thrombosis. To a degree, some of the alternative explanations from defense-side doctors are accepted in the child-abuse field. A 2009 textbook that Cindy Christian co-edited includes a discussion of diseases and accidental injuries that can mimic the effects of abusive head trauma. Leventhal, the Yale pediatrician, told me about an unusual case involving an accidental fall. “A child who was sitting in a highchair and put his feet up on the table in front of him and rocked himself backward,” Leventhal said. “When the child was taken to the hospital, the ophthalmologist said, ‘This is shaken baby,’ because of the massive retinal bleeding. Luckily, there were seven people playing cards in the room when the baby fell.” Leventhal continued, “The subdural hematoma continued to bleed, and it turned out he had a previous bleeding disorder, a clotting problem.” Leventhal and others in the child-abuse field emphasize that such hemorrhaging as a result of a fall is very rare. In order for doctors to determine what caused an injury, they begin with a list of alternatives, ruling out the ones that don’t match a patient’s symptoms until they arrive at a diagnosis, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty. But defense-side doctors like Barnes say that in a criminal case, physicians should be more careful about testing their assumptions, and they should give the possibility of an alternative explanation — a stroke, say, caused by an infection — more weight. It’s on this question of probable causes that the doctors who
testify in these cases split. Prosecution-side experts rely on a set
of studies that indicate that when children have subdural bleeding
and extensive retinal hemorrhaging, they are far more likely to have
been abused than injured in any other way. In a 2010 paper in Pediatrics,
Christian and the pediatric ophthalmologist Alex Levin concluded that
the evidence supporting the “diagnostic specificity” of
“severe” retinal hemorrhaging has significantly increased.
“Some children have such severe retinal hemorrhaging that it
is much more likely to be from abusive head trauma,” Christian
told me. She testified to this at Rueda’s trial, because Noah
Whitmer had severe retinal hemorrhaging. Levin similarly called Natalie
Beard’s retinal bleeding “textbook severe” when
he testified for the prosecution at Audrey Edmunds’s 2007 hearing.
When the prosecutor asked him how significant these findings were
for diagnosing shaken-baby syndrome, Levin answered: “Very important.
We really don’t have any other cause for this particular kind
of hemorrhaging and retinal findings.” Underlying the clash over the medical research on shaken-baby syndrome is another one about human nature. How likely is an adult with no history of wrongdoing to do terrible harm to a child by violently shaking it? To pediatricians like Leventhal and Christian, the sad answer, born of experience, is that such a lapse is all too possible. When I described Trudy Rueda’s case to Leventhal, he told me about cases in which he had met and liked a parent or caregiver who ended up confessing to harming a child. Was there truly no indication that the adult in question was capable of such an act? The doctors who treat abused children insisted that sometimes, there isn’t. They described disturbing confessions, like one that made headlines in Florida last year after a 22-year-old mother told the police that she had shaken her 3-month-old baby and perhaps caused him to hit his head, because he wouldn’t stop crying while she was playing FarmVille. Leventhal cites a 2010 study that included 29 people who confessed in the French courts to shaking infants and who described the abuse as extremely violent. Doctors like Barnes, on the other hand, emphasize that confessions are not always reliable. The exonerations of recent years have shown that people sometimes falsely admit to crimes because of police pressure or the promise of a plea bargain. In the first case from Canada’s shaken-baby inquiry to reach the Ontario Court of Appeal, the judges overturned the conviction of Dinesh Kumar, a 44-year-old father who pleaded guilty to shaking his 5-week-old son to death. Kumar says now that at the time of his guilty plea, he believed he had no hope of prevailing against the damning testimony of the state’s pathologist, who has since been discredited for giving error-riddled testimony based on botched autopsies. In response to the critics who question the basis for some shaken-baby convictions, many in the child-abuse-treatment field have fired back with a critique of their own. Christian and Leventhal dismiss defense-side experts’ alternate explanations, like Uscinski’s theory that children suffer spontaneous rebleeds from birth injuries. “Every year they come up with a new alternate theory that we have to refute,” Christian says. Normally, of course, this is how science progresses: One researcher comes up with a hypothesis, which others question and test. But shaken-baby cases are haunted by the enormous repercussions of getting it wrong — the conviction of innocent adults, on the one hand, and on the other, the danger to children of missing serious abuse. In one study, researchers looked into the deaths of five children who had head injuries that initially were misjudged to be accidents and found that four of them could have been prevented if an earlier pattern of abuse had been detected. If parents are the focus of a shaken-baby investigation, doctors must weigh this risk in helping the state determine whether a child should be removed from the home. “When babies are sent home with an injury that’s misattributed to an accident, we know that one-quarter to one-third of them will come back with another serious injury or, in some cases, death,” Leventhal says. Barnes, who is now part of a child-abuse-protection team at Stanford, doesn’t dispute the need to investigate shaken-baby symptoms. But he says that most of his colleagues don’t present the science dispassionately. “They have built their careers, their entire standing on this issue.” His opponents, for their part, dismiss the defense experts as hired guns. “They’re aggrandizing themselves and making a lot of money testifying,” says Robert Block, the president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics. While it’s true that experts like Uscinski can make six figures a year testifying (he says he testifies free when a defendant cannot afford to pay him), it’s also the case that some witnesses for the prosecution are paid. Barnes no longer takes fees to testify in either criminal or custody cases. Neither did four of the other five defense experts who testified for Audrey Edmunds. Last September, the fight among the doctors broke out in public on the Web, after Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former prosecutor and a law professor at DePaul, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed warning of wrongful convictions and calling on the National Academy of Sciences to referee the shaken-baby-syndrome dispute. On the Web site CommonHealth, about 20 doctors commented, mostly to express outrage. One of them was Block. He wrote that Tuerkheimer had “been beguiled by a group of physicians who are using the courtroom to distort science, facts and reality.” And he denounced her for “furthering the cause of the so-called innocence project.” Philipp Baumer was born after a difficult delivery and spent his first week in the newborn-intensive-care unit. His mother, Victoria, who had given up her last baby for adoption, struggled with drug addiction. Her sister Julie, who was 27 and a loan officer for a mortgage company, was helping take care of Victoria’s oldest child. She volunteered to adopt Philipp. “I didn’t want to see anyone else leave the family,” she told me in November when I met her in Ann Arbor, Mich. When Philipp came home, neither Julie Baumer nor her parents could get him to take a bottle regularly. On Oct. 3, 2003, when he was 6 weeks old, Philipp was not able to keep down food for 12 hours, Baumer says. She called his pediatrician, who sent her to the emergency room at Mount Clemens Regional Medical Center outside of Detroit. The E.R. doctor who saw Philipp found he was dehydrated and septic, gave him fluids and antibiotics and ordered a CT scan. But the test was canceled when Philipp was scheduled for transfer to the region’s specialty facility for pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. At Children’s, Philipp went straight to intensive care. But he waited 28 hours for the CT scan. By then, Philipp had been in the hospital for a total of 33 hours. The scan showed subdural bleeding, which was so extensive that his fontanelle (the soft spot on a baby’s head) was bulging. An ophthalmologist saw retinal bleeding. Philipp also had a skull fracture, although it was not near the site of the hemorrhage. In an emergency operation, a shunt was placed to relieve the pressure on Philipp’s brain, but it was too late to prevent severe damage. Philipp, who is now 7, has cerebral palsy; he cannot walk on his own, talk or see. Four months after Philipp’s injuries occurred, Julie Baumer was charged with child abuse in the first degree. The prosecutor didn’t present a theory about why Baumer would have harmed Philipp, saying that it was the state’s job to show that Baumer intended to shake the baby, not what motivated her. Two doctors from Children’s Hospital testified for the prosecution: Steven Ham, the neurosurgeon who put in the shunt; and Cristie Becker, a radiologist who treated Philipp later. Becker said Philipp’s injuries were inflicted by shaking and timed them to “likely within 24 hours” of the CT scan. She said the skull fracture may have been an old birth-related injury. Looking at the scan, Ham said the fracture was new and that Philipp’s injuries were the result of blunt-force trauma that occurred “within the previous 12 to 24 hours.” He said he could pinpoint the timing based on “how sick the child was, and then the fact that in looking at the scan we could see fresh blood in the scan.” Becker and Ham didn’t note in court that their 24-hour time frame meant that Philipp would have started hemorrhaging while he was at Children’s — and no longer in Baumer’s care. (When I called Becker, she said, “I don’t care to revisit that issue, and best of luck trying to find the truth in the midst of that trial.” Ham did not return my calls.) Baumer’s trial lawyer failed to point out this flaw in the prosecution’s case. The lawyer also did not find a defense expert who could read Philipp’s brain scans. Baumer had no money to hire one, and her lawyer didn’t know that he could have asked for court funds to cover the expense. In 2005, Baumer was convicted and sentenced to 10 to 15 years. Baumer was raised Catholic, and in 2007, a nun saw her name on a prayer list and came to visit her in prison. When she heard her story, the nun asked Baumer if she needed a new lawyer and wrote on her behalf to Charles Lugosi, then a professor at the Catholic law school Ave Maria. Lugosi agreed to take Baumer’s case and enlisted the help of a former prosecutor, Carl Marlinga, who had opened a defense practice. Later, the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic joined the defense. The defense team sent Philipp’s brain scans to Patrick Barnes.
At the bottom of the images, Barnes saw a distinctive bright triangle
surrounding the major vein that brings blood in and out of the brain.
To Barnes, the triangle clearly pointed to a diagnosis unrelated to
abuse: Venous sinus thrombosis, or stroke, probably from an infection
— an explanation similar to the one Barnes gave for Noah Whitmer’s
injuries. Another radiologist and a forensic pathologist concurred
with Barnes’s reading of Philipp’s scans. The defense
experts also saw suggestions of an earlier smaller stroke, which could
have triggered the feeding problems that led Julie to call Philipp’s
pediatrician. This reading of the scans matched the time frame Becker
and Ham had given at trial: Philipp could have started to show some
symptoms, and then had a major stroke after he was admitted to the
hospital. The defense experts agreed with Becker that the skull fracture
was old. They said it was likely the result of Philipp’s difficult
birth. At Baumer’s second trial, which took place in October, the defense called neighbors and friends who testified that she was gentle and loving with children. The prosecution introduced no evidence to the contrary. Baumer has two drunken driving offenses on her record from the late 1990s, but they weren’t introduced at the trial. Back on the stand, Ham and Becker now said they had misspoken about the time frame, and came up with new estimates: Becker said that Philipp’s internal bleeding could have begun five days before the CT scan, and Ham said one or two days. They both remained convinced that Philipp’s hemorrhages were inflicted. “Before they testified, they both said that it was their opinion from the beginning that the injuries occurred before Philipp came to the E.R.,” Richard Goodman, the prosecutor at the second trial, says. And the prosecution’s doctors disagreed with Barnes and the other defense-side experts that Philipp’s scans showed a thrombosis. On cross-examination, Baumer’s lawyer, Marlinga, asked Ham and Becker if they were trying to deflect criticism of the hospital for failing to give Philipp the care he needed because of the delay of his CT scan. The doctors denied that their revised testimony had anything to do with protecting the hospital. The jurors began their deliberations by taking a poll. Nine out of 12 thought Baumer should be found not guilty. “For me, it came down to this: For the prosecution to be right, I was required to believe that a woman with no history or indication of violent tendencies or instability hit this baby’s head so hard that she fractured his skull, and shook him so hard that she caused extensive brain damage, while leaving no marks on him,” says Carman Minarik, a juror who is a minister at First United Methodist Church in Mount Clemens. “That just didn’t make a lot of sense to me.” Sera Miller, a claims representative for the Social Security Administration, was one of the three jurors who thought at first that Baumer was guilty. She found the medical testimony dense and confusing. “I think we needed 12 doctors on that jury,” she said. After an afternoon of deliberations, she went home and couldn’t sleep. In the morning she decided that the defense had done enough to introduce reasonable doubt. The jury found Baumer not guilty. When Philipp was 3 months old and ready to leave the hospital, he was put into foster care with Debi and Phil Zentz, who later adopted him and changed his name to Ben. When the second jury announced that it found Baumer not guilty, the Zentzes were in court. Baumer looked at Debi. “I was hoping for a bridge between the families,” Baumer says. Instead, Debi Zentz gave this statement to the press: “The verdict does not change our belief. Reasonable doubt does not equate to innocence.” When I called her in January, she said, “I have absolutely no doubt that Julie Baumer shook and horribly injured my son.” The Whitmers also feel certain that Trudy Rueda harmed their son and that she wronged them by putting them through a trial. “We got to a point where we said that if she stands up and admits what she did, we might be able to put this behind us,” Michael Whitmer said. “But now, how do you forgive?” He and his wife were sitting on a couch in their living room, in the Cape Cod-style house in Alexandria, Va., that Michael renovated by hand. Noah, his blue eyes sometimes focused and sometimes vacant, walked a bit unsteadily on the floor in front of us, picking up books and toys and putting them in his mouth. Noah can see now because a few months after his injury, he slept standing up for weeks to drain the blood from behind his eyes. His seizures have stopped, but only thanks to a strict and labor-intensive ketogenic diet. How could the Whitmers forgive, given the medical testimony from doctors they trust? Rueda’s conviction is now on appeal, with a hearing scheduled for mid-February. As for Audrey Edmunds, she has been out of prison for about three years. Now 49, she is blond and slim, and when I met her at a mall near her home outside Minneapolis, she talked to me about her three daughters. She wore jeans and open-toed sandals and showed me pictures of her children at a Twins game and talked about the delight she takes in taking snacks to her youngest girl’s soccer practice. For a few minutes, her 11 years in prison seemed like a balloon she has let go. But Edmunds does not live with her children. Her husband divorced her four years into her sentence; she says the separation was just too much for him. He stopped taking the girls to see her every week. When she got out of prison, she moved in with a friend and took a job at a Kwik Trip convenience store. Better work is hard to come by because of the time Edmunds served in prison. She also wants the early shift so she can see her kids in the afternoons. Sometimes, though, they go on a trip with their father and forget to call. “I was gone for so long,” she says. Edmunds said, however, that she had to come to terms with the drive to prosecute her. As we walked through the mall, she pointed out a Dora the Explorer display she thought young kids would like. Then she turned away from it. “A baby has died,” she said simply. “They want to blame somebody.” Dianne Jacobs Thompson Est. 2007 Also http://truthquest2.com (alternative medicine featuring drugless cancer treatments) Author publication: NEXUS MAGAZINE "Seawater--A Safe Blood Plasma Substitute?"
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