The news side also had a piece on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-debate-over-shaken-baby-syn...
> In Tribble’s case, the FBI agent testified at trial that the hair from the stocking matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”
> In closing arguments, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further: “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.”
It was dog hair.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/dc-judge-exonerat...
This man was not committed to death row because of one doctor. He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified he had a history of violently shaking and screaming at a child for crying.
Limiting the power of government is a central idea in conservative thought, especially in America[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_Sta...
IANAL, but wouldn't that be against the rule that character evidence cannot be used by the prosecution (unless in countering character evidence from the defence)?
Specifically, I believe what you describe would be in contravention of the following: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_404
> (a) Character Evidence.
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of a person’s character or character trait is not admissible to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character or trait.
> [...]
> b) Other Crimes, Wrongs, or Acts.
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of any other crime, wrong, or act is not admissible to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.
> (2) Permitted Uses. This evidence may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.
To quote a post I recently found resonating with me:
"Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to be stopped from enjoying all the things that come with being alive. When you kill another person, you deprive them of worldly enjoyments like food, sex, conversations, bathing, laughing, crying and therefore it is only befitting that you too get deprived of same and the only way to do so is through the death sentence. If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences."
https://www.sundaystandard.info/iocom-a-retributionist-i-sup...
Credit to the guardian article for linking this. What a weird world.
Firstly, 90% dont agree with trial reform. Most conservatives and wealthy "liberals" do not care, but they are not the ones who suffer.
Secondly, "defund the police" helps solves trial reform by reducing the number of people pushed into trial on questionable grounds. Take this for example: >>37431962 -- this type of AI-driven precog system would not be funded if we defunded police departments. That means less people arrested/tried on pseudo-science grounds.
Similarly, less police means the police have to focus on the highest impact issues, rather than trying to go on dragnets and putting angent provaceteurs into the community to literally manufacture criminals.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/shaken-baby-s...
[UPDATE] To those of you downvoting me, would you kindly explain why? It seems like a reasonable question to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
"Prosperity theology is a religious belief among some Charismatic Christians that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for them, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one's material wealth. Material and especially financial success is seen as a sign of divine favor."
[1] https://shakenbaby.science
[2] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-sha...
[3] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...
Yes, this article is from 2016. Texas also has a strong law that allows throwing out "junk science". This case didn't make it through appeals because the forensic criteria that is suspect was such a small part of the evidence.
Yes, this article is from 2016 and yes it's in Texas which has a strong law which allows throwing out bad science.
The suspect forensic claim was such a small part of the evidence against the defendent that it didn't survive appeals.
From a purely economic POV, it makes no sense. Compare the average annual cost per state prison inmate [1] ($22,000 for Texas) to the annual cost of a death row inmate. For example, $90,000 per inmate per year for Nevada [2].
In addition capital cases are significantly more expensive to try. Each Federal execution cost an estimated $1 million [3].
Since 1973, at least 190 people sentenced to death have been exonerated [4]. People exonerated of crimes tend to skew heavily towards minorities, particularly African-American [5][6], which shows it's not really about the severity and certainty of a conviction but instead emotional retribution disproportionately targeted at black people.
The American carceral state is an abject failure and a blight on humanity. We have 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's priosners. If locking people up worked, this would be the safest country on Earth.
[1]: https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-stat...
[2]: https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/76th2011/ExhibitDo...
[3]:https://interrogatingjustice.org/death-sentences/the-cost-of...
[4]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence
[5]: https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...
It's one of the grimmest open data sets around. And the source of this dataviz from Reddit: https://imgur.com/t61UIgH https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/26rui7/oc_...
[1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/09/20/pcast-r...
[2] https://innocenceproject.org/misapplication-of-forensic-scie...
[3] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-problem-wi...
We have pretty good proposals to deal with this problem. I think the following seems sensible:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4368
>Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments
No one has ever changed the law to benefit the rich, no sirree.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/To...
It is our current system that is fringe. Copyright is practically permanent when compared to a fleeting human lifespan. Even when copyrights eventually expire, trademarks function as "a species of mutant copyright" to keep works protected forever. Companies like Disney profit off our shared heritage and then lock it in their "Vault" forever. The way human culture has worked for hundreds of thousands of years has been derailed within just the last few generations.
Radical changes to line the pockets of the owning class are sensible and legal and moderate, but wanting even the smallest change to prevent the slaughter of innocents by the Abbott regime is fringe.
Note that I don't necessarily disagree with you that reformers often make bad legal arguments. Making good legal arguments requires good lawyers, and only the rich can afford good lawyers.
Although SBS is a highly disputed and contested diagnosis, most medical authorities (Mayo Clinic, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC...) do not recognize any legitimate controversy associated with it. The most notable exception is the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services which published a systematic review in 2016 criticizing the scientific reliability of SBS diagnoses made on the so-called "triad" of subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage, and encephalopathy [1]. This report itself generated intense debates.
The difficulty here is that definitions are generally vague and change over time. What does "shaken baby syndrome" mean? An abusive gesture, a medical theory, something else? That alone is unclear.
What is being really contested is the idea that you can reliably infer shaking whenever you observe this "triad" of findings in an infant with no history of major trauma, and no other evidence of trauma (no bruises, no fractures, no neck injury...). This idea was universally accepted between the 1980s and the 2000s. But the science has shifted, to such a point that medical authorities no longer officially support this theory — however, diagnoses are still being made by inertia of clinical practice and criminal justice. Yet, authorities still claim there is no controversy on the existence and severity of abusive head injuries, which isn't really the point. More on this issue here [2] and in this paper [3].
[1] https://www.sbu.se/en/publications/sbu-assesses/traumatic-sh...
[2] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...
[3] https://wlr.law.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1263/2020/...
For example, the Wikipedia article on SBS has a section on "Legal Issues" that gives some details. Or you may find informative Wikipedia's article about Waney Squier, a doctor who was involved in SBS cases as an expert witness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waney_Squier
The "Legal Issues" section on the SBS also mentions Waney Squire's case.
____________________
[1] Btw, this is a "controversy" in the sense of often acrimonious debate between experts and not in the sense of the "controversy" that Young Earth Creationists demand be taught in schools. It's a controversy about methodology and medical and science ethics; the kind of thing that gets up some scientists' noses.
I totally agree. This is insufferable.
This is not just a virtual, academic subject to me. I've cofounded an association of French families [1] that has been contacted by 1300+ people in the past 8 years or so. I see parents losing their baby to foster care for 6, 12, 24 months or more. To say they are broken for life is an understatement. I see fathers, mothers, nannies maintain their innocence for years until they are convicted to 5 to 15 years of jail, because medical experts have certified that no other explanation than shaking could have ever caused the child's findings. Three more people I know have been convicted in the past couple of weeks. I feel so absolutely desperate and hopeless seeing people going to jail one after the other, week after week, while I can't do anything about it. All cases are not illegitimate, of course, but there are serious reasons to be doubtful when there is no external evidence of trauma, strong and sustained denials, and no antecedent of abuse.
For sure, we have tried to alert medical authorities, doctors, politicians, institutions, judges, celebrities, scientists, journalists for years, and almost no one actually cares, while those who do will do everything in their power to cancel and suppress us (Waney Squier is one among many other examples, Chapter 1 of our Cambridge book provides more examples). I see no other example in our modern history of an active, systematic endeavor that has been so destructive to so many people for so long.
Thanks! Although I just saw it and didn't have the chance to upvote it when it was posted. Let's hope it gets on the second chance queue. It's a good article, well written and level-headed.
>> This is not just a virtual, academic subject to me.
I can tell. Thank you for your indefatigable advocacy.
I read about Shaken Baby Syndrome some time ago and since then I've kept bookmarks of cases I see in the news that seem to be false convictions. I remember one in particular of a British man who was accused of having murdered his baby daughter by shaking. The case has stuck in my mind because the press reported how a Playstation was found on the living room table and the prosecution alleged that the daughter's crying had disturbed the father's playing, and so he had shaken her so he could continue playing. I could not believe that such a far-fetched conjecture, virtually impossible to falsify, would be accepted by judges and juries and thought that for the prosecution to be grasping for straws like that they must really have nothing concrete to go on, but the father was put in jail nonetheless. I don't have my bookmarks at hand now so I can't look up his name.
I suspect that when legal and medical experts claim that SBS cases don't only take the evidence of the triad into account, that's the kind of "evidence" that they mean they also consider: just-so stories that stop only short of calling the family pet as a witness.
Edit: I just realised - your association is called "adikia". "Injustice" in my native language, Greek.
Texas has a history of executing the disabled and presenting "expert" junk science as evidence. https://www.propublica.org/article/is-texas-still-executing-...
https://www.texastribune.org/2011/04/15/texas-psychologist-p...
Illinois had similar problems with the death penalty, including likely executing innocent people.
Arkansas executed an innocent but convicted person in 2017 who was subsequently cleared by DNA evidence. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-sense-chaos/2...
So it seems the death penalty cannot be enforced if it cannot be investigated or adjudicated with a necessary and sufficient degree of rigor. It also doesn't serve a purpose as a deterrent (criminals aren't smart enough to anticipate outcomes). Furthermore, it makes the society that dispenses it appear governed by a 3rd-world authoritarian regime. Finally, it's an expensive process and a bloodlust spectacle. Better off keeping cretins alive behind bars for the remote possibility of rehabilitation and let them live with themselves rather than giving them an easy out.
