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Dr. John Plunkett died this week. He spent nearly 20 years arguing in court against bad forensic science, for which he was maliciously prosecuted and received false ethics complaints. Through his efforts, 300 innocent people were exonerated. (This sentence from fark.com)
Like a lot of other doctors, child welfare advocates and forensic specialists, John Plunkett at first bought into the theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). It's a convenient diagnosis for prosecutors, in that it provides a cause of death (violent shaking), a culprit (whoever was last with the child before death) and even intent (prosecutors often argue that the violent, extended shaking establishes mens rea.) But in the late 1990s, Plunkett — a forensic pathologist in Minnesota — began to have doubts about the diagnosis. The same year his study was published, Plunkett testified in the trial of Lisa Stickney, a licensed day care worker in Oregon. Thanks in large part to Plunkett's testimony, Stickney was acquitted. District Attorney Michael Dugan responded with something unprecedented — it criminally charged an expert witness over testimony he had given in court. Today, the scientific consensus on SBS has since shifted significantly in Plunkett's direction.
[...] According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 16 SBS convictions have been overturned. Plunkett's obituary puts the figure at 300, and claims that he participated in 50 of those cases. I'm not sure of the source for that figure, and it's the first I've seen of it. But whatever the number, Plunkett deserves credit for being among the first to sound the alarm about wrongful SBS convictions. His study was the first step toward those exonerations.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 12 2018, @02:51AM
Money is the root of all evil, eh? But it isn't, quite. In this case, it's the desire for the quick and easy answer, and refusal to admit that total control and safety is impossible. This is "think of the children!!" versus the fact that no amount of protecting can ever achieve 100% safety.
When a child dies, parents everywhere are screaming for blood. There's a lot of pressure to pin blame on some human agency, and string them up. We don't like that there are still many things beyond our control. If a meteor struck and killed a child (an exceedingly low probability), some would still want to blame it on a person. Like, if the child was playing outside and died of a meteor strike, then it's the caregiver's fault for not keeping the child safe indoors.
Long time ago I read of a case in which a young boy rather suddenly started suffering severe health problems. They rushed him to emergency, the doctors operated, but the boy died anyway. The parents sued the doctors for malpractice, of course. Wanted those faking, lying, incompetent, malicious doctors' heads. But, it turned out the lad was infected with one of those nasty intestinal parasites that he picked up when some country cousins visited, and most unfortunately for him, the parasite took a wrong turn and ended up in his brain where it caused lots of problems that were ultimately fatal. It's very rare. The doctors were young and inexperienced, and totally missed the parasitic causes of the problems, but even experienced doctors were likely to have missed it, and then, even if they had figured it out, it was by then too late and they probably could not have saved the boy anyway. It was the work of another investigator who uncovered the presence of the parasite, and helped the doctors win the lawsuit, thereby saving them from having their careers unjustly ruined.