What is ‘shaken baby’ syndrome over which a US man could be executed?

A Texas man this week could become the first person executed in the United States for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

Robert Roberson is scheduled to receive a lethal injection on Thursday (October 17) for the 2002 killing of his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis.

The 57-year-old has long proclaimed his innocence.

While his lawyers and medical experts, don’t deny that head and other injuries from child abuse are real, they argue his conviction was based on faulty and now outdated scientific evidence.

Here’s all we know about the highly scrutinised diagnosis ahead of Roberson’s scheduled execution.

What is shaken baby syndrome?

Shaken baby syndrome is a serious brain injury caused by forcefully and violently shaking a baby, according to Healthline.

More from Health

From infections to lifestyle damage, experts call for integrated surgery and physiotherapy in India Dr explains: How modern lifestyles are fuelling the 'tech neck' epidemic and orthopaedic ailments

The condition, which is a type of child abuse that causes serious brain damage, is also referred to as whiplash shake syndrome, shaken impact syndrome, and abusive head trauma.

According to Healthline, it can happen after just five seconds of shaking.

Its symptoms include bleeding around the brain, brain swelling, bleeding in the eyes, difficulty staying awake, body tremors, trouble breathing, poor eating, seizures, vomiting, discoloured skin, coma, and paralysis.

The idea of child maltreatment first surfaced in the early 1970s.

It garnered attention as an explanation for why certain kids showed up sick, sometimes fatally sick, showing evidence of internal head trauma but little to no exterior harm.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

The new human organ scientists discovered in 2020 can help fight cancer of head and neck: Research

Doctor Explains | Why Pap smears can’t detect ovarian cancer and which tests women should rely on instead

Norman Guthkelch, a British paediatric neurosurgeon, was one of the first to support the hypothesis. In 1971, he suggested that the child’s severe shaking might be the reason.

However, some eminent scientists were sceptical of the condition’s credibility as a medical diagnostic and as a forensic technique applied in criminal cases. There are more than 80 different non-violent explanations for the symptoms, such as illness and falls, both of which Nikki’s case clearly proved.

Thousands of parents have been prosecuted for child abuse using the hypothesis, and Guthkelch has expressed concern that it is no longer credible, as per The Guardian.

According to the National Centre on Shaken Baby Syndrome, there are about 1,300 reported cases in the US.

As per the National Registry of Exonerations, 32 people who were convicted on the grounds of SBS have been cleared since 1993, indicating that concern has grown throughout the criminal judicial system.

What do we know about Roberson’s case?

Roberson has spent more than 20 years on death row in Texas for fatally shaking his two-year-old daughter Nikki. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected his petition last week.

His attorneys say he was wrongly arrested and later convicted after taking his daughter to a hospital. She had fallen out of bed in their home in the East Texas city of Palestine after being seriously ill for a week.

New evidence gathered since his 2003 trial shows his daughter died from undiagnosed pneumonia that progressed to sepsis and was likely accelerated by medications that should not have been prescribed to her and made it harder for her to breathe, said Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s attorney.

However, prosecutors maintain Roberson’s new evidence does not disprove their case that Curtis died from injuries inflicted by her father.

According to court filings from the Anderson County District Attorney’s Office, which brought Roberson’s case, a judge dismissed the theory that Curtis’ death was caused by pneumonia and other illnesses following a hearing in 2022 to review the new evidence.

Roberson’s attorneys and other supporters are not saying that child abuse doesn’t exist or that shaking a baby is safe, AP quoted Kate Judson, executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that seeks to improve the reliability of forensic science evidence.

“This is a case about whether someone was misdiagnosed and justice wasn’t served,” Judson said.

Haney said doctors are not just focused on a triad of symptoms to determine child abuse, but instead look at all possible things, including any illnesses, that could have caused the injuries.

Are there cases where decisions were overturned?

Yes.

In California, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Michigan, among other states, courts have recently reversed convictions or withdrawn charges related to shaken baby syndrome.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last week ordered a fresh trial in another shaken baby syndrome case out of Dallas County, concluding that scientific breakthroughs related to the diagnosis would now likely result in an acquittal in that case.

However, Roberson’s bid to have his execution postponed has been turned down by the appeals court on multiple occasions, most recently on Friday.

However, according to a 2021 study, 97 per cent of the more than 1,400 convictions involving shaken baby syndrome from 2008 to 2018 were upheld, and these convictions were hardly ever overturned on the basis of medical evidence, according to Danielle Vazquez, executive director of the National Centre on Shaken Baby Syndrome, located in Utah.

According to Vazquez, her organisation is concerned that some parents or carers may mistakenly believe that shaking a newborn is harmless due to scepticism around the diagnosis.

With inputs from The Associated Press