Shortcut: Shaken Baby Syndrome: How Certain Is the Diagnosis?

Meshel Laurie (0:03)

This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie.

Few areas of forensic medicine are more sensitive or more consequential than the question of how a baby suffered a serious brain injury. Journalist Michael Bachelard explores the controversial science behind shaken baby syndrome in his podcast, Diagnosing Murder, investigating cases where parents and carers have been accused of harming their children. Michael joins us on this episode to discuss what he found, the families involved in these cases, and the ongoing debate over how these devastating injuries should be understood. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

I mean, this is such an important story that you're working on, but such a downer. Like I feel like we need to warn our listeners, perhaps more than never before, that this is such hard stuff to talk about, right? But it's so important that we do talk about it. And you make the point in the first episode that you're sort of a little bit worried that people are going to accuse you of trying to minimize violence against children or...

Michael Bachelard (1:20)

I didn't want to be the guy who was, you know, could be seen as defending baby killers. It's not how I imagined my journalistic career going.

Meshel Laurie (1:31)

It's incredibly touchy subject to bring up. These men are reviled in our community. The idea of a big strong man shaking a baby and giving it catastrophic injuries, maybe killing it.

These are not sympathetic characters.

Michael Bachelard (1:47)

No, that's right. And the way they very often present, you know, as I say, it's the boyfriend who's been left in charge of the baby while the mother goes off to do shopping or whatever it is, and the baby ends up in this seizure or dying or dead.

You know, there is not a lot of sympathy for them, and you can completely understand why.

In 1971, a little slim academic paper speculating that shaking might cause brain damage, and that kind of hit a chord because at that point, believe it or not, the idea that people actually abused their children was still fairly new. And suddenly, here's this kind of explanation for why children or babies were showing up with some of these injuries. So it went off into a kind of an educational sphere. So people would say, don't shake your baby. And by the way, that is great advice. You don't want to shake a baby. It's really bad for them. But what happened in the 1990s was that people, prosecutors and police took this educational kind of theory and approach and went, well, actually, if this baby turns up dead and we don't know why, maybe they've been shaken and they started prosecuting these cases. And it's sort of accelerated from there as the police. And we tell this story in the podcast, the prosecutors and the medical scientists start to amp each other up. And the medical scientists say, well, if they're going to prosecute on these things, we'd better be certain. So they've done all these studies which build on it and build on this kind of theory.

Meshel Laurie (3:19)

And then it becomes a sort of a slam dunk, doesn't it? Legally and medically. And a baby shows up at the hospital. It has retinal hemorrhage, subdural hemorrhage and brain swelling. That's the triad.

It's been shaken.

Michael Bachelard (3:32)

Well, and legally, it's kind of all you need. And that's why our podcast is called Diagnosing Murder because you've got a perpetrator, the last person who was holding the child. You've got criminal intent because they say the force required is like a fall from a five-story building or a car crash. And you've got a victim being the baby. So really on the basis of this medical opinion, that's pretty much all that a prosecutor needs to convince a jury. And those prosecutions really amped up in the 1990s. More recently, interesting things have happened. There's a bunch of medical doctors now who are questioning the theory.

There's been 40 exonerations in the United States by scientists and defense lawyers challenging the theory and the evidence behind it. A guy has been released from death row recently, pending a new trial in Texas on the change in the scientific evidence.

Meshel Laurie (4:34)

What's changed scientifically? Like, I think, tell me correctly if I'm wrong, is it that scientists now say that a baby can get these injuries in different ways?

Michael Bachelard (4:46)

There's a couple of things. The biomechanics of it, that is the tests that they've done on baby lambs and monkeys, and on crash test dummies and things like that, they've never shown the forces that you can apply simply by shaking, are enough to give that kind of effect. So they've always been unfriendly to that, but nevertheless, the theories survived that. I guess there is a greater appreciation now of two things. One is that short falls, including from as low as a bed or a couch, can cause those kinds of forces, and they can be accidental, of course.