The Forensic Unreliability of the Shaken Baby Syndrome

As a lawyer who is often involved in concurrent family/criminal cases, I sometimes encounter situations where parents or caregivers are accused of shaking a child. Papetti’s book is a MUST HAVE for lawyers because it provides an in-depth overview of the flaws in the Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) diagnosis. Papetti even discusses the application of the Daubert standard to SBS, which is invaluable for lawyers.As the only diagnosis that also has a cause (a baby cannot be diagnosed with SBS if they have not been shaken), SBS is a challenge for courts and attorneys alike to navigate. Papetti makes this type of injury less daunting by providing a comprehensive medical overview that is clear and easy to understand, as well as helpful citations for attorney to use to back up their arguments.While Papetti recognizes that the common goal of both the sides is to protect children from abuse, he also addresses that the physician who diagnoses SBS is not infallible. Through no fault of their own, physicians who treat children are often trained to see signs of child abuse and to immediately call child protective services (Department of Child Safety in Arizona) when they suspect abuse.I often recommended this book to colleagues dealing with SBS/AHT allegations. Papetti’s expertise in navigating the SBS/AHT diagnosis translates to an easy-to-understand guidebook for a practitioner defending (or even just attempting to understand) the complexity of these allegations.Well done!

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to get a good understanding of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) and the flaws of this debunked diagnosis. Papetti's writing is clean and concise. This book is over 300 hundred pages, and yet can be read through very quickly, as a great deal of those pages are taken up with extensive citations and notes. It is a must read for anyone studying this complex issue, and a valuable resource for a lawyer who needs a comprehensive overview, with the citations to back up the facts.This book covers the history and origins of SBS, the biomechanical aspects, the truth of short falls, the issue of neck damage, the triad, lucid intervals, the circularity of the SBS literature, the alternative explanations for the triad, the lack of integrity in the work of SBS proponents, as well as a section on application of the Daubert standard to SBS, valuable for lawyers.I found this book to be worth its price, and I am grateful to the author for his tremendous work in writing it.

This is a solid but necessarily selective review of the topic. Physicians everywhere have known for years that the literature on shaking injury is lousy. There is just no way of doing triple blinded randomized control trials in something like this. So we will never have great experimental science to support the hypothesis. We must rely on models and cases studies.The author could have done a slightly better job emphasizing the fact that the issue at hand is the FORENSIC unreliability—that is, jurisprudence is the topic at hand. The diagnosis of shaking injury as a MEDICAL concept may be satisfactory, but this book argues that it is not adequately established to meet Daubert criteria as scientific evidence for criminal proceedings. The book makes this point eventually and briefly, but many readers might lose sight of this.There are points where the pendulum swings also. This comes up in the matter of subdural bleeding. Arguments are presented to reject the bridging veins as the source and then articles suggesting these subdurals arise as intradural bleeds are presented. Shortly later the unfounded assertion is made that it is now established that these subdurals begin as intradural bleeds. But that is not a universally accepted and established fact yet. There is merely evidence to support it in some cases. So the pendulum swings from one unfounded assertion to another.This is an easy read and is very informative. I recommend it but read it critically lest you get swept up in the confusion of this whole topic. The issues at hand are merely two: 1) is there a SYNDROME resultant from shaking? And 2) is it established science for admissibility in medical jurisprudence?Whether or not shaking can even truly cause injury is not actually the question that this book seeks to address—though it is part of the discussion of course.