…in the late 1990s, Plunkett — a forensic pathologist in Minnesota — began to have doubts about the diagnosis. He started investigating cases in which children had died in a manner similar to the way accused caregivers had described the deaths of the children they were watching — by short-distance falls. What he found alarmed him. In 2001, Plunkett published a study detailing how he had found symptoms similar to those in the SBS diagnosis in children who had fallen off playground equipment. It was a landmark study. If a short-distance fall could produce symptoms similar to those in SBS cases, the SBS diagnosis that said symptoms could only come from shaking was wrong. By that point, hundreds of people had been convicted based on SBS testimony from medical experts. Some of them were undoubtedly guilty. But if Plunkett was right, some of them almost certainly weren’t.
Naturally, defense attorneys began asking Plunkett to testify. He obliged. The same year his study was published, Plunkett testified in the trial of Lisa Stickney, a licensed day care worker in Oregon. She had been charged with murder for the death of a young boy in her care. According to Stickney, she was in another room when she heard a thud. She rushed over and found the boy on the floor near an overturned chair, with blood coming from his head. But according to prosecutors, an autopsy showed the boy had the symptoms that conventional wisdom held could only have come from violent shaking. Thanks in large part to Plunkett’s testimony, Stickney was acquitted.
The acquittal was another landmark moment in the SBS story. Plunkett was now a threat to SBS cases all over the country. The office of Deschutes County, Ore., District Attorney Michael Dugan responded with something unprecedented — it criminally charged an expert witness over testimony he had given in court.
Of course they did — he was a denier.
paywall at WaPo try this:
http://www.startribune.com/john-plunkett-pathologist-who-battled-shaken-baby-syndrome-dies-at-70/480301593/
Plunkett, a forensic pathologist, spent nearly 20 years challenging shaken baby syndrome diagnoses. He was a leading critic of the theory he once accepted, and his work helped reverse hundreds of convictions based on bad forensics.
Plunkett died from cancer April 4, surrounded by his family at his farm in Welch, Minn. He was 70.
Plunkett provided expert testimony in 50 convictions that were overturned and personally consulted in hundreds of other cases in his “voracious quest for truth,” Goldsmith said. He won a lifetime achievement award from the Wisconsin Innocence Project in 2016 and was the central character in Goldsmith’s “The Syndrome,” an award-winning 2014 documentary.
Plunkett saw what victims of abuse looked like and noticed that many shaken baby syndrome (SBS) cases lacked external injuries. He consulted physicists and neurologists and assembled his own team of medical professionals to test the theory. He published his findings in 2001, detailing similar symptoms of brain bleeds in children who had fallen short distances and those diagnosed with SBS.
His wife, Donna McFarren Plunkett, called her late husband an optimist, and when the article was met with skepticism and personal attacks, he sought to restore those wrongfully convicted to their families.
Plunkett, the oldest of eight children, had a warm persona that connected colleagues, family and friends. His son Ben Plunkett said more than 100 people came to his birthday celebration last year.
Goldsmith’s cousin, Susan Goldsmith, is an investigative journalist who did research for the film and flew from Oregon to attend Plunkett’s funeral service last weekend. She said Audrey Edmunds, a caretaker convicted of murder in a shaken baby case who served 11 years in prison before she was exonerated, drove from northern Wisconsin through a blizzard to attend Plunkett’s funeral.
Plunkett spent his final years on his farm, where he cared for horses and shared his home with guests. Family and friends stayed at the farm and a neighbor’s home to wait out the storm after his funeral, which many called a celebration.
“There won’t ever be another John Plunkett,” Susan Goldsmith said. “He was someone willing to risk everything to help others. He wouldn’t rest — reconnecting children who were sent to foster homes and parents sent to prison wrongfully.”
Prosit!
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group ‘True North’
malevolent prosecutors? regarding cases involving kids? try this:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/innocence/etc/sum.html
something for everybody: trial by msm, ie one kid who for instance, claimed they were on a boat tour when sharks leaped right over the boat. prosecutors CLEARLY with an agenda, child witnesses subjected to extreme grilling, aka ‘didja didja didja’ as opposed to ‘tell us in your own words, UNINTERRUPTED, what you actually saw and had happen’. and coached by parents who were told NOT to do so.
on and on it went. and of course the tried and true ‘plead guilty NOW or it’s going to be far WORSE’.
an atrocity by any description. I watched the PBS documentary in disbelief at the heinously disgusting behaviour of the prosecuting att’y.
I like the idea of prosecutors facing the music for withholding evidence in favour of the defendant.
In our systems, somewhere along the lines, the prosecutors got immunity, so it takes a whole lot to make them pay, prosecutors like doctors should be required to get their own insurance to protect the people from the prosecutors “errors”
SBS is to the 90s what Satanic ritual child abuse was to the 80s.
Somehow the people who prosecute these abominations always seem to get off scot free.
oh, and then there’s this (fortunately) rare medical condition can put parents in the hoochgow and/or had their kids taken away:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11953504
basically, a metabolic disorder caused ‘antifreeze’ to show up in blood and tissue samples.
aaaaand the crown att’y or DA pee their pants at the prospect of another ‘notch’ on their ‘gun’. and no doubt *some* of them IGNORE this explanation on their way to a court room ‘victory’ over the truth.
yup HB, I was charged with improper left turn. The cop was a rooky and an a$$hole. By the time I hit court, the cop had been kicked off the force for being an idiot. Crown asked me if I had been offered a plea deal. I told said crown that he had no witness, so no case. And by law he was obliged to with draw charges and that he should have notified me of doing so. I also told the fvck that by his actions he was breaking the law. Yup, all about conviction rates, and writing their CV!
One again, “Law Enforcement” and the “Legal” system at their finest. But it’s wrong, you see, to hold them and their families accountable. Even though their spouses know full well what they are, yet they cheer them on anyway.
There are no “good cops”.
Science has famously been described as self correcting. Scientists make mistakes — they are human, after all — but those mistakes are eventually found out and corrected.
And this may, on the whole, be true, but between the time the mistake is made and the time that it is corrected, a lot of damage can be done.
When scientific results are presented in court, what is needed is a rigorous assessment of how reliable those results are. Are the results highly verified, such as the laws of thermodynamics? Or are the results based on a single or a few results with many possible confounding factors, like many dietary claims?
p.s., anybody happen to notice the frequency I cite OLD stories to support a given claim by moi or other posters?
THAT ladies and gentlemen explains the moniker.
NOT some ‘claim’ to 95% accuracy of big complex issues like, oh, firearms laws and culture.
jist sayin’ . . . . .
I recently finished a history course and was asked by the prof to describe the day jfk stopped a bullet. aka ‘where were you when’.
and then again with the missile crisis. in an informative humorous way.
the closer to home the event gets the more detailed the description what happened.
I once memorized 60 digits of pi for practice. I also could recite almost every ph # I ever had.
and remember like yesterday the times I was sexually abused by none other than my own muther. ouch.
I got a black and white of Janis Joplin on my living room wall, caption “it’s all the same fcuking day”.
am I boring anyone? imagine what it’s like for me . . . . lol !!!
cops are assuredly NOT your friend. I also recollect a series on legal advice once featuring a cop stating it is true the best strategy when busted, DON’T TELL THEM NUTHIN’ THE ‘GOTS NUTHIN TO HIDE’ IS C-R-A-P-O-L-A so time to ‘spill the beans’, is actually meant to create an ‘urban legend’ that dovetails nicely with THAT profession’s penchant to do ‘whatever’ to garner convictions and fill out the blotter.
jist sayin’ . . . . .
What to add?…
I want to see the demographics of the women sent away for shaking babies, and the demographics of the women Plunkett helped exonerate.
My best guess:
The white women were overwhelmingly innocent.
It was the “diverse” women who killed the white children stupidly left in their care because they wouldn’t stop crying when the nannies were trying to fornicate with their bulls on their employers’ time.
Yes, of course, the real villains here are brown people.
This is yet another case of the US justice system being inferior to Canada’s. One of the many ways Canada’s justice system is superior is more conservative use of forensic evidence. Another is no elected judges/prosecutors (to the best of my knowledge).
Unthing, I’v had a FEW brushes with the kanadian legal system, and it’s fu*king joke. You keep honking off about things you have no clue about. As to “brown” people, maybe you can afford to pay for some of them to git driver training, or maybe attitude adjustment classes.
There are appointed judges and prosecutors in the US as well, and they are every bit as foul, corrupt, treasonous, and contemptible as any of the elected. All the judges declaring President Trump’s orders “unconstitutional” were appointed. At least there’s a possibility of a community REPLACING an elected judge or prosecutor, even though said replacement will have to have a “law” degree. With the appointed, you are stuck with the sewage forever. Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a prime example.
Waay too many people watching too much CSI and the like.
I have a problem with the statement that there are no good cops. There are many. But there are always a few bad apples that taint any profession.
Now, Journalists are another story.
No there are not ‘many’. There are as many as the ones who arrest the bad cops. Which is rare.
Nailed it. The so-called “good cops” look the other way screaming “I SEE NOTHINK!!!” in their best imitation of Sergeant Schultz. They are not even remotely “good”.
The courts and legal system is designed to cater to the criminals here in Canada.
To call it a justice system now would be a joke.
How many innocents have they put in jail here? Half a dozen come to mind.
How many criminals run free with extensive criminal records – far too many.
Canada’s crime rate is not higher than America’s, despite America’s vastly higher incarceration rate.
Canadian Courts , a lot of law and very little justice. Lawyers Bullsh!tting the Judge and each other, and then they all go to lunch together to discuss their investment port folios.