Anatomy of Innocence by Laura Caldwell

Author:Laura Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

GAYLE LYNDS is hailed as the queen of espionage thrillers. She is the two-time winner of the Military Writers Society of America’s award for best novel, and her work has been nominated for numerous other awards. She is married to JOHN SHELDON, a retired prosecutor, defense attorney, judge and former visiting scholar to Harvard Law School. Frequent cowriters, John and Gayle live happily in Maine, far from the urban jungles about which they write.

Editors’ Note:

In 1971, Dr. A. Norman Guthkelch observed that the shaking of babies could result in “whiplash,” subdural hematoma, retinal bleeding and other symptoms, even though there was no external evidence of head injury to the babies. Such injuries often lead to severe disability or death. “Shaken baby syndrome,” as Guthkelch’s diagnosis was later named, became the basis for numerous prosecutions of caregivers—almost wholly women.

On January 31, 2008, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals granted Audrey Edmunds a new trial based on “competing credible medical opinions in determining whether there is a reasonable doubt as to Edmunds’s guilt.” Specifically, the appeals court found that “Edmunds presented evidence that was not discovered until after her conviction, in the form of expert medical testimony, that a significant and legitimate debate in the medical community has developed in the past ten years over whether infants can be fatally injured through shaking alone, whether an infant may suffer head trauma and yet experience a significant lucid interval prior to death, and whether other causes may mimic the symptoms traditionally viewed as indicating shaken baby or shaken impact syndrome.”1

The controversy continues. Dr. Guthkelch has stepped back from his position that the symptoms are always indicative of criminal conduct, expressing disappointment in the way his diagnosis has been appropriated by using the science as a way to convict people.2 Meanwhile, the National Center for the Review and Prevention of Child Deaths in the United States continues to argue for study, worried that as a result of the current scientific confusion, guilty child abusers are going unpunished.

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