Comment by raducu
2 years ago
Similar case in Denmark/Romania where a baby was taken from his romanian parents because of the shaken baby syndrome, parents spent time in jail, but the hemorage continued over time so they had to concede it wasn't the shaken baby syndromd.
Even if the kids hemorrhaging continued, it was brought to the ER initially with fractures in the right side of the skull.
> it was brought to the ER initially with fractures in the right side of the skull.
Just to defuse this a bit. My #4 used to collect skull fractures. He'd slip away in a nanosecond and would be 50' above us two heartbeats later. We put him in a padded helmet for a year or so. It stayed on sometimes.
As an adult he can still disappear in an empty room.
I did not know this detail, I know the Danish state offered apologies, the charges were dropped and the child was returned to the parents.
Yeah, nobody know the exact parts of the case. As its semi-secret (to protect the child and parents I guess). While the parents were cleared, this case is definitely not appropriate to this discussion as it was definitely not only hemorrhaging that started it. If a hospital gets a toddler with fractures on their skull, society should damn well figure out how it got them and stop it from happening again.
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The trouble is: shaken baby syndrome is real and well documented. Because the crime is so abhorrent, people strongly want to believe the diagnostic tools to be much more sensitive and accurate than they really seem to be.
It's the classic "N guilty men" problem, aka Blackstone's ratio: if you risk putting one innocent person in jail, how many guilty people you need to catch to make it morally justifiable? 5, 10? 100?
You have to pick a number, or else no kind of criminal justice can exist.
In the article it clearly states that shaking does not cause the hemorrhage that's currently considered "shaken baby syndrome". It literally says there aren't documented cases where the shaking was captured on tape/testified and the symptoms present at the same time.
It's more likely that a fall (or being thrown) would cause the symptoms.
I read it as no cases where shaking caused ONLY the retinal/subdural haemorrhage, without any other trauma.
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You need to work on your comprehension
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The better way to think of what you said is:
If toyota cars unintentionally accelerate and kill people, but sometimes people mistakenly accelerate and kill people. If I am driving a toyota and accelerate and kill a person, if 100% of all cops/investigators believe the first case doesn't exist, and the second case is the only possible answer, I will be thrown in jail without a second thought; my life is destroyed, and it wasn't even my fault.
But more than that, we don't even know what the ratios are, is it 90% / 10%? is it 10% / 90%? is it 50/50? Because everyone believes it is 0%/100% we can't make the "N guilty men" decision at all, so we need a hard stop, evidence, and re-start.
I know you were downvoted, but I think your thoughts are exactly the problem I am trying to point out. So thank you for commenting on it.