Comment by cornholio
2 years ago
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.
That's indeed what I said, but I was cautious. I'd have to dig into the latest literature to be sure, but I don't remember seeing even 1 case where shaking with no impact was independently witnessed or videotaped, and was shown to cause retinal/subdural haemorrhage, with or without any other form of trauma.
In any case, these situations are extremely rare, much more than those involving any kind of head impact.
You need to work on your comprehension
Please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.