Symposium: Examining Shaken Baby Syndrome Convictions in Light of New Medical and Scientific Research

I\u27ve been asked to react to Professor Findley\u27s talk, and I just wanted to try to put this in a concrete format that we can understand. In the summer of 2001, when my oldest daughter was about six months old, I put her in a backpack (the kind that you strap to your back) to go for a hike. In trying to get her out of that backpack after the walk, I dropped her, and she landed on her head, and she very briefly lost consciousness. So I rushed her to the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, where I live, and by the time I got her in the car she regained consciousness, and she was fine by the time she was examined at the hospital. The reason I\u27m not in jail today is because she did not present these three symptoms that Professor Findley and Dr. Bames are talking about: encephalopathy-in other words, damage to the brain; retinal hemorrhaging-blood in the eyes; and a subdural hematoma-blood underneath the skull in the brain