By Susan Luttner

On an otherwise lovely afternoon in the spring of 1996, sitting on a bench under the redwood trees in the city park with a friend while our children played, I heard a piece of news that made me blench. My friend’s adult niece, Stephanie, had been accused of shaking a baby into permanent brain damage.Stephanie said the 5-month-old she was watching had choked on a bottle and quit breathing in her arms. At the hospital, though, doctors said bleeding and swelling in the child’s brain and eyes proved the little girl had been violently shaken – so violently, in fact, that the effects would have been immediately obvious.

My friend was confident an investigation would exonerate her niece. The baby had been dropped off that morning with ‘a touch of the flu’,and vomiting is a well-known sign of head injury. Doctors found no external signs of battering – no bruising, abrasions, or grip marks – but they did find healing rib fractures estimated to be maybe 10 days oldthe afternoon she collapsed at Stephanie’s. They also found blood in the girl’s brain of several different ages, the oldestestimated at a week, and she had an undatable skull fracture with no bruising of the scalp above it – all possibly implying she had suffered a blow to the head a week or 10 days earlier.

page: 89 – 110
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 35, Issue 5
SKU: 350503