The New Jersey Supreme Court last week affirmed (6 -1) an appellate court ruling that prosecutors cannot admit the Shaken Baby Syndrome hypothesis in a criminal trial. It’s the first state to bar the diagnosis, despite growing awareness that SBS syndrome is junk science. It is often presented as the cause of injury or death of a child in criminal prosecutions. Robert Roberson’s case in Texas is one of the most prominent examples of how an innocent person can be wrongly accused of killing their child based on the egregiously flawed theory.
The appellate court had ruled in favor of two fathers, in separate cases, who were charged with aggravated assault of their two infant boys. In a 2022 decision, Judge Pedro J. Jimenez, Jr., dismissed the indictment against one of the fathers, saying SBS/AHT (abusive head trauma) was “more conjecture than a diagnosis.” Judge Benjamin S. Bucca, Jr., then barred testimony based on SBS in the second case, citing Jimenez’s ruling,” the New Jersey Monitor reported. Their rulings were then affirmed by the New Jersey Superior Court, which found that “The evidence supports the finding that there is a real dispute in the larger medical and scientific community about the validity of . . . SBS/AHT theory, despite its seeming acceptance in the pediatric medical community.”
Prosecutors then appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which issued its ruling based on SBS/AHT’s history over the last 60 years. Finding that the theory of SBS/AHT was based on biomechanical science and engineering, the state high court ruled that the state hadn’t established that the biomechanical community agreed that shaking alone could produce the “triad of symptoms” (subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhages, and encephalopathy) that characterizes SBS/AHT, according to a syllabus of the court’s decision. The court also noted that testimony presented at the trial court indicated that there is no test supporting a finding that a person can inflict the physical force necessary to cause the symptoms that indicate a child was injured as a result of SBS/AHT.
It remains to be seen if the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling will cause a ripple effect in other states. According to the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, there are approximately 1,300 SBS/AHT cases reported every year in the U.S.
Last month, Robert Roberson came within a week of being executed after being convicted based on the SBS hypothesis before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed his execution and reinstated the temporary restraining order requested by Texas lawmakers. The high court sent his case back to the district court to reconsider his sentence because another person convicted under SBS was exonerated by the CCA in November 2024.
If Roberson’s execution had proceeded, he would have been the first person in the U.S. to be put to death based on SBS, a diagnosis that even the physician who first identified it told NPR may be relied upon too often by doctors and medical examiners as the cause of a baby’s death or injury without considering other factors.
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