“The criminal justice system’s demand for proof beyond a reasonable doubt has led to the development of entire scientific fields – some now facing serious questions about their accuracy — aimed at definitively proving a suspect’s guilt or innocence.
“Bloodstain patterns. Handwriting analysis. Firearm and toolmark examination.
“The urge for irrefutable evidence is particularly strong in cases of alleged child abuse, which often happen with no witnesses and give police little to go off besides the word of the parent who brings a child to the hospital.
“But a vocal minority of experts now say that the certainty doctors once assigned to the idea of shaken baby syndrome was misplaced. The ‘constellation’ of injuries, once considered a virtually certain sign of child abuse, may have other causes – including causes that aren’t criminal.
‘I think the broad problem is that what’s sometimes missing in these medical investigations of suspected abuse is the idea that there are limits to what the science can tell us,’ said Jeffrey Gilleran, the chief attorney of Maryland Office of the Public Defender’s forensics division.
Read the article by Madeleine O’Neil in the Maryland Daily Record.
