Twenty-five years ago, Russell Maze was convicted of killing his infant son. Actually, he was first convicted of having assaulted his infant son, and then, when the child died a year and some months later, he was tried again and convicted of homicide. His wife, Kay Maze, pleaded guilty to reckless aggravated assault, because at the time she (naïvely) believed doing so would help her regain custody of her child.
For detectives at the time, it was an open and shut case. A doctor — child abuse expert Dr. Suzanne Starling — told them that she was absolutely certain that the only way Maze’s son Alex could have the sustained the injuries he had was through “shaken baby syndrome or being thrown through a car windshield.”
So when they interviewed Maze, this is what they told him. They said they already knew, for a fact, that he had to have shaken Alex very roughly, and that he needed to tell them how he did it. Ultimately, after several hours, Maze “confessed.” Or he at least conceded that it was possible that when he came upon his son and saw that he wasn’t breathing — the initial reason he made the 911 call that started all of this — that he perhaps shook him a little while trying to revive him.
For the Tennessee prosecutor who tried Maze in both of his trials, Brian Holmgren, an advisory board member of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome who would later write a paper titled “The Supreme Court Screws Up the Science: There Is No Abusive Head Trauma/Shaken Baby Syndrome ‘Scientific’ Controversy,” it was also a no-brainer.
But as it turns out, it was not a no-brainer and it certainly wasn’t all that open and shut, and the Davidson County District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit has determined that Russell Maze was innocent all along and is now asking for his conviction to be vacated.
Via the Nashville Banner:
In a notice of intent filed in late December 2023, Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk wrote, “This Office knows of clear and convincing evidence establishing Ms. Maze and Mr. Maze were both convicted of crimes they did not commit.”
Along with that letter, the CRU submitted a lengthy report detailing flaws in the conviction process and analysis from five medical experts who debunk the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, also known as abusive head trauma — citing new science that points to other likely explanations for Alex’s death. Last month, one of the detectives in the case filed a statement with the court saying that the police did not have a complete picture of Alex’s health and, as a result, erred in their investigation.
Today, a judge will hear their petition and determine if Maze will finally be set free. He goddamned well should be.
As anyone who knows anything about Shaken Baby Syndrome can tell you, we now know (and have known for some time now) that the triad of specific injuries that “could only be shaken baby syndrome” — subdural hemorrhage, retinal bleeding, and encephalopathy — can also be caused a number of other things, including metabolic disorders, Vitamin K deficiencies, and other non-abuse related issues. One thing known to mimic the syndrome is macrocephaly, or enlarging head circumference, which doctors had observed in Alex Maze prior to the shaken baby diagnosis.
Alex Maze had been born several weeks premature and had to be hospitalized for the first few weeks of his life. The Mazes took him to the hospital seven times afterwards, due to his continual health problems, and at one point were even told they were overreacting.
However, on May 3, 1999, the day they brought Alex to the hospital for the last time, the attending physician wrote down in his notes that the child was a “full-term” baby with no history of health problems at all. Had the physician acknowledged that Alex’s initial due date had not even arrived yet and that he’d had severe health problems since birth, it is very likely that “Shaken Baby Syndrome” would not have even been on the table.
Demetria Kalodimos of the Nashville Banner produced a mini-documentary telling the Mazes’ story that is definitely worth a watch if you have the time.
Despite what the former prosecutor in Maze’s case claims, there has been a legitimate controversy over Shaken Baby Syndrome for decades, starting with the very case that brought it to many people’s attention in the first place — the 1997 case in which British au pair Louise Woodward was put on trial for having supposedly killed Matthew Eappen, the child in her care, by shaking him to death. Even then, there were experts trying to explain that it would not have been remotely physically possible for someone to shake a baby the way prosecutors claimed Woodward shook the baby without injuring the baby’s neck or injuring it in any other way.
Hell, Patrick Barnes, the pediatric radiologist who testified in the Woodward trial on behalf of the prosecution, has said in the years since that he was wrong and no longer believes that shaking had anything to do with Eappen’s death.
Even the man who is credited as first discovering what would later be termed Shaken Baby Syndrome, Norman Guthkelch, was deeply opposed to the diagnosis being used to prosecute parents and caretakers, when all he ever wanted to do was to let parents know that shaking a baby was dangerous and that they shouldn’t do it.
“SBS and AHT are hypotheses that have been advanced to explain findings that are not yet fully understood. There is nothing wrong with advancing such hypotheses; this is how medicine and science progress. It is wrong, however, to fail to advise parents and courts when these are simply hypotheses, not proven medical or scientific facts,” Guthkelch said in 2012. This is what a reasonable person sounds like.
Since 2015, the year after the documentary The Syndrome came out and the controversy around Shaken Baby Syndrome became more widely known, even as myriad forensic pathologists, biomechanical engineers and other experts have produced evidence that there’s no real way to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors have charged at least 3,000 people with child abuse or murder related to Shaken Baby Syndrome or Abusive Head Trauma, despite the fact that there really is no definitive way of proving either without a witness. False confessions, like Maze’s, are very common in these cases because the police tell distraught parents that they probably shook the baby by accident and that if they simply confess they won’t get 10,000 years in prison.
It is entirely understandable that people want to arrest and punish child abusers, and that they like the idea of being able to point to “science” as irrefutable proof. But we just should not be sending anyone to prison (or keeping anyone there) for 25 years or even 25 days based on a hypothesis that, I’m sorry, has never been definitively proven.
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