Scroll down, past the welcome message, to find full list of links for POSTINGS on this website

Scroll down, past the welcome message, to find full list of links for POSTINGS on this website
Scroll down, past the welcome message, to find full list of links for POSTINGS on this website (in the sidebar to the left)

Translate

Search This Blog - Results shown BELOW Welcome Message


IMPORTANT WELCOME MESSAGE

Scroll down past message to view posted topics


“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

“‘Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction.” - British poet Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron)

A lot of evidence concerning abuse and corruption connected with Children's Aid/Children Services/CPS and the various related government departments and non-government organizations (NGOs) has surfaced in both the U.S. and Canada - yet, over the years, nothing changed.

This indicated that there was a larger more powerful connection at play. It did not take long to find this bigger connection. However, in the early years, there were few people who would accept the reality of these larger global connections.

Most people do not want to believe that corruption and abuse against innocent families and children exists in Canada and the U.S.. They need to feel a sense of security in the society they live in, and that need is so great that most people will prefer to believe a lie rather than face the truth. They want to believe that such things only exist in third world countries !

Understanding that even the basics of the wickedness in Nova Scotia, Canada was hard for most people to accept, we originally limited the information we posted to local concerns. This way, at least, we hoped that we could begin educating Nova Scotians about the reality of abuse and corruption connected with Children's Aid/Children Services/CPS.

However, it broke our hearts to find testimonies from parent groups throughout North America and beyond who had worked years to inform the public and had attemped to change the system, as we had, with no success. They were frustrated and did not understand why, despite all the evidence that had come forward, nothing was done, nothing changed.

We felt they were owed an explanation, so, hopefully, now is the time for people to hear and accept the "Bigger Global Picture".

The powerful connections that are responsible for abusing our innocent families and children go to the highest levels that hides behind secrecy and secret organizations.
Countless people will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people." ~ H. G. Wells (1939)

Finally alternate media, first hand testimonies from people coming out of these evil organizations, and countless politicians began now declaring openly the plan for a New World Order and a one world government. Because of this, it is hoped that people will accept the evidence we are now posting concerning this evil global connection. Please view topics under "Bigger Picture" , "Agenda 21" , "Democracy Destroyed" etc .

Because of the push to form a One World Government, we are all connected in our struggle. What is being done elsewhere is being, or will be, done to us because it is the same global power which is working towards the destruction of our families and our children worldwide - And the corruption in Children's Aid/Children Services/CPS is is just one of the instruments they use to achieve this goal.

Thus far there are at least 8 powers that are struggling for this one world domination: the Illuminati, Communism, the Vatican, the Masons, the Islam extremists (understand these Islam extremists are killing fellow Islamic people who do not agree with their extreme views) and India, China, and Russia. They all use and manipulate each other but, ultimately, each wants ultimate control.

In the Christian Bible, it is prophesied that an evil Anti-Christ will set up a one World government utilizing a one world religion where all the people of the world will eventually be forced to worship him alone. It is difficult, at this time, to determine, for certain, if this Anti-Christ raises up from any of the 8 powers mentioned above or elsewhere. Please link here if you are interested in learning more about the Anti- Christ.

Over the years, we have seen the voice of the people shut down: Newspapers, and Radio stations, that were willing to write and broadcast critical articles and interviews against Children Services/CPS and government folded. And radio/media personalities, who allowed people to speak out against Children Services/CPS and the government, lost their jobs or were heavily curtailed.

Both the US and Canada have passed laws to remove our right and freedoms, including free speech: the Patriot Act, numerous Executive Orders nullifying the US Constitution. The latest US government grab for power is the NSAA that would allow the US government to put any US citizen in indefinate detention without charges or a trial.

Oath Keepers (military police and sheriffs loyal to the US Constitution - ready to defend the people against enemies "foreign or domestic" ) and some congress people, senators and US States have also taken a stand. Even concerned individuals have gone to the courts to fight the NSAA.

We believe the internet, as we know it, soon will be limited. Eventually internet use will be removed completely from the hands of the people. The time is short. The time to get this information out is now. No one is immune from the abuse of Children Services /New World Order/Agenda 21 etc. The victims can be your family, your children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews etc.

You cannot move away from this threat - It is global !You must not put your head in the sand! - There is a global plan to destroy the family unit and physical, sexual and mental abuse is an essential part of Trauma-Based Mind Control, one of the many mind control programs used by this global system to destroy our children. They are also using the more insidious Neuro Linquistic Programing (NLP) to alter people's value system. But the current and planned use of Electronic, Psychotronic Mind Control which can be used on people in mass is the most alarming of all ! Please view the many topics on this site under the title MIND CONTROL.

They want our children to rebel against us. They want the new generation to view the "state" as their parent.

But worse than all this, they want to kill off most of the people on this planet, and all under the guise of environmentally saving the planet. We have been declared the enemy - They openly state that we, and our children must be sacrificed for the greater good.

If this sounds extreme to you then it is because you have not been paying attention to the world events that are unfolding before your very eyes. You have been lulled into ignorance and apathy. The expansion of sports and sports arenas, the addiction to various social networks, the focus on celebraties on so called "news" shows. This has all been designed to placate the masses and to get your focus off politics and the changes that are being done to you and your family. Your attention has also been diverted to worrying about the economy and an "enemy" that shifts and changes to suit the political manipulating whims of a small powerful elite. - and this spell has been caste over you "by design". The people in the highest realm of this global power call us "stupid sheep", and we are being lead to the slaughter !

You must wake up NOW! Time is VERY short ! I suggest you start with the several topics listed under "Agenda 21" :

1. AGENDA 21/ Sustainable Development Explained: North America - US - Canada - Nova Scotia (It is recommended that you read this 1st)

2. AGENDA 21/ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Population Cut/ Cull (kill) Part 1
(They want to kill us, You should question, Vaccines, Fluoride, Water, GMOs, Chemtrails, Morgellons - GMO/Chemtrail desease.

3. AGENDA 21/ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Population Cut/ Cull (kill) Part 2
(Morgellons, Meat, Aspartame, No home gardens, Planned vitamin, mineral and organic food ban, Smart meters, Cancer cures, Pollution free energy and cars, Abortion, After birth abortion, Denying medical care, Killing our own troops, Gun control)

4. AGENDA 21/ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Pushback - People are waking up Part 1
(States, Governors, Sheriffs, )

5. AGENDA 21/ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Pushback - People are waking up Part 2
(Militia, Military, Whistleblowers)

6. Agenda 21/Sustainable Development: The Bigger picture

7. AGENDA 21/ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Political Takeover

8. AGENDA 21/ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Canada - New World Order (NWO)

If we do not WAKE UP, fight back, and win then you need to seriously prepare yourself and your family for, incarceration without trial, torture, persecution, and even death.

Did you know that Obama has declared Christians to be "potential domestic terrorists"? - Especially those who believe in the promised Second Coming of Jesus Christ, who, as it happens, according to the Bible, comes to put a stop to an evil one world government. http://youtu.be/c0kiSGKbljs

Maybe some of these Christians and Messianic Jews know something that is very important for these times and perhaps we should pay attention to what their holy books have to say about the "End Times" "End of the Age" etc. (the 3 1/2 to 7 years just before the return of Yeshua Ha Mashiach/ Jesus the Messiah or Anointed One.

For those who want to check this out, please LINK HERE (scroll down to topic list on the right) . Beautiful pictures, fab songs, great testimonies from ex- satanists, ex-witches, ex-illuminati, ex-islamists, Christ believing Jews, etc, archeological evidence for Biblical events and most important scriptures to help you, encourage you and guide you.

May you find the path to the Creator of the heaven and earth. He foresaw these days (view topics on the "End Times" in the link above) we are living in right now and He has instructed us clearly on what we must do and what we are NOT to do. ( "The Mark of the Beast" View all scriptures on this subject HERE Revelation 13: 11-17, 14: 9-11, 16: 2, 19:20, 20:4 . Acceptance of the mark is not a matter to be taken lightly. The Bible states that anyone who accepts the mark, that one must have to buy or sell, denies Christ in favor of a false god. This decision, once made, is irrevocable, and the consequences are everlasting. - ( LINK HERE to read in context with fab pictures and music)

Get yourselves educated. Get familiar with the law and the illegal and unconstituional actions of your government . Educate yourselves about the New World Order and Agenda 21. Get vocal with the government to protect your family and children. Get into the family court and bear witness to what is going on in the name of "justice".
Above written by - Reverend Niemoeller, a German Lutheran pastor who was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the concentration camp Dachau in 1938.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

A MUST READ for ALL Parents!!

A MUST READ for ALL Parents!!
http://sweetsusieg.hubpages.com/hub/A-MUST-READ-for-ALL-Parents

It really did start as a good thing.

In today’s state of affairs CPS workers (Child Protective Services) are coming into homes and taking children at an alarming rate. There are many things that can be said about CPS and most of them are not good. When CPS was first started it was designed for the betterment. Since we have learned and evolved in our parenting skills, we have become better parents.

Don't Mess With Texas CPS
"The family goes back to the age of savagery!" - quote from text book used to train social workers. Child protective Services is out of control. Their current method of operation is a Marxist soviet style system of unaccountable "Emergency" powers. No longer are parents allowed Due Process. Mere hearsay is enough for them to steal your kids.


Think it doesn't apply to you?

If you think that you are a good parent and they have nothing on you, think again. If you are a grand parent and think they can’t take away your grand children, think again. Look around your home, do you have wooden table? Anything with corners? Throw rugs? Sharp knives that are not locked away? Chemicals that are used for cleaning that are not under lock and key? Down to 1 egg in your egg tray? Do you have any enemies? Maybe a neighbor that is displeased with you? PLEASE read on!!


CPS Steals Children for Profit - Your Tax Dollars in Action!
Short video detailing abuse of power by Child Protective Services - CPS. Highlights financial incentives to steal kids and place them on drugs. Contains multiple news clips and interviews from families that CPS stole the kids from, and includes the late (possibly murdered) Nancy Schaefer.


Social Security? YES!

Two things are going on with CPS, first because we have become better parents they are needing to find justification for taking of children. The second, WHY do they need to take children? Because of the money involved. There is a LOT of money involved in children. Counseling for 'reunification' is no longer encouraged, in fact most often it is refused.

Our Federal U.S. Government is paying CPS to take children via Title IV D funding, or in other words Social Security. So when the day comes that you are told Social Security is broke and you are allowed no benefits, you will know this; All the money that you pay in each week goes, in part, to the removal of children from their homes.

Follow the money

Before I get into what is done with these children let explain the money. When a CPS worker becomes involved. Meaning when they open a case, the local office receives between $3,000 and $5,000 dollars per child - per month, from the Federal Government. The money just goes up from there. CPS can drag out cases for months. Then when they feel the money may be drying up from you (the client) they may take a good look at your children. Are they marketable? Are they cute, is it possible they can be adopted out?

What can and does happen

The first thing that can and does happen is you will be charged with something, anything. Please understand it does not have to be proven, not at all. The accusation is enough to remove your child/children. The most common charge is ‘failure to protect’. This can come from just about anything. After that, they can bring more charges and if they have made the 1st one, it is guaranteed they will come up with many others. NOT ONE CHARGE HAS TO BE PROVEN. A false accusation from ANYONE can bring CPS knocking at your door.

CPS workers are ‘above the Law’, there are no ramifications, no repercussions and they have no accountability. They are allowed BY LAW to say and do anything they please to take your children from your home. State Troopers LOVE to let CPS workers take charge because they do not have to have a warrant. All you have to do is open the door to them. Once they have entered your home, everything becomes suspect and they can and do remove anything they think they can charge you with. All without a warrant. Not only that, but you do NOT have to be read your Miranda rights.

More than likely you will be placed on the news with some sort of horror story that has been cooked up that will have you ostracized from the community. Your family and friends may turn against you because of the charges. Your spirit will be broken and all you will want is for ‘it to be over’, once you have come to that stage, they have you. You will do anything they tell you to do.

What happens to the children?

What happens to the children? At first they may be allowed to live with family members, but that will be short lived. They may be moved from foster care to foster care, those children who don’t want to leave their parents are labeled as mentally unstable and usually placed on large amounts of medication. Some of these become 'The Throw away’ children. Once they have forced, coerced or threatened you to sign off your parental rights, your kids will now be put up for adoption. Your family members will not be allowed to adopt them. Why? Because the State does not receive money for family related adoptions.

For each child that is adopted out, the State receives upwards of $85,000 from you guessed it, Title IV funding, or Social Security.

Some of these children are even sold to other Countries. For International adoptions the amount received is unknown at this point. It is kept very secret. A Former FBI agent is the one who discovered that this was happening.

What can YOU do?

There are several steps you can take to PREVENT your children from becoming targeted by CPS. Keep in mind the ones who are first targeted are relatively poor families. Being on any assistance can bring you unwanted attention. The second are large families, having 5 or more children will cause CPS to direct their attention your way. Because the amount of money that is involved, think about it, for 5 children they can get for your County between $15,000 and $25,000 per month, to start!! They particularly like to target 2 parent homes, because the children will be removed to foster care. If there is an ‘absent’ parent they are obligated to place the children in that home first, this will not net them any money so these families are over looked a lot of the time, even if ACTUAL abuse is noted.

1. The first thing you can do is put up a ‘No Trespassing’ sign on your property.

2. The next thing is a sign on your door “WARNING -ALL WHO ENTER ARE SUBJECT TO VIDEO SURVEILLANCE - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!! Make sure you have a camera that can record on hand.

3. NEVER open the door to a stranger! If someone comes knocking at your door, step outside to talk to them. If you invite them in, that is all that is needed.

Keeping them at Bay

ALWAYS make sure you write down their identity and badge number if they have one. If you can get them to sign their name that they visited that’s even better!

More than likely if you have those first 3 in place they will think twice about attempting to enter your property. If you force them to get a warrant then you will have a little more protection from the law. Not much, but some.

On to the ‘next step’. If you are having a hard time with your bills and your electricity is on ‘shut off’ you may be subject to being under scrutiny. In a home that has no electricity or one that is having a hard time keeping up with the bills, CPS will find a way to wiggle in. It is felt that electricity is a ‘necessity’ unless you can prove that you have a few things in place your children may be taken away.

Emergency supplies

Battery operated lighting, flash lights, or even hurricane lamps (provided the fluid is kept safe and put up out of the reach of children) are a good thing to have should your electricity be shut off. A small propane cook stove (can be found in the camping gear area of your local Walmart). Bottled water. Water sanitizing tablets. Canned food, with non electric can opener. Powdered eggs (if you can find them) and powdered milk. A first aid kit. Extra blankets or sleeping bags. Think ’Disaster’ when implementing these types of things in your home. Keep them separate from your ’regular’ things, in a closet or storage area that the kids can’t get into. If a CPS or DHS worker comes into your home, you can show them your preparedness.

Keep a log and RECORD everything

If you MUST talk to them, make sure they are recorded! Make sure that you keep a log of ALL visits. It is a guarantee they will not want this. NEVER sign ANYTHING without first consulting with an Attorney. Always, always remember your 5th Amendment right!!!! The right to remain silent, UTILIZE this!!! They will threaten you, “If you don’t talk to me, I promise you will never see your children again”. Get this recorded or in writing. It is a PROMISE that anything you say WILL be used against you, no matter what you say!

In most cases when there is a false accusation a number of your civil rights are being abused. Find a Civil Rights Attorney, if you can’t afford one see if they will take your case pro-bono. This will be a ‘Civil’ case, an Attorney WILL NOT be provided for you, you MUST provide your own. IF you are charged with Criminal charges, then you will be provided with an Attorney if you cannot afford one. Both Civil and Criminal are two different cases and WILL NOT be combined.

Children or Puppies?

In the State where I live there is a website that has been created for those wishing to adopt children. It is a site where pictures of children are displayed with a bio describing the children. Most of the parents that I have talked to regarding this site are horrified because it gives the impression that the children are being auctioned off to the highest bidder. If your looking for a puppy then might you not do the same?

Newborn baby taken from mother because of a poppy seed bagel


Still not a Believer?

For those of you who are still skeptical of what I am saying go visit ‘you tube’ and type in CPS in the search bar, a multitude of various video’s will pop up. On face book there are MANY various sites that are trying to get help for parents who have had their children removed. Go to Google and type in Legally Kidnapped. There are many sites that can use your support, one day you may be on the chopping block from CPS, if you are prepared then you will begin to know where to turn.



John Van Doorn


John Van Doorn Runs for San Diego County Supervisor in 2010
http://angiemedia.com/2010/02/24/john-van-doorn-runs-for-san-diego-county-supervisor-in-2010/


John Van Doorn has announced he is running for San Diego County Supervisor in 2010. We believe he deserves strong consideration for your vote in the June 2010 primaries.

The corruption and abuse within the County of San Diego government threatens the well-being of the citizens and particularly children and parents of the county. Bill Horn, the incumbent candidate, has participated in hiding and continuing these abuses. Despite two decades of San Diego Grand Jury reports detailing how San Diego CPS has wrongly removed children from families, fabricated evidence, perjured, and acted in a malicious fashion against many parents and children, Bill Horn has not lifted a finger to correct these problems despite being a member of the County Board of Supervisors during this long era of egregious CPS misconduct.

2008 Campaign

In 2008, John Van Doorn ran for the County Board of Supervisors as a virtually unknown candidate against four-term supervisor Pam Slater-Price. Despite his newcomer status, he attained 30% of the vote.

I believe his strong showing in part came from sharing his views about how the County of San Diego is harming children and families and how he wants to stop this destruction. His personal experience with the corrupt and broken San Diego government and courts has educated him in the way the county hurts children and parents for a profit. He has seen in person the abusive conduct of County of San Diego Child Welfare Services (commonly referred to as San Diego CPS). He has been subjected to harm against his family by the broken San Diego County Superior Courts that fail to understand that children need both parents. It’s evident to him that the County of San Diego government has decided that declaring fit parents as child abusers or “bad parents” and tossing their children into foster care or sole custody are viewed as money-making opportunities. The county gets Federal Title IV payments for :
each child it takes from a family,
each parent it labels as an abuser, and
each child support case it opens up.

You and your children are but dollar signs to the County of San Diego. They care about their budget and jobs, not about your family. John Van Doorn says that he knows this well and wants to put an end to it.

Using Children To Pump Up Revenues

The County of San Diego has financial motivation to label you as a child abuser or a bad parent. That you have not abused or neglected your children or that you may have made a mistake that has CPS upset at you but did not seriously endanger any children doesn’t matter to them. The shocking truth is that San Diego CPS management predetermines the outcome of some “risk evaluations” to meet their financial goals. You can be declared a child abuser to have your children taken from you and put into foster care so that the County of San Diego can get paid by the federal government for doing it. They are likely to fight to keep your kids in foster care, even if there is no reasonable justification, as they “earn” federal Title IV-D revenues for each child in foster care.

John Van Doorn related in a conversation in January 2010 that this disgusting practice of predetermined risk evaluations was revealed to him by a CPS case worker as an explanation for why he couldn’t change a CPS report with false information and conclusions. He said his supervisor told him what the outcome would be before he even did the interviews. He explained that he could not change his report even though he knew the bruise on the child involved was from slipping in a bathtub and hitting the tub spout and that this has been verified by the interviews.

Van Doorn was alarmed and brought attention to this problem in a public meeting of the County Board of Supervisors. He explained how these practices hurt innocent parents and children who are in no danger. Instead of moving to correct the problem by ensuring CPS management stops this abusive profiteering, the CPS case worker who disclosed the abusive practices of CPS management was promptly fired.

Hiding Title IV Funding Dependencies Upon Abusing Families

CPS and the County of San Diego Board of Supervisors want to hide their very dirty secret that a large part of funding for county operations comes from abusing children and parents to get payments from the federal government. It doesn’t just involve foster care and child support, it even involves adoptions. For many years, by delaying or blocking adoptions, the county maintained its revenue stream for each child living under its “protection” in foster care. That foster care is statistically more dangerous than leaving children with their biological parents is well known but commonly ignored because putting children in foster care is more profitable and helps keep county social worker jobs secure.

When this problem became apparent to some in the federal government, rather than cracking down on the CPS family abusers, they passed a law allowing payments to county governments for each child they adopted out to make up for the revenue loss. Now adoptions are more often supported by San Diego County. It’s not because they realized that adoptions are generally better than leaving children in foster care until age 18 and then kicking them out on the streets. They are now more supportive because adoptions have become yet another revenue center for the county. Maximizing revenue involves:
- declaring parents child abusers,
- taking their kids and putting them into foster care, and then
- moving to terminate parental rights and
- adopt out the children.
This is the way County of San Diego Child Welfare Services (CPS) helps funds its own operations and that of other county agencies.

John Van Doorn wants to end this practice by substantial cuts in funding and employee count for the family-abusers in county government. Children who are in danger should still get help to ensure their safety, but children who are merely poor or needy or whose families are going through temporary difficulties shouldn’t be removed from their homes simply because the government can make a profit on them.

Broken Family Law and Juvenile Law Courts

This corruption spreads into the San Diego family law and juvenile courts. The judges know that they are expected to help fund county and court operations. They can do it by issuing unfair and punitive child custody and child support orders as part of the Title IV federal funding paid to the County of San Diego is for collecting and enforcing child support. Taking away children, dragging out trials for years, and abusing families are tactics they can use to help do their part to fund county operations.

Encouraging the use of psychological evaluators in cases in which they are not needed is another tactic that the local courts use to pass along dollars to their friends. Van Doorn has experience with this abuse, too. Despite a fair and impartial psychological evaluation by one psychologist that pointed out the good points and flaws in both parents, the courts allowed Van Doorn’s ex-wife to force a second psychological evaluation conducted by ill-reputed Dr. Stephen Doyne. Doyne was allegedly upset at Van Doorn for not being able to pay him because his assets were frozen by the court due to the divorce. Van Doorn pointed out that his ex-wife could pay, so it appears her payments got her the evaluation she wanted. The San Diego Superior Court rubber-stamped this corruption and the county benefits from it doing so as the county is paid by the federal government to place children primarily or solely with one parent to force the other parent to pay child support.

(from Custody Evaluator’s Credentials Questioned In Lawsuit)

John Van Doorn, a Doyne client, said “You have a certain expectation that the courts have vetted out the person they are appointing.”

San Diego family law courts have allowed Stephen Doyne to act as a court-appointed psychological evaluator even though he appears to have published questionable and allegedly fraudulent credentials and failed to file state-mandated disclosure and reporting forms required of all psychological evaluators. Doyne has earned the ire of many San Diego parents for allegedly biased evaluations and unethical business practices.

Some of the other section 730 psychological evaluators in the county have been critical of Doyne, expressing the opinion that Doyne is making a bad name for all psychologists involved in resolving child custody and divorce disputes in the county.

Too often the result of this type of corruption is that children are prevented from spending more or less equal time with each of their parents. The abuse of using a divorce or child custody case as a means to impede or terminate parent/child relationships is traditionally committed against fathers. But it sometimes happens to mothers, too. Whichever parent is the target, the children will suffer harm in virtually every case. Even when good evaluators spell out workable plans to keep both parents involved in the lives of their children, San Diego courts may misuse such evaluations in “winner takes all” decisions that ultimately harm the children and are extremely unfair to one of the parents.

Children need both parents. The government should get its fingers out of perverting children’s lives for its own financial gain. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with children who have adequate food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care (which is the case with the vast majority of children) from spending equal time in each parent’s home and seeing that their parents have made different choices and have different lifestyles as a result. This would be far more beneficial to the children than yanking them away from one parent, damaging or destroying that child-parent relationship, and doing so to maximize the amount of child support to be paid and thereby maximizing the amount of Title IV funding that the County of San Diego will be paid to enforce these abuses.

New County Board of Supervisors Members Needed

The wrongs heaped upon San Diego children and parents will never stop with the current board members in place. As one of our authors wrote last year:

(from San Diego County Grand Jury Cites Further CPS Misconduct)

The failures and shortcomings in the CPS agency in the county have been brought to the attention of the Board of Supervisors repeatedly. Yet they do nothing effective to fix the problems, leaving CPS and its abusive staff free to continue to abuse the county’s children and parents.

There is no realistic doubt that the current San Diego County Board of Supervisors is substantially at fault for the abuses in the current system. Grand Jury reports have exposed the problems to them over and over again with substantial evidence of the misconduct of CPS and its sister child-abusing agencies. But little to no action is taken to correct the serious deficiencies.

The current Board of Supervisors consists of Greg Cox, Dianne Jacob, Pam Slater-Price, Ron Roberts, and Bill Horn. All five of the supervisors have been in office since 1995 or earlier, a period of time during which Grand Jury investigations have consistently shown that serious problems exist with CPS and that the agency blows off the recommendations to fix them on a routine basis.

The county supervisors have no incentive to clean up problems in the system because to do so, those problems must be discussed further. This is political risk-taking intolerable to them. They know they were in charge during this whole period of time and should have done something about the problems. Doing it now is effectively an admission that they were negligent in the past. Instead, they do all they can to bury these problems behind the scenes so that they are not politically damaged by their harmful and negligent conduct.

The county badly need new leadership to put an end to these problems and clean up the abuses and corruption.

John Van Doorn is a candidate who has stated that he intends to do exactly that. While he alone may not be enough to clean up the county, there’s no doubt in my mind that the alternative of re-electing Bill Horn will certainly lead to four more years of the same bad government.

CPS Live Buzz Interviews

Interview with the Children's Administration CPS
Mock interview with the Children's Administration. This is a must see and good for distribution to help others gain understanding of the system.

Interview with the Children's Administration II Relative Care
The State of Washington and along the West coast are developing communities to adopt children into taken from relative caregivers. This video depicts the attitude of the Children's Administration regarding child removal and family lineage destruction. They want to take children from poor families and create a Utopian society. [Google search "Judge masturbates in court" - this is for real! ]


CPS Live Buzz Interviews Doctor About Psych Evaluations



Officer Friendly's Safety Tips For Dealing With Child Protection Workers
For more information on how to deal with social workers, visit Fight CPS:
http://fightcps.com/2010/04/09/what-to-do-if-child-protective-services-social-workers-are-investigating-you/

and AFRA's How To Fight CPS page.
http://familyrights.us/how_to/fight_cps.html

And of course, for all the latest dirt on the Child Protective Industry visit: http://www.legallykidnapped.blogspot.com/



CPS Gone Wild - Episode 1
SIGN THE PETITION: http://www.change.org/petitions/return-michael-terpening-to-his-family

----------------
DISCLAIMER
----------------
This is a political cartoon, a parody. To the best of our knowledge, the conversation represented never actually happened, although it would not surprise anyone if it did. The cartoons represented are purely fictional, any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. This is intended as criticism and is an interpretation of this case from a 3rd party. This video has not been commissioned, endorsed or otherwise requested by the Terpenings, their friends, family, attorneys or any affiliated party thereof. We reserve the right to publish this video under the rights afforded to us by the First Amendment as well as any other applicable laws, rules, regulations and/or legal statutes.


CPS Gone Wild - Episode 2

Baby LK (Legally Kidnapped) Reports

LK Report for April 18th 2010



Baby LK Report for September 19th 2010
There's something a little fishy going on around here



Baby LK Report For September 26th 2010
National Failure To Protect Week Special


Baby LK Report For October 3rd 2010
The Notorious Toy Horder of San Diego


Baby LK Report For October 17th 2010



The Original Cartoon Caracter Against Child Abuse
Baby LK Report For December 5th 2010


Special "Free Kids in West Virginia!" EditionBaby LK Report For March 13th 2011

 

Happy National Child Abuse Propaganda Month
Baby LK Report For April 3rd 2011



National Systematic Failure Week
Baby LK Report For April 10th 2011



Mom's Fight Back
Baby LK Report For April 17th 2011


Baby LK Report For April 24th 2011


How To Piss Off A Child Protective Worker
Baby LK Report For May 1st 2011

Exclusive: CPS Destroys Mothers Day Edition
Baby LK Report For May 8th 2011


How To Play God With The Lives Of Children
Baby LK Report For May 15th 2011



Ending The Cycle Of Bullshit In Child Welfare
Baby LK Report For May 22nd 2011


How Not To Hide A Secret Love Child
Baby LK Report For May 29th 2011


It Can Happen To You
Baby LK Report For June 5th 2011


Social Workers Who Enjoy Stealing Children
Baby LK Report For June 12th 2011



The Child Abuse Hysteria Special
Baby LK Report
For June 19th 2011


The God Of Child Welfare Reform
Baby LK Report For June 26th 2011


The All American Thing To Do
Baby LK Report For July 3rd 2011



Baby LK Report For July 10th 2011


Snip Snip - Baby LK Report For July 17th 2011


We Will Never Forget Our Children
Baby LK Report For September 11th 2011



Adoption Is Against Natural Selection
Baby LK Report For September 18th 2011


Don't Sick Your Dog On A CPS Agent
Baby LK Report
For September 25th 2011



Protection Orders Against Child Protective Workers
The Baby LK Report
For October 1st 2011




Without Adequate Cause Or Justification
The Baby LK Report
For October 9th 2011

LK's Stolen Child Special
Baby LK Report
For October 16th 2011

Happy New Year CPS!
Baby LK Report
For January 1st 2012



Don't Throw A Pot Of Boiling Water At A Social Worker
Baby LK Report
For January 15th 2012


Getting Your Jollies From The Child Abuse Hotline
Baby LK Report
For January 22nd 2012



1... 2... CPS is comming for you
Baby LK Report
For January 29th 2012


The Superbowl of Child Welfare Fraud
Baby LK Report
For February 5th 2012




Don't shoot your daughters lapotop
Baby LK Report
For February 12th 2012





Baby LK's Anti-CPS Comedy Routine


Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Shaken Baby Syndrome - Syndrome Questioned


Shaken Baby Syndrome - Syndrome Questioned


CBC News: 'Shaken Baby Syndrome?'- Sorry Canada view only but there are other videos below that are world wide view

Reporter Gillian Findlay sits down with CBC News Network's Heather Hiscox. In the interview, they discuss research that suggests that the widely accepted shaken baby syndrome may actually be a physical impossibility.

Diagnosis Murder - CBC broadcast Jan 13 2012 - Sorry Canada view only but other videos below for world wide view
For decades the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome virtually guaranteed convictions, shattering the lives of thousands of parents, babysitters and families.  Now new evidence questions whether the syndrome  even exists, and whether some have been wrongly convicted.  

Diagnosis Murder

It's a scenario as horrifying as it is heartbreaking: a frustrated parent ... a baby that just won't stop crying ... and suddenly, what were tender, cradling arms become instruments of death. At least this is how Shaken Baby Syndrome has been characterized in countless court cases in recent years. But what are the scientific foundations of this diagnosis?
Gillian Finlay

Gillian Findlay examines the conventional wisdom around Shaken Baby Syndrome, discovering that those who question it often feel targeted by those who believe passionately in it. And yet new science suggests the so-called syndrome may be a physical impossibility.

"Diagnosis Murder" tells the story of several Canadian parents who say they were wrongfully accused--and the leading-edge medical researchers who believe they're telling the truth. The stakes are high: Some have gone to jail. All have had their other children taken away from them.

Zabeth and Paul Baynes and family

One couple recently had their children returned after a four-year battle. Even though the courts in B.C. cleared Zabeth and Paul Baynes of charges they had shaken their baby, the couple feel they will carry the stigma for life. Another man in Ontario has now had his case put up for judicial review, giving him hope that his name may too be cleared.

Is Shaken Baby Syndrome conclusive evidence of murder? Or is it a scientific hypothesis that has convicted an untold number of parents as killers -- when their children actually died from other causes?


Extended Interview: Keith Findley - worldwide viewing

Until recently, Keith Findley served as the president of the Innocence Network, an affiliation of 64 innocence projects in North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. He is the co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. In this extended conversation, Gillian Findlay learns about his first case defending a client charged with SBS, what he has learned about the science, and his perspective on the issue globally.


Interview: Dr. John Plunkett - worldwide viewing

Dr. John Plunkett, is a forensic pathologist, and a leading critic of shaken baby syndrome. Gillian Findlay has Dr. Plunkett explain the significance of the research he conducted to test the SBS hypothesis.


A History of Shaken Baby Syndrome

In a classic case of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), the allegation of shaking is based on the triad that includes the following:

1. Bleeding between the brain and skull (subdural hematoma)
2. Bleeding behind the eye (bilateral retinal hemorrhaging)
3. Swelling of the brain

VIRGINIA JASPERS

• Many of the theories surrounding SBS came out of the case of Virgina Jaspers from the 1950s.
• She was an American baby nurse (nanny) and was charged for killing three children who were under her care.
• In total 15 children were injured by her.
• She admitted to having shaken some of the babies.
• A Newsweek article published in 1956 entitled "The Boys Jeered Her" details the life of Jaspers and what may have led her to injure children under care.

HENRY KEMPE

• Kempe published an article that concludes all children with subdural hematomas and retinal hemorrhages were abused by shaking "The battered child syndrome" Journal of the American Medical Association, 1962.
• There was no data, or evidence to support this conclusion.
• A Time magazine article talks about this new 'battered child syndrome' on July 20, 1962.

DR A NORMAN GUTHKELCH

• In 1971 a two-page article was published in the British Medical Journal entitled "Infantile Subdural Hematoma and Its Relationship to Whiplash Injuries."
• Dr. A. Norman Guthkelch, a British pediatric neurosurgeon, noticed that in his area of Northern England, many parents thought it was acceptable to shake a child to gets its attention and/or to discipline the child.
• This shaking appeared to produce two symptoms: retinal bleeding and subdural bleeding.
• These symptoms appeared without any evidence of external injury to head.
• To support this suggestion, Guthkelch references 23 cases of children that were either proven or suspected of parental assault.
• Out of the 23 children, seven suffered from subdural hemorrhaging.
• From those seven children, five had no external marks or injuries.
• Guthkelch theorizes that repeated shaking rather than direct impact was the cause of these hematomas (bleeding).
• He compares his theory of shaking to the two cases of adults suffering subdural hematoma from whiplash after a car accident.
• He references Dr. Ayub Ommaya 's article "Whiplash. Injury and Brain Damage" Journal of American Medical Association, 1968.
Following his 1971 article, Guthkelch did not produce any more research on this subject.
• Instead, a Dr. John Caffey from the United States picked up Guthkelch's observations and continued on with his own studies.

DR JOHN CAFFEY

• In 1946 he describes four cases of children who had subdural hematomas and long bone fractures in his article "Multiple Fractures in the Long Bones of Infants Suffering from Chronic Subdural Hematoma," published in Radiology.
• The article concludes that infants with such fractures also have subdural hematoma, thus further investigation is needed into what brought on the subdural hematoma.
This article is often cited as evidence for proof of SBS.
• SBS is later given more attention through Caffey's article "On the Theory and Practice of Shaking Infants" (American Journal of the Disease of Children, 1972).
• SBS is further discussed in his article "The Whiplash Shaken Infant Syndrome: Manual Shaking by the Extremities with Whiplash-Induced Intracranial and Intraocular Bleedings, Linked With Residual Permanent Brain Damage and Mental Retardation" (Pediatrics, 1974)
• He references Guthkelch's article "Infantile Subdural Haematoma and its Relationship to Whiplash Injuries" (British Medical Journal, 1971), the work of Ommaya, and the Newsweek article "The Boys Jeered Her", 1956.

AYB OMMAYA

• His research on the impact of adults suffering subdural hematoma as a result of automobile whiplash resulting from a rear-end collision is published in his article in 1968 and used by Caffey and others in support for possible explanations of subdural hematoma in babies.
• In 2002, he began to question the application of his research to support SBS "Biomechanics and Neuropathology of Adult and Pediatric Head Injury" (British Journal of Neurosurgery, 2002).
• He confirmed that in his article the impact of shaking alone produces an acceleration that is "well below thresholds for [head] concussions, subdural hematoma, subarachnoid hemorrhage (space surrounding the brain), deep brain hemorrhages and cortical contusions (traumatic brain injury)."
• He stated that Caffey, Gulthkelch and others, referenced his research to support SBS without taking into consideration that his research was based on subjects facing an acceleration of 30mph (~50km) speeds in a car crash.

POINTS TO PONDER

Caffey admits that his conclusions of infants suffering from the effects of whiplash without any external trauma to the head and the face presents a contradiction."
• This diagnostic contradiction opens itself up for further investigation.
• The issue remains the lack of evidence of external trauma (bruises, bleeding, cuts, broken bones, etc.) when a baby is diagnosed with SBS.
• The question remains: how can a baby be shaken with enough force to cause brain injury and leave no external evidence of trauma?
• Many of those skeptical of SBS point to the fact that SBS is a theory "based on anecdote and experience."
• The obvious problem to resolving this question being that no studies involving actual babies being shaken can done for ethical reasons.

DR ANN-CHRISTINE DUHAIME

• In 1987, Dr Duhaime a pediatric neurosurgeon in the United States, used model dolls fitted with accelerometers, and then shaked them in an attempt to resolve this dilemma.
• From her study, she concluded that the shaking occurred by these dolls, in terms of velocity and acceleration, is well below the injury range.

DR MICHAEL PRANGE

• The results from Duhaime's experiment are again repeated by Bioengineer Dr. Michael Prange and his team and published in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering in 2003, entitled "Anthropomorphic Simulations of Falls, Shakes and Inflicted Impacts in Infants."
• They used a more realistic baby model.
• They concluded that shaking could not produce enough force to cause brain injury, including subdural hematoma.

SUBDURAL HEMATOMA and RETINAL HEMORRHAGE

• Much of the focus in SBS lies in explaining what causes subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhages in babies.
Complications at child birth can be a trigger of subdural hematoma, bleeding disorders, infections, or vitamin deficiencies.
Increased pressure inside the skull which puts more pressure on the brain can trigger both subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging.

Ground-breaking cases in Shaken Baby Syndrome:

AUDREY EDMUNDS

• In 1995, Audrey Edmunds, a mother of two at the time, looked after some of the neighbourhood children in her house.
A baby in her care suddenly became unresponsive, and was rushed to the hospital. She died soon after.
• The baby was found to have a severe case of classic shaken baby syndrome symptoms.
• Edmunds was accused of killing the baby by shaking.
• She was sentenced to 18 years of prison in 1995.
• However, in 2008, in an appeal, State vs Edmunds, she was exonerated.

LOUISE WOODWARD

• In 1997, Louise Woodward then 19 years old from England, was an au paire working in Boston.
• She looked after two children every day.
• One day she found the eight-month old responsive and called the ambulance.
• The baby died from both subdural hematoma and a fractured skull.
• A very public and lengthy court case ensued.
• Her case opened up the door for skeptics of SBS to question the assumptions made by SBS supporters.
• At the end of the case, Woodward spent 279 days in jail, and was deported back to the UK.


Extended Interview: Waney Squier - CBC world wide viewWaney Squier is a pediatric neuropathologist who specializes in brain development. In this clip, Gillian Findlay asks Dr. Squier for the history of the SBS, and the evolution of her research.


Shaken-Baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/magazine/06baby-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
The New York Times
By EMILY BAZELON
Published: February 2, 2011

Noah Whitmer, now 2, with his parents, Erin and Michael Whitmer, can nod his head “yes,” but he is not yet talking. He wears a patch for a period of time each day to correct his vision.

At 4 months, Noah Whitmer was an easy baby. Super tranquilo, remembers Trudy Eliana Muñoz Rueda, who took care of Noah at her home day care center in Fairfax County, Va. Rueda and Noah’s mother, Erin Whitmer, both noticed when he stopped taking his bottle well and napping as usual in the middle of his fifth month, in April 2009. Whitmer thought this was because Noah had just started eating solid food. She and Rueda talked about it early on April 20, both of them hunched over Noah in his car seat when Whitmer dropped him off.

That afternoon, after a morning in which Noah didn’t nap and drank only a couple of ounces of formula, Rueda says she prepared a bottle for him while he lay on a mat. In her native Peru, Rueda, who is 46, ran a travel agency and taught college courses for prospective tour guides. Her husband was trained as a lawyer. After they moved to the United States in 2001, the couple had a second child, and three years later Rueda converted her basement into a home day care center so she could work while spending time with her two kids. When Rueda sat down to feed Noah, her 13-year-old daughter was at school, her 5-year-old was upstairs watching TV and the four other children in her care were taking naps. Rueda’s sister-in-law, who spent the morning with the children while Rueda was at a doctor’s appointment, had just left the house. “Everything was calm and quiet,” Rueda, who has soft features and dark hair, told me in Spanish while her lawyer translated.

There are two irreconcilable versions of how that calm shattered. Rueda says that Noah was crying, and she picked him up, sat on the couch and gave him the bottle to help put him to sleep. While she was feeding him, she felt Noah’s arm go limp, and when she moved to take the bottle out of his mouth, he made a sound that she didn’t recognize. “I could tell something was happening,” she says. She stood up and put Noah on her shoulder, patting him on the back. “As I did this, his body tensed up in a ball. It was as if he was looking for air, and he couldn’t breathe.” Rueda put Noah on the floor and started C.P.R., at the same time reaching for her phone to call 911. She put the dispatcher on speakerphone so she could keep tending to Noah. “I said, ‘Please, please get someone here,’ ” she said. “I knew it could hurt him if there wasn’t enough oxygen going to his brain.”

Erin Whitmer’s account of the moments before Noah lost consciousness is entirely different. “Around 2:30 on April 20, 2009, Noah was shaken,” she wrote on her blog Noah’s Road, on the one-year anniversary of the incident. “He’d been crying. He needed something that his day care provider wasn’t providing him. Maybe he was tired of lying on the mat where she’d had him. Maybe he needed a hug, a laugh, a kind touch. Instead, she picked him up, her fingers gripping him tightly, feeling the softness of his velour pants and his cotton onesie under her fingers, and she shook him.”

Whitmer’s account of what [she thought] Rueda must have done to Noah was based on evidence presented at Rueda’s trial and information from the doctors who treated him after he was rushed to Inova Fairfax Hospital. The doctors gave Noah a CT scan, which showed subdural hemorrhaging (bleeding in a space between the skull and the brain) and an ophthalmological exam revealed retinal hemorrhaging (bleeding at the back of the eyes). Also, his brain was swelling. For decades, these have been the three telltale signs linked to the kind of child abuse commonly called shaken-baby syndrome.

Noah had no external marks on his body — no bruises or cuts or fractures, no sign that he was forcefully gripped and no evident neck injury that would seem to result from vigorous shaking. But an M.R.I. confirmed the CT scan findings and showed that the subdural bleeding was extensive. The doctors at Inova Fairfax tested Noah for clotting disorders that can cause these kinds of hemorrhages. The tests came back negative. The doctors told Erin and Michael Whitmer, who are both 32, that they strongly suspected Noah was violently shaken in the moments before he stopped breathing. While Noah lapsed into a coma, police went to question Trudy Rueda. A day later, Rueda was arrested. She was charged with two felony counts: abuse of a child causing serious injury and cruelty to a child.

Before April 20, 2009, Noah was a healthy baby. Trudy Rueda also had nothing suspect in her past. In five years as a day care provider, she had a pristine record with state regulators — she had taken the classes required for her license and extra ones as well. She cared for a boy with autism and a girl with one arm, reportedly with calm and assurance. “She was more patient than all of us,” one mother testified at Rueda’s trial. A second said, “What she’s accused of now I could not begin to imagine Trudy doing.” And yet Noah emerged from her home with terrible and permanent injuries.

Between 1,200 and 1,400 children in the United States sustain head injuries attributed to abuse each year. Most of them are less than a year old. Usually, there’s not much dispute that these children were abused, because doctors discover other signs of mistreatment — cuts, bruises, burns, fractures — or a history of such injuries. There is no exact count of shaken-baby prosecutions, but law-enforcement authorities think that there are about 200 a year. In an estimated 50 percent to 75 percent of them, the only medical evidence of shaken-baby syndrome is the triad of internal symptoms: subdural and retinal hemorrhage and brain swelling.

For a year after Noah came out of his coma, he had as many as 32 seizures a day. Now he is 2, and his parents watch as his 1-year-old brother surpasses him developmentally. Noah sometimes nods his head “yes” and gives high fives, but he is not yet talking; doctors are not sure of his cognitive prognosis. Erin Whitmer, a slender woman with large brown eyes who chose Rueda for part-time day care after a careful search, cried when she found out that Rueda had been arrested. Now she says, “It will never completely leave me, the horror that I trusted my son with someone and she did this to him.”

At Rueda’s trial in January 2010, the prosecutor presented six doctors who testified that Noah’s brain scans showed he had been abused. The doctors’ reading of the scans were the main evidence that a crime had taken place, of its timing and even of Rueda’s state of mind, since they agreed that only an act of great violence could inflict such injuries. Two doctors who treated Noah in the hospital said that the baby’s scans showed that he had an acute subdural hemorrhage — the bleeding had begun suddenly — which was, as one doctor stated, “inconsistent with accidental trauma.” Another witness, Craig Futterman, a doctor at Inova Fairfax and president of the board of the Shaken Baby Alliance, put it more bluntly, “This child was shaken, or shaken and slammed against something.”

The usual explanation for how a caregiver can become an abuser is that in a moment of intense frustration, she snaps. The prosecutor, Gregory Holt, imagined for the jury a scenario in which Rueda was aggravated that she could not get Noah to stop crying: “Put him on the mat, put him on the chair, he’s not drinking his milk. Getting a little bit frustrated?” And he claimed that Rueda confessed to shaking Noah.

On the day of Noah’s injuries, Rueda spoke to the police without a lawyer and denied hurting him. The next day, Joslyn Waldron, a social worker for Virginia’s Child Protective Services, visited Rueda at home. Waldron knew that Noah’s doctors at Inova Fairfax suspected that he had been abused because of his symptoms. She and Rueda spoke together in Spanish while a detective, who did not speak Spanish, was present. At the trial, Waldron testified that Rueda confessed to shaking Noah when he was crying and before she gave him a bottle. The social worker said she wrote in her notes, “Might have shaken him about three times, but not sure” (using a standard Spanish word, sacudir, for shake).

As is protocol in her department, Waldron offered to tape the interview; Waldron says Rueda declined. Rueda has denied telling Waldron that she shook Noah. At the trial, she testified in heavily accented, halting English, frequently interrupting herself because she didn’t understand the questions. Rueda said that she told Waldron, “I probably moved kind of rough with Noah,” at the moment that she lifted him to give him the bottle, but that she had not gotten frustrated with the baby or harmed him.

When her lawyer asked her what she thought happened to Noah, Rueda answered: “I imagine the parents, we all want to know what happened. But I cannot give you an explanation about what I don’t know.”

The Whitmers dismissed Rueda’s denials of guilt. “It’s a complicated thing to look at someone who always smiled at you, to know that your baby loved her, and to know that because of her, you struggle each day to adapt to a new sense of reality,” Erin Whitmer wrote on her blog, which has had more than a million visits, after Rueda’s first criminal hearing. Michael Whitmer expressed his rage at Rueda’s next hearing by wearing a T-shirt he made. On the back is a picture of Noah taken in the hospital, with tubes coming out of his mouth and the words: “Ask me what happens when you shake a baby.”

At the trial, the prosecution presented one more piece of testimony against Rueda. The pediatrician who saw Noah in the I.C.U. told the jury that given the severity of the baby’s injuries, their “onset would have been very rapid, so it would have been within minutes of when the injury occurred.” This meant that the person with the baby right before he stopped breathing — Rueda — was necessarily the guilty party.

Rueda’s lawyer didn’t challenge this assumption directly. Medical experts, however, have begun to point out that clinical observations show that it’s possible for a child to have a brain injury and still remain conscious. The child may be lethargic or fussy or may not eat or sleep normally for hours or days, while the subdural hemorrhage and other injuries become more serious, ending in acute crisis. This has made some doctors wary of pinpointing the timing of a child’s injury — even when they are sure that abuse occurred — lest the wrong adult take the blame. “The police want us to time it within one to three hours,” says John Leventhal, a Yale pediatrics professor and medical director of the child-abuse programs at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital. “But sometimes we can only time it to within days.”

In this case, because Rueda had been at the doctor that morning and her sister-in-law stayed to help with lunch, she spent only about an hour alone with the children in the day care center before calling 911.

Arguing that another adult had harmed Noah would have meant implicating Rueda’s sister-in-law, whom Rueda says she has never suspected, or the Whitmers, whom no one has accused. Rueda, her husband and their lawyers decided not to take this tack. The defense relied primarily on Ronald Uscinski, a neurosurgeon on the faculty of the medical schools of George Washington University and Georgetown. When he took the stand, Uscinski refuted all the prosecution experts who said that Noah’s hemorrhaging was acute — the sudden result of a new injury. Uscinski testified that he saw chronic subdural bleeding on the scans, which he said was the result of trauma at birth.Rebleeds” like Noah’s, he testified, “can occur with minimal or no trauma. They can occur spontaneously.” On cross-examination, Uscinski said that he earned approximately $200,000, which was about 30 percent of his income, as an expert witness in 2009.

For the prosecution, Cindy Christian, a pediatrics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has published extensively about shaken-baby syndrome, rejected Uscinski’s reading of Noah’s brain scans. “That’s false, he did not have a rebleed from a chronic hematoma from birth,” she said. “There was no evidence of that.”

After five days of testimony, the jury deliberated for five hours and voted to convict. Virginia’s sentencing guidelines called for a minimum sentence of 3 years and a maximum of 15. The jury recommended 10½ years and Erin and Michael Whitmer took the stand in support of that punishment. “This is a life sentence for my son, for my wife, for me, and for our family,” Michael Whitmer told the jury.

CAREWORN Trudy Rueda at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Virginia. She was convicted of shaking Noah Whitmer and sentenced to 10½ years in prison.

“Really still, now, I can’t comprehend it,” Rueda told me, looking wan and bereft when I visited her at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Virginia. Rueda’s daughters have gone to live with her older sister in Peru while her husband works extra hours to support the family and pay for her appeal. Rueda can rarely speak to her children.“It is so hard to talk about this separation,” she said, and started to cry.

A dozen years ago, the medical profession held that if the triad of subdural and retinal bleeding and brain swelling was present without a fracture or bruise, that would indicate, for example, that a baby had accidently fallen, abuse must have occurred through shaking. In the past decade, that consensus has begun to come undone. In 2008, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, after reviewing a shaken-baby case, wrote that there is “fierce disagreement” among doctors about the shaken-baby diagnosis, signaling “a shift in mainstream medical opinion.” In the same year, [in Canada] at the urging of the province’s chief forensic pathologist, the Ontario government began a review of 142 shaken-baby cases, because of “the scientific uncertainty that has come to characterize that diagnosis.” In Britain, after one mother’s shaken-baby conviction was overturned, Peter Goldsmith, then attorney general, reviewed 88 more cases. In 2006, he announced doubts about three of the convictions because they were based solely on the triad; in the other cases, Goldsmith said, there was additional evidence pointing to the defendant’s guilt.

A small but growing number of doctors warn that there can be alternate explanationsinfections or bleeding disorders, for example — for the triad of symptoms associated with shaken-baby syndrome. Across the country, the group of lawyers that has succeeded in exonerating hundreds of people based on DNA evidence is now mounting 20 to 25 appeals of shaken-baby convictions. “No one wants child abuse,” says Keith Findley, a lawyer for the Wisconsin Innocence Project. “But we should not be prosecuting and convicting people in shaken-baby cases right now, based on the triad of symptoms, without other evidence of abuse. If the medical community can’t agree about all the conflicting data and research, how is a jury supposed to reach a conclusion that’s beyond a reasonable doubt?”

Much of the science of shaken-baby syndrome dates from the late 1960s, when a neurosurgeon named Ayub Ommaya conducted a brutal animal experiment to figure out how much acceleration it took to cause a head injury. Ommaya took more than 50 rhesus monkeys and strapped each one into a chair mounted on wheels, leaving their heads unsupported. He placed the chair on a 20-foot-long track, and an air-powered piston sent the monkeys zooming into a wall. Fifteen emerged with some kind of cerebral hemorrhage. Eight of those also had injuries to the brain stem or cervical cord.

Ommaya’s experiment involved neither shaking nor infants. Still, two pediatric specialists, John Caffey and A. Norman Guthkelch, each wrote a paper that pointed to the work as evidence that unexplained subdural bleeding in babies could occur without direct impact to the head and with or without a visible neck injury. In the 1980s, the term “shaken-baby syndrome” came into broad use, and a national prevention and awareness campaign was set in motion.

As the diagnosis of shaken-baby syndrome took hold in medicine, and prosecutors began to bring charges based on it, doctors testified that shaking could generate the same terrible force as throwing a child from a second-­story window. It turned out they were wrong. In 1987, a neurosurgeon named Ann-Christine Duhaime published a paper that included the autopsy results of 13 babies with symptoms associated with shaken-baby syndrome. In all of them she found evidence of trauma that was actually caused by impact. She teamed up with biomechanical engineers to create infant-sized dummies equipped with sensors to measure acceleration.“We shook them as hard as we could, and we thought something was wrong, because the accelerations we measured were unexpectedly low,” Duhaime says. Instead, the force level shot up when the testers released the dummies after shaking them, even if they hit a soft surface like a bed or a couch.

Later experiments confirmed this finding and have made some doctors and biomechanical engineers skeptical that shaking alone can cause severe brain damage or death. At the same time, the experiments have not ruled this out, Duhaime says. Among other things, the dummies are not live children, and while their heads and necks can exhibit the effects of acceleration, impact on brain tissue is still hard to model.

Many doctors who treat child abuse say that decades of clinical observation, as well as confessions, show that it’s possible for shaking alone to cause the triad of subdural and retinal bleeding and brain swelling. A 2009 position paper from the American Academy of Pediatrics, written by Cindy Christian, recommends that doctors use the more general term “abusive head trauma” but also calls shaking an “important mechanism” of such trauma. Many doctors who testify for the defense agree that shaking could in theory cause the triad of symptoms but only if there is an injury to the neck or spinal cord, “where the breathing center is,” as one doctor puts it. It’s the absence of signs of this kind of an injury that makes some shaken-baby cases particularly fraught.

AFTERLIFE Audrey Edmunds, a mother of three, was in prison 11 years before her conviction for shaking and killing a 7-month-old baby was overturned. She now lives apart from her children in the lower level of a friend's home.


In 1993, Audrey Edmunds left her job as a secretary and started caring for children in her home near Madison, Wis. Like Trudy Rueda, Edmunds says that a baby she was taking care of, 7-month-old Natalie Beard, suddenly collapsed while drinking a bottle of milk; Natalie was propped up with the bottle in a car seat while Edmunds was out of the room getting her two daughters and another child ready for preschool. In the hospital, a CT scan showed that Natalie had the triad of shaken-baby symptoms but no spinal-cord injury. The baby died, and the doctors agreed that Edmunds, who was pregnant with her third child, had to be responsible. She was charged with first-degree reckless homicide.

At Edmunds’s trial, a librarian testified that she once heard a thump and then the cries of a child who was with Edmunds, but she didn’t see what had happened. Edmunds denied ever harming a child in her care. Her neighbors testified to her calm around children. Natalie “was a real fussy baby,” one said, “but Audrey was very patient with her.” Another day care provider in the neighborhood said, “I looked up to Audrey . . . when I started doing my day care.”

Still, the prosecution’s medical experts said that only Edmunds’s violence could explain Natalie’s injuries. A forensic pathologist, Robert Huntington, testified that the baby most likely had been abused at some point during the two hours before her collapse — which was when she was with Edmunds. The jury convicted Edmunds, and she was sentenced to 18 years; she went to prison two days after her youngest daughter’s first birthday.

A decade later, Edmunds had a hearing to determine whether she should have a new trial. Huntington this time took the stand on her behalf. When Keith Findley, her lawyer, asked whether Huntington was comfortable with his 1996 testimony, the pathologist said, “No, sir, no I am not.” He explained that in the years since her trial, he observed a child with subdural and retinal bleeding who was lucid for a period between her brain injury and her collapse. After that, he returned to the medical literature and found research to support this possibility. Huntington now believed that a “lucid interval is a distinct, discomforting but real possibility.” He said he could no longer precisely time the injury that caused Natalie’s death. For how long could Natalie have appeared relatively normal — fussy, but not obviously in crisis? “I’m sorry, I just don’t know,” Huntington said.

Huntington’s change of heart reflects a new explanation for the manifestation of brain injury in babies. In a 2001 study, the British neuropathologist Jennian Geddes found that most babies with the triad of shaken-baby symptoms suffered not from a rupture of the nerve fibers of the brain but rather from a lack of blood caused by oxygen deprivation to the brain’s cells.

The rupture of the brain’s nerve fibers is immediate and produces instant coma; the effects of oxygen deprivation can be slower and more subtle. This can explain how a child with the triad of shaken-baby symptoms could, for some period of time, seem fussy or lethargic or stop eating or sleeping well. In 2005, Christian co-wrote a study that concluded, “Although infrequent, young victims of fatal head trauma may present as lucid before death.”

This possibility introduces questions about whether the last person to care for a child before he or she stops breathing is necessarily guilty of abuse. In most cases of assault or murder, jurors could weigh this doubt in light of other evidence — witness testimony, perhaps, or the motive the defendant would have had to commit the crime. In shaken-baby cases, however, this kind of additional evidence is often absent. Doubts raised about the medical testimony loom large because it’s so central to the prosecution.

At Edmunds’s hearing for a new trial, five doctors joined Huntington on the side of the defense. Opposing them were four doctors for the prosecution. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruled in January 2008 that the disagreement among the physicians represented a shift in medical opinion and warranted a new trial: a jury would have to hear both sides. Edmunds called her daughters to tell them she was coming home. Six months later, prosecutors dropped the charges against her.

Audrey Edmunds’s successful appeal was built on a foundation laid by defense lawyers a decade earlier in the first big courtroom fight over shaken-baby syndrome. In that case, prosecutors in Massachusetts charged an English au pair, Louise Woodward, with the murder of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen, who stopped breathing in her care. Matthew had the triad of shaken-baby symptoms, along with a skull fracture. Woodward, who was 19, told the police that she shook Matthew lightly when she couldn’t wake him from a nap. Prosecutors decided that the shaking must have been violent. They also said that to cause the skull fracture, Woodward must have smashed Matthew’s head on a hard surface at a velocity of more than 25 miles per hour.

Woodward’s lead counsel was Barry Scheck, who went on to found the Innocence Project at Cardozo law school with Peter Neufeld. He enlisted seven medical experts, including Ommaya, the neurosurgeon who experimented with the rhesus monkeys, and Ronald Uscinski, a colleague. The defense’s theory was that Matthew’s skull fracture was three weeks old when he died, and that because of it, a slight jarring could have caused his fatal bleeding. Scheck didn’t try to explain how the fracture happened. “We didn’t know, so we didn’t claim anything,” he told me. But the defense experts testified that because tests showed no swelling at the site of the fracture, it had to be old.

The prosecution, for its part, lined up the doctors who treated Matthew at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Among them was Patrick Barnes, then a pediatric radiologist at Children’s. He had written, with another doctor, a chapter in a textbook that embraced the traditional theory of shaken-baby syndrome and shared the assumptions that pointed to Woodward’s guilt.

Barnes testified for the prosecution at the trial, saying Matthew’s brain scans showed his injuries were a result of shaking as well as a skull fracture. The prosecutors also asked Barnes to help them prepare for their cross-examination by briefing them on what to expect from the defense’s doctors. He spent evenings watching Court TV tapes of their testimony. He heard doctors from fields other than pediatrics — biomechanics, neurosurgery and neuropathology — discuss scientific findings about traumatic brain injury that contradicted his belief in the traditional method for diagnosing shaken-baby syndrome. He started to question his assumptions. “I’d been in lockstep with the child-abuse establishment for 20 years,” he told me. “For the first time, I saw that there were well-qualified experts on the other side giving opinions I’d never heard, that I knew nothing about.”

Woodward’s case ended in a stalemate. After the jury found her guilty of second-degree murder, the judge reduced the conviction to involuntary manslaughter and released her for time served. But a lasting legacy of that case was the eventual conversion of Patrick Barnes from an upholder of the medical orthodoxy surrounding shaken-baby cases to one of its strongest critics.

After Woodward’s trial, Barnes continued to think about his newfound doubts. He read widely in the medical literature. He started to look at brain scans brought to him by defense lawyers. In a New York case in which a father was being prosecuted, Barnes says, he found strong support in the medical literature for a diagnosis of infant stroke, which he thought was likely related to an infection like meningitis. Now he says that he sometimes sees other explanations for the triad of symptoms. “There are a number of things you have to look for in these children — infections, bleeding and clotting problems,” Barnes says. “Even now, I am most concerned about looking very carefully for predisposing or complicating medical conditions, in particular for infants younger than 6 months.”

Trudy Rueda’s lawyer asked Barnes to review Noah Whitmer’s brain scans before her trial. Barnes wasn’t able to testify because of a scheduling conflict, but he says the scans indicate that the baby had a thrombosis — a blood clot within a blood vessel. The prosecution’s doctors saw the thrombosis, too, but they claimed it was a result of abuse. To Barnes, the clotting suggested infant stroke, which can be triggered by an infection. He says the fact that Noah was not taking a bottle or napping normally in the days before he was hospitalized suggests that his condition could have been subtly deteriorating during that time. “It’s a very striking pattern,” Barnes says of the thrombosis. “The baby not eating well may reflect the process which starts this. Usually, it’s not a process that happens acutely and the baby crashes. It can start relatively slowly.”

Barnes also testified at Audrey Edmunds’s hearing challenging her conviction. He said that it was difficult to know for sure what had happened to Natalie Beard based on her scans; at the time of her death, hospitals were using CT scans, rather than also using M.R.I.’s, which provide more detail. But he did say that he saw the possibility of a thrombosis.

To a degree, some of the alternative explanations from defense-side doctors are accepted in the child-abuse field. A 2009 textbook that Cindy Christian co-edited includes a discussion of diseases and accidental injuries that can mimic the effects of abusive head trauma. Leventhal, the Yale pediatrician, told me about an unusual case involving an accidental fall. “A child who was sitting in a highchair and put his feet up on the table in front of him and rocked himself backward,” Leventhal said. “When the child was taken to the hospital, the ophthalmologist said, ‘This is shaken baby,’ because of the massive retinal bleeding. Luckily, there were seven people playing cards in the room when the baby fell.” Leventhal continued, “The subdural hematoma continued to bleed, and it turned out he had a previous bleeding disorder, a clotting problem.”

Leventhal and others in the child-abuse field emphasize that such hemorrhaging as a result of a fall is very rare. In order for doctors to determine what caused an injury, they begin with a list of alternatives, ruling out the ones that don’t match a patient’s symptoms until they arrive at a diagnosis, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty. But defense-side doctors like Barnes say that in a criminal case, physicians should be more careful about testing their assumptions, and they should give the possibility of an alternative explanation — a stroke, say, caused by an infection — more weight.

It’s on this question of probable causes that the doctors who testify in these cases split. Prosecution-side experts rely on a set of studies that indicate that when children have subdural bleeding and extensive retinal hemorrhaging, they are far more likely to have been abused than injured in any other way. In a 2010 paper in Pediatrics, Christian and the pediatric ophthalmologist Alex Levin concluded that the evidence supporting the “diagnostic specificity” of “severe” retinal hemorrhaging has significantly increased. “Some children have such severe retinal hemorrhaging that it is much more likely to be from abusive head trauma,” Christian told me. She testified to this at Rueda’s trial, because Noah Whitmer had severe retinal hemorrhaging. Levin similarly called Natalie Beard’s retinal bleeding “textbook severe” when he testified for the prosecution at Audrey Edmunds’s 2007 hearing. When the prosecutor asked him how significant these findings were for diagnosing shaken-baby syndrome, Levin answered: “Very important. We really don’t have any other cause for this particular kind of hemorrhaging and retinal findings.”

Defense experts, however, criticize the methodology of these studies. And even taken at face value, they say, the studies show that severe retinal hemorrhaging is far more common in abuse cases, not that it’s never found in any other circumstance. At the 2010 meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the Canadian forensic pathologist Evan Matshes presented the results of a study, under peer review, of 123 autopsies performed on infants in Miami-Dade County who died under natural or accidental circumstances, or from homicides. Of the children with retinal hemorrhages, 53 percent died from accidental or natural causes, and 47 percent died as a result of homicide. Severe retinal hemorrhages were identified in some of the children in the accident group. Although the children in the homicide group were more likely to have severe retinal hemorrhages than the other groups, this finding could be explained by factors other than abuse, according to Matshes. The children in the homicide group had isolated head injuries and were more likely to be resuscitated for a period of time, he says. In the aftermath, they were more likely to develop brain swelling and bleeding disorders that may explain the severe retinal hemorrhaging. Matshes puts his conclusions like this, “It is simply incorrect to state that severe retinal hemorrhaging is diagnostic of abuse or shaking.” He is now working on a study that looks at whether infants with subdural and retinal hemorrhaging might in fact have neck injuries, which could indicate shaking, that go undetected, because doctors haven’t looked in the right place for them. Matshes and his team are conducting autopsies of the entire cervical spinal column, which is not usually dissected in shaken-baby cases. The goal is to determine whether injuries there could explain how shaking can cause brain damage or death — and whether this additional diagnostic tool might one day help distinguish which babies have in fact been abused, and which have subdural and retinal bleeding from other causes.

Underlying the clash over the medical research on shaken-baby syndrome is another one about human nature. How likely is an adult with no history of wrongdoing to do terrible harm to a child by violently shaking it? To pediatricians like Leventhal and Christian, the sad answer, born of experience, is that such a lapse is all too possible. When I described Trudy Rueda’s case to Leventhal, he told me about cases in which he had met and liked a parent or caregiver who ended up confessing to harming a child. Was there truly no indication that the adult in question was capable of such an act? The doctors who treat abused children insisted that sometimes, there isn’t. They described disturbing confessions, like one that made headlines in Florida last year after a 22-year-old mother told the police that she had shaken her 3-month-old baby and perhaps caused him to hit his head, because he wouldn’t stop crying while she was playing FarmVille. Leventhal cites a 2010 study that included 29 people who confessed in the French courts to shaking infants and who described the abuse as extremely violent.

Doctors like Barnes, on the other hand, emphasize that confessions are not always reliable. The exonerations of recent years have shown that people sometimes falsely admit to crimes because of police pressure or the promise of a plea bargain. In the first case from Canada’s shaken-baby inquiry to reach the Ontario Court of Appeal, the judges overturned the conviction of Dinesh Kumar, a 44-year-old father who pleaded guilty to shaking his 5-week-old son to death. Kumar says now that at the time of his guilty plea, he believed he had no hope of prevailing against the damning testimony of the state’s pathologist, who has since been discredited for giving error-riddled testimony based on botched autopsies.

In response to the critics who question the basis for some shaken-baby convictions, many in the child-abuse-treatment field have fired back with a critique of their own. Christian and Leventhal dismiss defense-side experts’ alternate explanations, like Uscinski’s theory that children suffer spontaneous rebleeds from birth injuries. “Every year they come up with a new alternate theory that we have to refute,” Christian says.

Normally, of course, this is how science progresses: One researcher comes up with a hypothesis, which others question and test. But shaken-baby cases are haunted by the enormous repercussions of getting it wrong — the conviction of innocent adults, on the one hand, and on the other, the danger to children of missing serious abuse. In one study, researchers looked into the deaths of five children who had head injuries that initially were misjudged to be accidents and found that four of them could have been prevented if an earlier pattern of abuse had been detected. If parents are the focus of a shaken-baby investigation, doctors must weigh this risk in helping the state determine whether a child should be removed from the home. “When babies are sent home with an injury that’s misattributed to an accident, we know that one-quarter to one-third of them will come back with another serious injury or, in some cases, death,” Leventhal says.

Barnes, who is now part of a child-abuse-protection team at Stanford, doesn’t dispute the need to investigate shaken-baby symptoms. But he says that most of his colleagues don’t present the science dispassionately. “They have built their careers, their entire standing on this issue.” His opponents, for their part, dismiss the defense experts as hired guns. “They’re aggrandizing themselves and making a lot of money testifying,” says Robert Block, the president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics. While it’s true that experts like Uscinski can make six figures a year testifying (he says he testifies free when a defendant cannot afford to pay him), it’s also the case that some witnesses for the prosecution are paid. Barnes no longer takes fees to testify in either criminal or custody cases. Neither did four of the other five defense experts who testified for Audrey Edmunds.

Last September, the fight among the doctors broke out in public on the Web, after Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former prosecutor and a law professor at DePaul, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed warning of wrongful convictions and calling on the National Academy of Sciences to referee the shaken-­baby-syndrome dispute. On the Web site CommonHealth, about 20 doctors commented, mostly to express outrage. One of them was Block. He wrote that Tuerkheimer had “been beguiled by a group of physicians who are using the courtroom to distort science, facts and reality.” And he denounced her for “furthering the cause of the so-called innocence project.”

SISTERS Julie Baumer with a photo of her parents and her sister, Victoria. Baumer, who was caring for Victoria's son, was convicted of child abuse but later found not guilty at a second trial.

Philipp Baumer was born after a difficult delivery and spent his first week in the newborn-intensive-care unit. His mother, Victoria, who had given up her last baby for adoption, struggled with drug addiction. Her sister Julie, who was 27 and a loan officer for a mortgage company, was helping take care of Victoria’s oldest child. She volunteered to adopt Philipp. “I didn’t want to see anyone else leave the family,” she told me in November when I met her in Ann Arbor, Mich.

When Philipp came home, neither Julie Baumer nor her parents could get him to take a bottle regularly. On Oct. 3, 2003, when he was 6 weeks old, Philipp was not able to keep down food for 12 hours, Baumer says. She called his pediatrician, who sent her to the emergency room at Mount Clemens Regional Medical Center outside of Detroit.

The E.R. doctor who saw Philipp found he was dehydrated and septic, gave him fluids and antibiotics and ordered a CT scan. But the test was canceled when Philipp was scheduled for transfer to the region’s specialty facility for pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. At Children’s, Philipp went straight to intensive care. But he waited 28 hours for the CT scan. By then, Philipp had been in the hospital for a total of 33 hours. The scan showed subdural bleeding, which was so extensive that his fontanelle (the soft spot on a baby’s head) was bulging. An ophthalmologist saw retinal bleeding. Philipp also had a skull fracture, although it was not near the site of the hemorrhage. In an emergency operation, a shunt was placed to relieve the pressure on Philipp’s brain, but it was too late to prevent severe damage. Philipp, who is now 7, has cerebral palsy; he cannot walk on his own, talk or see.

Four months after Philipp’s injuries occurred, Julie Baumer was charged with child abuse in the first degree. The prosecutor didn’t present a theory about why Baumer would have harmed Philipp, saying that it was the state’s job to show that Baumer intended to shake the baby, not what motivated her. Two doctors from Children’s Hospital testified for the prosecution: Steven Ham, the neurosurgeon who put in the shunt; and Cristie Becker, a radiologist who treated Philipp later. Becker said Philipp’s injuries were inflicted by shaking and timed them to “likely within 24 hours” of the CT scan. She said the skull fracture may have been an old birth-related injury. Looking at the scan, Ham said the fracture was new and that Philipp’s injuries were the result of blunt-force trauma that occurred “within the previous 12 to 24 hours.” He said he could pinpoint the timing based on “how sick the child was, and then the fact that in looking at the scan we could see fresh blood in the scan.”

Becker and Ham didn’t note in court that their 24-hour time frame meant that Philipp would have started hemorrhaging while he was at Children’s — and no longer in Baumer’s care. (When I called Becker, she said, “I don’t care to revisit that issue, and best of luck trying to find the truth in the midst of that trial.” Ham did not return my calls.) Baumer’s trial lawyer failed to point out this flaw in the prosecution’s case. The lawyer also did not find a defense expert who could read Philipp’s brain scans. Baumer had no money to hire one, and her lawyer didn’t know that he could have asked for court funds to cover the expense. In 2005, Baumer was convicted and sentenced to 10 to 15 years.

Baumer was raised Catholic, and in 2007, a nun saw her name on a prayer list and came to visit her in prison. When she heard her story, the nun asked Baumer if she needed a new lawyer and wrote on her behalf to Charles Lugosi, then a professor at the Catholic law school Ave Maria. Lugosi agreed to take Baumer’s case and enlisted the help of a former prosecutor, Carl Marlinga, who had opened a defense practice. Later, the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic joined the defense.

The defense team sent Philipp’s brain scans to Patrick Barnes. At the bottom of the images, Barnes saw a distinctive bright triangle surrounding the major vein that brings blood in and out of the brain. To Barnes, the triangle clearly pointed to a diagnosis unrelated to abuse: Venous sinus thrombosis, or stroke, probably from an infection — an explanation similar to the one Barnes gave for Noah Whitmer’s injuries. Another radiologist and a forensic pathologist concurred with Barnes’s reading of Philipp’s scans. The defense experts also saw suggestions of an earlier smaller stroke, which could have triggered the feeding problems that led Julie to call Philipp’s pediatrician. This reading of the scans matched the time frame Becker and Ham had given at trial: Philipp could have started to show some symptoms, and then had a major stroke after he was admitted to the hospital. The defense experts agreed with Becker that the skull fracture was old. They said it was likely the result of Philipp’s difficult birth.

This testimony won Baumer a new trial. It also gave the defense team an answer to the question that hovers over every shaken-baby prosecution: What happened to hurt the child? During a trial, solving that mystery isn’t supposed to be the defense’s responsibility — the burden of proof rests with the prosecution. But a credible response makes it easier to lift the weight of the medical evidence from the shoulders of the defendant.

At Baumer’s second trial, which took place in October, the defense called neighbors and friends who testified that she was gentle and loving with children. The prosecution introduced no evidence to the contrary. Baumer has two drunken driving offenses on her record from the late 1990s, but they weren’t introduced at the trial.

Back on the stand, Ham and Becker now said they had misspoken about the time frame, and came up with new estimates: Becker said that Philipp’s internal bleeding could have begun five days before the CT scan, and Ham said one or two days. They both remained convinced that Philipp’s hemorrhages were inflicted. “Before they testified, they both said that it was their opinion from the beginning that the injuries occurred before Philipp came to the E.R.,” Richard Goodman, the prosecutor at the second trial, says. And the prosecution’s doctors disagreed with Barnes and the other defense-side experts that Philipp’s scans showed a thrombosis. On cross-examination, Baumer’s lawyer, Marlinga, asked Ham and Becker if they were trying to deflect criticism of the hospital for failing to give Philipp the care he needed because of the delay of his CT scan. The doctors denied that their revised testimony had anything to do with protecting the hospital.

The jurors began their deliberations by taking a poll. Nine out of 12 thought Baumer should be found not guilty. “For me, it came down to this: For the prosecution to be right, I was required to believe that a woman with no history or indication of violent tendencies or instability hit this baby’s head so hard that she fractured his skull, and shook him so hard that she caused extensive brain damage, while leaving no marks on him,” says Carman Minarik, a juror who is a minister at First United Methodist Church in Mount Clemens. “That just didn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Sera Miller, a claims representative for the Social Security Administration, was one of the three jurors who thought at first that Baumer was guilty. She found the medical testimony dense and confusing. “I think we needed 12 doctors on that jury,” she said. After an afternoon of deliberations, she went home and couldn’t sleep. In the morning she decided that the defense had done enough to introduce reasonable doubt. The jury found Baumer not guilty.

When Philipp was 3 months old and ready to leave the hospital, he was put into foster care with Debi and Phil Zentz, who later adopted him and changed his name to Ben. When the second jury announced that it found Baumer not guilty, the Zentzes were in court. Baumer looked at Debi. “I was hoping for a bridge between the families,” Baumer says. Instead, Debi Zentz gave this statement to the press: “The verdict does not change our belief. Reasonable doubt does not equate to innocence.” When I called her in January, she said, “I have absolutely no doubt that Julie Baumer shook and horribly injured my son.”

The Whitmers also feel certain that Trudy Rueda harmed their son and that she wronged them by putting them through a trial. “We got to a point where we said that if she stands up and admits what she did, we might be able to put this behind us,” Michael Whitmer said. “But now, how do you forgive?”

He and his wife were sitting on a couch in their living room, in the Cape Cod-style house in Alexandria, Va., that Michael renovated by hand. Noah, his blue eyes sometimes focused and sometimes vacant, walked a bit unsteadily on the floor in front of us, picking up books and toys and putting them in his mouth. Noah can see now because a few months after his injury, he slept standing up for weeks to drain the blood from behind his eyes. His seizures have stopped, but only thanks to a strict and labor-intensive ketogenic diet. How could the Whitmers forgive, given the medical testimony from doctors they trust? Rueda’s conviction is now on appeal, with a hearing scheduled for mid-February.

As for Audrey Edmunds, she has been out of prison for about three years. Now 49, she is blond and slim, and when I met her at a mall near her home outside Minneapolis, she talked to me about her three daughters. She wore jeans and open-toed sandals and showed me pictures of her children at a Twins game and talked about the delight she takes in taking snacks to her youngest girl’s soccer practice. For a few minutes, her 11 years in prison seemed like a balloon she has let go.

But Edmunds does not live with her children. Her husband divorced her four years into her sentence; she says the separation was just too much for him. He stopped taking the girls to see her every week. When she got out of prison, she moved in with a friend and took a job at a Kwik Trip convenience store. Better work is hard to come by because of the time Edmunds served in prison. She also wants the early shift so she can see her kids in the afternoons. Sometimes, though, they go on a trip with their father and forget to call. “I was gone for so long,” she says.

Edmunds said, however, that she had to come to terms with the drive to prosecute her. As we walked through the mall, she pointed out a Dora the Explorer display she thought young kids would like. Then she turned away from it. “A baby has died,” she said simply. “They want to blame somebody.”

Emily Bazelon, a contributing writer, is a senior editor at Slate and the Truman Capote law-and-media fellow at Yale Law School.