Written and submitted by Keith Findley, Wisconsin Innocence Project director and President, Innocence Network Board of Directors:
NPR disclosed last week that a senior pathologist in the Los Angeles County coroner’s office has sharply questioned the forensic evidence used to convict Shirley Smith, a 51-year-old grandmother, of shaking her 7-week-old grandson to death. The disclosure comes three months after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Shirley Smith’s conviction and sentence for felony child endangerment by summarily reversing the 9th Circuit’s grant of habeas relief in Cavasos v. Smith.
According to NPR, the newly disclosed report by the pathologist, James Ribe, details eight “diagnostic problems” with the coroner’s 1996 ruling that the child had died from violent shaking or a forceful blow to the head. Ribe’s report notes that there was no evidence of abuse, and that the child’s brain injuries were relatively minor and could have been caused by suffocation from sleeping face down on a couch cushion or even from the birth process.
These revelations make the Supreme Court’s summary reversal in Smith’s case all-the-more troubling. The Court’s per curiam majority treated this as a routine decision mandated by established principles requiring deference to juries in Continue reading
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