THE sheer weight of conflicting medical evidence which dominated Louise
Woodward鈥檚 trial last month in Massachusetts seemed to leave so much room for
reasonable doubt about her guilt that an acquittal looked like the only sensible
verdict. But as the whole world now knows, she was found guilty of murdering
Matthew Eappen.
The media can be forgiven for playing every angle from Woodward鈥檚 obsession
with theatre to her comparative plainness and British reserve. But something
deeper went demonstrably wrong in Boston. To reach their verdict the jurors had
to reject a mass of expert medical testimony鈥攖estimony which cast serious
doubt on the prosecution鈥檚 case that Woodward caused the dead baby鈥檚 injuries by
shaking him violently and throwing him against a flat surface. Right now we can
only speculate on why this happened. But the disturbing possibility is that it
wasn鈥檛 simply the result of a jury failing to get to grips with complex
technical evidence.
The undisputed medical facts are that the child was comatose on arrival at
hospital. He had a fractured skull and a brain so swollen from internal bleeding
it catapulted a blood clot onto the hospital floor during an operation to save
him. He also had a fractured wrist that had gone undetected for more than two
weeks before the alleged shaking incident.
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To the local doctors who treated and examined Eappen, it looked like a clear
case of child abuse by violent shaking or 鈥渟haken baby syndrome鈥濃�攁 view
they propounded in court. But the defence flew in medical experts who claimed
that the death was caused by a previously undetected head injury that was
reopened on the day of the alleged incident by minor jarring or gentle shaking.
This injury, they claimed, could have occurred at the same time as the wrist
fracture and may have been accidental.
Neither version successfully explained all the facts. The key problem for the
prosecution was that there was no physical evidence that he had been shaken and
dashed against a surface鈥攏o bruises on the arms, shoulders, ribs or neck
and no swelling on the back of the head. The main problem for the defence was
the retinal haemorrhaging observed in the baby鈥檚 eyes. This rare injury is
scarcely ever seen in babies of Eappen鈥檚 age except in cases of violent shaking,
where the eye has been slammed back and forth hard enough to rip the retina.
But all the defence needed to do was provide grounds for reasonable doubt.
The absence of bruises alone should have been enough to force an acquittal. The
fact that it wasn鈥檛 suggests the jury must have taken an extraordinarily
sceptical, even downright cynical, view of the defence鈥檚 medical experts. For
this sorry state of affairs, American lawyers only have themselves to blame.
For years, they have been devaluing the currency of expert opinion in
courtrooms by using almost any doctor, scientist or pseudo expert they can find
to support their case. In the most notorious case of the 1980s, later
overturned, a Philadelphia jury awarded a psychic $1 million damages
after she claimed, with the backing of an expert, that a CAT scan had destroyed
her predictive powers.
Since then, new guidelines have put the onus on American judges to screen out
鈥渏unk science鈥� before a trial begins. The problem is that any gains made here
have been partly offset by a surge in class action suits. Massive claims, like
those being made against tobacco companies, have encouraged lawyers to pay their
hired experts even more money to say the right thing in court鈥攐r in some
cases, to go looking for the 鈥渞ight鈥� result in experimental or epidemiological
data. And technical advances, especially in brain imaging and genetics, mean
there is increasing scope for building a specious defence.
The US鈥攁nd perhaps one day Britain鈥攔isks creating a generation of
jurors who are either too confused or too cynical to properly weigh the opinions
of teams of experts like the ones that clashed in the Woodward trial. One
response would be to set up panels of independent scientists who would be
convened to help both judge and jury evaluate expert testimonies in complex
cases. It may be the only way to stop lawyers from abusing science and juries
from buckling under expert overload.
