Experts on Trial 

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Experts on Trial: 1. Shaken Baby

1. Shaken Baby

BBC Radio 4 - Experts on Trial, 1. Shaken Baby

A judge has to decide the cause of a baby’s death but the experts in the case don’t agree.

A judge must decide if baby Z’s death was caused by his parents, but expert witnesses submitting evidence in the case don’t agree with each other. Whose expertise should we accept?

What should we do when experts disagree with each other? Author and criminal psychologist Dr Julia Shaw lays bare the secret world of expert witnesses. An expert on the reliability of memory, she has submitted evidence in more than 50 trials in the UK, US, and Canada. In this series, she dives into five seminal legal cases where the outcome hinged on a crucial piece of expert evidence. 

In this episode, Julia tells the story of baby Z’s death and the ‘trial by experts’ his mother faced. Had she really shaken him? It was the job of medical experts to answer the question. But they disagreed about the interpretation of symptoms known as ‘the deadly triad’.
 
Dr Julia Shaw speaks with barrister Karen Squibb-Williams to try and make sense of shaken baby syndrome, of the controversy surrounding one of the experts in the case, Dr Waney Squier, and how disagreements like this can be resolved.


NOTE: This programme has been edited since broadcast to remove a statement that Dr Waney Squier emailed photographs to other experts in the case in an attempt to convince them to change their opinion, and one of the experts called that ‘wholly unacceptable’. In fact, Dr Squier emailed the photographs illustrating a specific pathological feature in dispute, to her instructing lawyer at his request, and it was the photographs themselves, with only brief case history, that were described as unacceptable. 


Presenter: Dr Julia Shaw
Produceer: Simona Rata

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