54 marieclaire.com.au“I lost the son
I so desperately
wanted – and
I was being
accused of
killing him”Harris was arrested and
charged with manslaughter. “I felt
like I was in a haze. I couldn’t talk,
I couldn’t move, I was just staring
into space. I’d lost the son I’d so
desperately wanted – and I was
being accused of killing him.
I just couldn’t believe it,” she tells marie claire.
Her trial hinged on complex medical evidence. The
prosecution included a report from respected paediatric
neuropathologist Dr Waney Squier, who confirmed
Patrick appeared to have been a victim of shaking. Squier
based her assessment on an SBS diagnostic tool that has
been used for the last 40 years, which assumes that if an
infant has swelling on the brain, bleeding on the brain’s
surface and behind the eyes (symptoms known as the
“triad”) and the parent or carer cannot offer another
explanation, then the baby has been violently shaken.
Despite fervently protesting her innocence, baby
Patrick’s SBS diagnosis meant Harris was found guilty of
manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison.
Grieving and separated from her two older daughters,
her incarceration was just the tip of the iceberg.
Harris, who had been pregnant during the trial, gave
birth to another son five months into her sentence. She
knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep the baby (whom
she named Matthew) with her, but was distraught to
discover he was to be adopted and lost forever. “I didn’t
stop crying for weeks,” she remembers. “When they took
Matthew away from me it broke my heart all over again.”I
t was a devastating outcome for Harris, yet one
that could have been very different thanks to
new research that has emerged
concerning the diagnosis of SBS.
In February, respected international
medical journal Acta Paediatrica
published a paper that critiques the exist-
ing scientific evidence behind SBS.
Professor Niels Lynöe, a medical
ethicist at the Karolinska Institute in
Stockholm, led the two-year study. He
concluded that there is no convincing
evidence to show that the triad is defini-
tive proof of shaking. “You can’t use these studies to
say that whenever you see these changes [the triad] in
the infant brain, the infant has been shaken – it’s not
possible according to current knowledge,” he explains.
Lynöe’s findings pose an ethical dilemma: without
a foolproof method to diagnose SBS, there is a risk that
innocent parents will be convicted or have their children
removed from their care. On the flip side, there is also
a risk that parents who have abused their children may
not face the consequences.
Although Lynöe’s study received backing from an
extensive independent review, it has not been
well-received by medical agencies that support the tradi-
tional diagnosis of SBS, with some trying to stop thereport from being published. “They’re afraid that people
who have abused infants might go free, or that parents
will use the report as a cover up for abuse,” says Lynöe.
The doubts the study raises are familiar to Dr Squier,
the prosecution expert responsible for diagnosing SBS in
Lorraine Harris’ manslaughter trial. For the past 17
years, Squier has been questioning the validity of SBS.
Although her report on baby Patrick was consistent with
the mainstream view of SBS, within two years of making
her assessment she changed her mind about the evi-
dence. After examining the research on SBS more closely,
she discovered she couldn’t make the
theory add up. “All I could do was admit
that I was wrong,” says Squier. “But
it’s awful to know you’ve been part of
someone’s conviction and jail sentence.
[Lorraine’s] life was wrecked by it.”
Squier, who has studied infant brains
for more than 20 years, is now one of
a small contingent of medical experts
around the globe who dispute the way
SBS is diagnosed. Like Lynöe, she believes
that the triad isn’t a telltale sign of shaking as it could be
caused by a number of other factors, such as genetic dis-
orders, blood clotting in the surface of the brain (venous
thrombosis) or even low falls, such as accidentally rolling
off a bed or change table. The physiology of the tiny new-
born brain makes it more likely to bleed, she says, and
astonishingly, many healthy babies are born with at least
two manifestations of the triad. “In newborn babies, 46
to 50 per cent have bleeding on the surface of the brain
and between 30 to 60 per cent have bleeding behind the
eyes. It’s because they’re little and they’re suffering from
pressure [from coming down the birth canal during
labour and delivery]. Blood can’t flow out of a baby’s
brain very easily when they’re being born,” she explains.INVESTIGATION