Georgia Judge Refuses to Overturn ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’ Conviction

Yesterday, Danyel Smith’s fight to prove he did not kill his two-month-old son suffered a devastating blow when a Georgia state court denied his request for a new trial. In 2003, Smith was convicted of shaking to death his son, Chandler, based on the largely discredited theory of shaken baby syndrome (SBS). 

In April, the Superior Court of Gwinnett County held an evidentiary hearing on Smith’s motion for a new trial. Prior to the hearing, the Gwinnett County prosecutor’s office offered Smith a plea deal for time served, which would mean he would be released from prison, according to his legal filings. Smith, who has always maintained his innocence, rejected it.

“Imagine watching your baby boy die of natural causes after frantically trying to save his life, and then being asked to say, untruthfully, that you killed him,” Smith’s attorney, Mark Loudon-Brown, told The Appeal in an email. “That is something Mr. Smith would not do, even at the price of freedom.”

For years, the courts have refused to believe Smith’s protestations of innocence. At trial, Smith testified that Chandler suddenly stopped breathing while they were driving to see the baby’s mother. Smith said he performed CPR on the side of the road, then got back in the car, and drove to his partner’s location. Once he arrived at the office building where his partner was waiting, he carried Chandler out of the car. His partner called 911, and two bystanders attempted to perform CPR. Paramedics arrived and took Chandler to the hospital. 

The police quickly assumed that Smith had abused Chandler. They arrested him at the hospital, five days before his son was taken off life support. 

At trial, Smith told the jury he was innocent. 

“I did not beat my son,” he testified. “I did not shake my son.”

The jury convicted Smith, and the judge sentenced him to life. 

What Is ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’?

The shaken baby syndrome hypothesis, which was first developed in the 1970s, posits that a so-called triad of symptoms—subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling—are indicators of violent shaking. According to the theory, the injuries are so catastrophic that a victim would immediately collapse, which would mean the last person with the baby, likely a caregiver who called for help, is almost certainly the perpetrator. At trial, medical experts for the State typically dismiss other possible explanations, such as an illness or a short-distance fall, and say the trauma sustained is comparable to a fall from a multi-story building or a car crash.

The case against Smith rested entirely on the SBS theory. No eyewitnesses or physical evidence suggested that Smith had ever harmed his son. But at Smith’s trial, prosecutors called medical doctors to testify that Chandler’s symptoms alone were proof that Smith had abused him.

“We have a collection of findings here that are classic and in some cases virtually exclusive for violent shaking,” the county medical examiner testified. 

A pediatric neurosurgeon told the jury, “Unless somebody could tell me something else was going on with this child … I think he was a shaken baby. I’ll be happy if somebody can tell me something else.”

In the years since Smith’s conviction, medical research has disproved many of the assumptions underlying an SBS diagnosis. Exonerations and studies have shown that illnesses and short-distance falls can mimic symptoms that experts had associated almost exclusively with shaking. Exonerations have shown that experts can diagnose a child with SBS in cases when there was no abuse at all. A Georgia jury acquitted Melonie Ware at a retrial for an alleged case of SBS after evidence showed the boy she was babysitting was not shaken and had died from sickle cell anemia. In another case, a Michigan judge overturned daycare worker Julie Baumer’s child abuse conviction after evidence showed the baby had actually suffered a stroke.  

In Smith’s case, his attorneys say evidence shows that Chandler died from a seizure triggered by injuries sustained during childbirth. 

But Superior Court Judge Ronnie K. Batchelor dismissed testimony from Smith’s eight medical experts and ruled that the “almost twenty years of advancement in medical science has not undermined the conclusions reached at the Defendant’s trial.”

Loudon-Brown said they plan to appeal the Court’s denial and “will continue our fight to undo this wrongful conviction.”

“The evidence showed that Mr. Smith is innocent, yet he remains in prison,” Loudon-Brown, a senior attorney for the Southern Center for Human Rights, told The Appeal.

Why SBS Defendants Still Face an Uphill Battle

At the time of Smith’s 2003 trial, a defendant in an SBS case had little hope of an acquittal. Of the 34 people exonerated of SBS, 27 established their innocence after Smith was convicted, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In the past three years alone, courts exonerated people in 14 SBS cases, including two in Georgia.

But while some courts have started to take a more critical look at SBS, many continue to rubber stamp convictions based on a theory that a New Jersey trial court called “akin to junk science.”

In Mississippi, appeals courts have upheld Tasha Shelby’s 2000 conviction for SBS even though the prosecution’s main witness, a medical examiner, recanted his testimony. A jury convicted Shelby of capital murder for shaking to death her fiancé’s two-year-old son from a previous relationship. In 2018, the medical examiner who had ruled the boy’s death a homicide testified at an evidentiary hearing that he “made a mistake.” He said he now believed the child had fallen and suffered a seizure, and that the child’s asthma had also contributed to his death. 

Earlier this month, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Robert Roberson’s request to toss out his conviction for shaking his two-year-old daughter to death. In 2003, Roberson was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. He’s scheduled to be executed on Oct. 17. If his execution is carried out, he will be the first person executed for SBS in the history of the United States. Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of more than 80 Texas lawmakers urged the governor to grant Roberson’s clemency petition, warning that, “Texas may put him to death for a crime that did not occur.” 

In SBS cases, often there are multiple layers of injustice—a parent or caregiver who must grapple with the loss of a child and a wrongful conviction for a crime that never occurred. In Smith’s case, he lost Chandler and the ability to raise his now two adult children. 

“My dad didn’t raise me, that motivated me even more to be there for my kids,” Smith said in a statement provided to The Appeal in 2022. “That has been robbed from me.”

Read Judge Batchelor’s decision: