Shaken Baby Syndrome Has Been Largely Debunked. Courts Are Still Catching Up.

This story was co-published with Truthout.

By the time Mason Tucker Smith was 2 years old, his mother, Mary Katherine Smith, had taken him to the doctor dozens of times.

Tucker had frequent ear infections, high fevers, and episodes of vomiting. On at least six occasions, he had seizures, but the doctors repeatedly reassured his mother, who goes by Katie, that these were benign “breath-holding spells” that would resolve on their own.

On the day of his collapse, July 30, 2014, Tucker had another seizure while Katie’s housemate, Jeremy Kitchens, was watching him in their bedroom and Katie was making dinner, according to her statement to the police.

As she approached the bedroom door, she heard a “thud.” Katie entered the room and Kitchens told her that Tucker was having another “episode.” Katie told police that she found Tucker unconscious on the ground. Believing that this was another breath-holding episode, she picked him up and put him on the bed. She left him in Kitchens’s care while she drove her daughter to meet a friend. While she was gone, Tucker vomited.

She returned to the house about 20 minutes later and checked Tucker’s oxygen level. When it began to drop, she called 911 and attempted to resuscitate him.

At the hospital, a physician concluded Tucker had been shaken. He was declared dead on August 2 and Katie was charged with his murder.

Two years later, Katie went to trial in Richmond County, Georgia, and was found guilty. The judge sentenced her to life in prison.

Shaken baby syndrome (SBS), also known as abusive head trauma (AHT), has been largely debunked, with one New Jersey judge calling it “akin to ‘junk science.’” While some courts have started to take a more critical look at SBS/AHT cases, prosecutions have continued and many people are still fighting their convictions.

The so-called triad of symptoms associated with SBS/AHT — bleeding around the eyes, bleeding between the skull and brain, and brain swelling — can be caused by strokes, short-distance falls, seizures, and disease, among other things.

Katie’s attorneys with the Southern Center for Human Rights say their investigation has revealed that she was convicted of a crime that never occurred.

Experts retained by her legal team — a neurologist and a forensic pathologist — have concluded that Tucker died of undiagnosed epilepsy, which was caused by an undetected arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in his brain. AVM is a life-threatening condition that typically develops in utero, in which a person has abnormally tangled blood vessels that disrupt blood flow, deprive tissue of oxygen, and face risk of rupture.

Forty-four people have been exonerated in SBS/AHT cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Katie’s attorneys have filed a motion for a new trial and, on August 24, they will present their new evidence before the Superior Court of Richmond County.. The Augusta District Attorney’s Office is opposing Katie’s petition. The office did not respond to emails or calls seeking comment.

“Tucker’s death was a tragedy, not a crime,” Katie’s lawyers wrote in their motion. “Tucker was sick from birth, and was living with an undiagnosed and untreated deadly brain condition.”

Tucker’s Medical Records

Truthout reviewed Tucker’s medical records, which total about 278 pages. They reveal that Katie took him to the pediatrician more than 25 times, in addition to visits to specialists and the emergency room.

The physicians reassured Katie that Tucker was a healthy child. They told her that when he became upset he held his breath until he passed out, but that this was nothing to be concerned about.

Tucker’s first witnessed seizure occurred at daycare when he was five months old. Katie picked him up from daycare and took him to the pediatrician.

“Patient was reported to have had eyes roll back and lose consciousness while eating baby food in a highchair (sort of slumped),” the doctor wrote.

The pediatrician sent him to the hospital for an overnight observation. During the observation, Tucker “ate and slept well,” according to the medical records. Katie told the doctor that Tucker’s father, who had died shortly after Tucker’s death, and nephew each had experienced one seizure. The report does not recommend any further evaluation.

After his second seizure, which also occurred at daycare, his pediatrician referred him for an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain. The EEG report states that it was normal.

In her affidavit to the court, defense expert Heather Ravvin McKee, a neurologist who specializes in epilepsy, says research shows that “a single routine EEG only has an approximately 29-55 percent chance” of showing abnormal brain waves.

Despite the results of the EEG, Tucker should have been treated for epilepsy after the second seizure at the latest, she wrote.

Tucker had another seizure a few months later in March of 2013. Then, on July 20, 2013, when Tucker was 15 months old, he experienced a seizure that lasted between 15 and 20 minutes. He was still seizing when he and Katie arrived at the hospital, according to his medical records.

Notes from the hospital state that he “was bedridden” because he “could not rise from the bed without assistance, could not ambulate, and could not sit in a chair or wheelchair without support restraints.” Yet, he was discharged the next day. Katie was instructed to make a follow-up appointment with Tucker’s pediatrician.

Less than two weeks later, Katie took Tucker to see a pediatric neurologist. His report is riddled with errors. He wrote that Tucker was born full-term (he was premature) and that he had never been hospitalized, although he had been admitted to the neurologist’s own institution just 11 days earlier.

He diagnosed Tucker with breath-holding episodes and told Katie that Tucker would grow out of them. “I do not think these are seizures or epilepsy,” he wrote in his report.

On July 23, 2014, a week before Tucker’s final collapse, Katie and Tucker returned to the pediatrician. Tucker had been vomiting, was nauseous, and was experiencing headaches. The doctor told Katie to keep him hydrated. However, this may have been a sign that something more serious was at play. Vomiting can occur as part of a seizure, following a seizure, or can be a sign of increased pressure in the brain, according to neurologist McKee, the defense expert.

The Prosecution’s Case

At Katie’s trial, misogyny and junk science collided. Katie was a single parent working as a hospice nurse. Her husband, and Tucker’s father, died by suicide when Tucker was just two months old. After his death, Katie and her children moved in with Kitchens, a friend from high school.

At trial, prosecutors portrayed Katie as an uncaring mother who neglected Tucker’s medical needs and prioritized her friendship with Kitchens over her children. Katie did not take the stand.

Vilifying mothers is a common prosecutorial tactic in cases where women are accused of crimes that likely never occurred, according to Valena Beety, author of Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity.

“The woman is wrongly convicted based on that confluence of [false] forensic evidence and gender bias,” Beety recently told The Appeal.

Kitchens testified for the prosecution and relayed essentially the same account that Katie had provided to the police. The prosecutor asked Kitchens if he had not killed Tucker, who did? Kitchens replied, “I guess Katie did … She was the only other one there.” On cross-examination, the defense accused Kitchens of killing Tucker.

Emergency personnel testified that Katie was “unnaturally calm” when they arrived.

“We’ve had kids locked in cars on cool days and the parents were much more emotional about the situation than that day,” a sergeant with the fire department told the jury.

Prosecutors and police often make assumptions about how a person should respond to a crisis. Among wrongful convictions, there are numerous examples of law enforcement presuming that too much or too little emotion was indicative of an innocent person’s guilt.

Katie’s attorney, Mark Loudon-Brown, noted in a phone interview with Truthout that Katie was a nurse who is trained to remain calm in crises.

The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was the testimony of two medical experts who told the jury that Tucker had been shaken.

Mary Lynn Sheram, the hospital physician who first diagnosed Tucker with SBS/AHT, testified that Tucker’s symptoms are “shown in the literature to be 100% as non-accidental trauma.” The bleeding around his eyes “makes it a hallmark for abusive head injury.”

Nearly identical statements have been made in numerous SBS/AHT cases that have resulted in exonerations.

Timothy Gonzalez was convicted in an SBS case in 2016, the same year as Katie’s conviction, and was exonerated earlier this year. At his trial, a child abuse pediatrician testified that there was no “accidental explanation” and no “medical explanation” for his daughter’s injuries. In 2022, the court tossed out his conviction. At his retrial earlier this year, his attorneys presented evidence that Gonzalez’s daughter had suffered from a respiratory infection that led to encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, which then developed into sepsis. On March 11, the jury acquitted Gonzalez of all charges.

The second medical expert for the prosecution in Katie’s case was Lora Darrisaw, the director of pediatric forensic pathology at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

“[W]e have no plausible accidental event that would account for the findings that I had,” she told the jury.

Several years before Katie’s trial, Darrisaw was the star witness in the murder trial of two Georgia parents, Ashley and Albert Debelbot, who were accused of killing their three-day-old newborn. She ruled the death a homicide by blunt force trauma. In 2021, the parents were exonerated after their attorneys uncovered evidence that their baby had been born with abnormalities in the brain which led to her death.

Openings for Exoneration

The medical community’s understanding of SBS/AHT has changed significantly in the years since Tucker’s death. Since 2014, 27 people convicted in SBS/AHT cases have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Last year, in a first-of-its-kind decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court banned testimony on SBS from the state’s courtrooms. In July, in another Georgia case, Gwinnett County Superior Court Judge Kimberly A. Gallant granted Danyel Smith’s request for a new trial, noting SBS/AHT is no longer treated as a “presumptive diagnosis,” and that “current medical and scientific standards” require providers to consider “alternative, non-abusive causes before concluding abuse.” (Danyel is also represented by the Southern Center for Human Rights. He and Katie are not related.)

“Today, the diagnostic approach is different,” Katie’s attorney, Loudon-Brown, told Truthout. “You might keep the idea of non-accidental trauma in your head, but you would have to go further. You would have to look at what’s going on with Tucker.”