A Strong Defense in Abusive Head Trauma Cases Requires Questioning Scientific “Consensus”
Shaken-baby-syndrome/abusive-head-trauma (SBS/AHT) prosecutions are unlike other criminal cases. In most prosecutions, there was a crime that occurred, and the focus is on who committed the crime. But in SBS/AHT cases, a dispute often arises over whether a crime has occurred at all. The State’s case almost exclusively rests on expert medical testimony. A doctor opines that the child died from abuse and not from a medical condition or from accidental trauma, such as a fall.
The problem I see so often in the criminal defense community is that defense counsel treats an SBS/AHT case like other criminal cases: counsel assumes a crime indeed occurred, and they focus on the evidence the State has pointing to a perpetrator. Approaching the case in this way is usually a lost cause for the client, because the accused is almost always the caregiver that was with the child when the medical emergency occurred.
To effectively prepare a defense in these cases, trial counsel must not skip over the threshold issue: did a crime occur? In other words, was the child’s injuries caused by an intentional act?
In investigating that issue, defense counsel must look at all possible causes of the child’s injuries, even those that are controversial. Being skeptical of what we are told is a necessary trait of a good criminal defense attorney. It does not take long practicing in this area of law before you discover that something you read or heard from an official source turned out to be wrong.
Over the last several years, I have handled several SBS/AHT cases post-conviction. These cases are especially complex. To be successful in reversing a conviction, it is usually not enough to call into question the State’s claim that the child died from intentional inflicted trauma, such as violent shaking. Rather, success usually requires determining what did cause the child’s injuries.
In one case, a three-month-old baby died in her sleep. The baby had signs of an immune system response to something and had suddenly lost 20% of her body weight from her last well-baby visit until her untimely death six weeks later. At her last well-baby visit, the child had received seven vaccines.
The consensus in the medical community has long been that all vaccines are safe and effective, and giving them all at once has no adverse effects. But finding research that supported that consensus was difficult. And then in December 2025, a new study was released. The study, which can be found here, noted that at the two-month well-baby visit, an infant receives seven immunizations. This is the most an infant will receive at one time.
Thus, the researchers studied whether there was any association between a baby receiving up to seven doses, and mortality. The researchers analyzed data from Louisiana. They pulled the death records for every child under the age of three who died in Louisiana during the period from 2013 through 2024. They excluded the babies who died before their third month of life. They also excluded those children for whom they could not match to their immunization records. This left 1,225 children included in the study.
The researchers next divided the group into unvaccinated and vaccinated. A child was considered vaccinated if the child had received any vaccine between day 60 and day 90 of life. Only the children who died between days 90 and 120 of life were included in the deceased category; if they died after day 120, they were still considered alive for purposes of the study.
The results were clear: children vaccinated in their second month of life were more likely to die in their third month than those who were not. How much greater was the risk? Babies who received all seven immunizations, compared to babies who did not receive any, were 68% more likely to die in their third month of life. And there were differences based on sex: female babies who received all seven immunizations were 112% more likely to die in their third month than female babies who did not receive any vaccines.
Of course, these results show an association between vaccination and mortality, but not necessarily a causal relationship. So the researchers decided to study the babies’ causes of death. If vaccination played no role in causing the deaths, one would expect that the rates of particular causes of death in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups would mimic one another. But they do not.
The researchers explained that the top three causes of infant death are SIDS, accidental suffocation or strangulation, and unspecified or ill-defined causes. Several years ago, public health experts believed unsafe sleep practices were the primary cause of SIDS, so they started a campaign to push safer sleep practices. They then claimed the campaign was successful by showing that SIDS deaths had decreased.
The only problem? The other two leading causes of infant deaths increased, meaning there has been no effect on infant mortality by changing sleep practices. Something else must be the culprit. Could it be vaccines? The authors of the study discovered that not only do vaccinated children die more often than unvaccinated children, they also die of different causes. The study does not discuss this matter in more detail, but it is something that should be studied.
What does all this have to do with criminal defense? It relates to the threshold issue defense counsel in SBS/AHT cases must investigate: did a crime even occur? To answer that question, counsel must determine whether anything else could have caused the baby’s death. That necessarily will entail going down investigatory “rabbit holes.” Counsel must not be afraid to question even established “scientific consensus.”