John Pfaff was mentioned in a post on the Simple Justice blog about the Supreme Court’s decision in Cavazos v. Shirley Ree Smith.
Teaching criminal law at Fordham Law School, John Pfaff posts at PrawfsBlawg about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Cavazos v. Shirley Ree Smith, dealing with two critical and troubling issues arising from the case.
The question at the heart of Cavazos is whether a 7-week old boy, Etzel Glass, died one night from SIDS or due to shaken baby syndrome (SBS) at the hands of his grandmother, Shirley Smith. At trial, the jurors heard from dueling pathologists about the likely cause of death, and they ultimately accepted the story of the prosecution’s doctors and convicted Smith.
The evidence in the case was ambiguous. Many (though not all) of the “tell-tale” signs of SBS were missing, and the state’s experts concluded that death resulted from an undetected—and perhaps undetectable—shearing of the brainstem. Smith’s pathologists noted that Etzel was a low birth-weight child born with jaundice and a heart murmur, all of which are risk factors for SIDS. A classic dueling-experts situation.
