Letters to the Editor: Two Personal Perspectives on Shaken Baby Syndrome

Readers of The Free Press are smart, opinionated, and ideologically diverse. That means we get a lot of really fascinating letters. We can’t publish all of them, but every month, we print a handful that have us talking in the office.

First up this month, a response to Jennifer Block’s piece on shaken baby syndrome, which ran last week. In it, she wrote about Robert Roberson, who has been on death row in Texas since 2003, having been convicted for supposedly rocking his baby too hard.

We received a letter from Mike Wrenn, who served as juror on a shaken baby syndrome case in New Hampshire:

I recently served on a jury here in Manchester, New Hampshire, in a case about a father accused of harming his 10-week-old child. The father was accused of shaking his daughter and inflicting fluid buildup in her brain. After listening to all of the witnesses and other evidence, it was very clear that there was a great deal of reasonable doubt. After the case was sent to the jury, we deliberated for no more than 45 minutes and unanimously decided that the defendant was not guilty.

In fact, the vast majority of the jury was taken aback by the circumstances that led to the father being charged with this offense in the first place. It seemed obvious to many of us that the evidence was fairly weak, yet Child Services and the police were convinced that charges should be brought against the father.