In spite of an odd effort via the district legal professional’s workplace in Nashville, Tennessee, to opposite a homicide conviction that its personal prosecutors received greater than 20 years in the past, the state’s Court docket of Legal Appeals upheld Russell Maze’s conviction on Friday. The courtroom stated there was once inadequate proof to end up his innocence, even if the unique clinical examiner within the case — whose testimony helped protected the 2004 conviction — recanted closing 12 months, concluding that Maze’s son died of herbal reasons, now not abuse.
Maze, whose case was once the topic of an in-depth article closing 12 months via ProPublica and The New York Occasions Mag, was once accused of shaking his 5-week-old son, Alex, who later died.
The courtroom’s 2-1 choice adopted a sweeping, yearlong reinvestigation of the case via a different group inside the DA’s workplace referred to as a conviction-review unit. After consulting with mavens in pathology, radiology, neonatology and ophthalmology, the unit concluded that Alex died now not from shaking however from an undiagnosed clinical situation.
Maze, now 60, was once arrested after Alex changed into nonresponsive within the spring of 1999. He has been at the back of bars ever since and is serving a lifestyles sentence.
Maze stood trial two times, and in each court cases, prosecutors introduced proof they stated confirmed Alex was once a sufferer of shaken child syndrome. The diagnosing physician, Suzanne Starling, informed jurors that inner bleeding round Alex’s mind and eyes indicated that he persisted a ferocious act of violence via shaking. “You can be appalled at what this gave the impression of,” she testified at Maze’s first trial. So forceful was once the shaking, she added, that “kids who fall from 3 or 4 flooring onto concrete gets a an identical mind damage.”
However within the years since Alex was once rushed to the emergency room, medical doctors and researchers discovered that the indicators as soon as thought to be to be the hallmarks of shaken child syndrome — mind swelling and bleeding across the mind and from the retina — aren’t all the time indicators of abuse. Lengthy considered definitive evidence of shaking, they’re now understood to produce other reasons, together with unintended falls, sickness, an infection and congenital issues.
In March 2024, the conviction-review unit — in conjunction with lawyers for Maze and his spouse, Kaye — introduced their findings at a two-day evidentiary listening to. Kaye, who wasn’t house along with her husband when their son changed into unresponsive in 1999, was once however charged with annoyed attack. Informed that an open prison case may just impede her efforts to regain custody of her son, who didn’t die instantly, she entered an Alford plea to a discounted legal fee — a plea that permits defendants to simply accept punishment whilst keeping up their innocence.
On the listening to, District Legal professional Glenn Funk recommended the courtroom to overturn their convictions. “Each unmarried clinical skilled, the use of present science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are in reality blameless of the crimes for which they have been convicted,” he stated. “It’s my responsibility as district legal professional to invite the courtroom to vacate those convictions.” The director of his workplace’s conviction-review unit, Sunny Eaton, was once even blunter. “The state were given this incorrect,” she informed Pass judgement on Steve Dozier.
Dozier had a protracted historical past with the case, having presided over Maze’s trials, appeals and postconviction court cases. (He additionally signed off on Kaye’s plea settlement, which spared her a jail sentence.) Scientific mavens testified on the 2024 listening to that Alex’s signs have been the results of an undiagnosed clinical situation. However Dozier gave this new testimony not more weight than the unique testimony from witnesses like Starling, writing that it didn’t mirror a brand new clinical consensus — best “new ammunition in a ‘fight of the mavens.’”
The Court docket of Legal Appeals’ choice on Friday upheld that ruling, figuring out that the Mazes “failed to ascertain that their clinical proof is in reality ‘new’ or that this proof supplies transparent and convincing evidence that Mr. Maze is in reality blameless.”
The opinion gave best perfunctory attention to a watershed second within the case: In September 2024, the unique clinical examiner, who made up our minds Alex’s dying to be a murder, stated he’d been incorrect. Sooner than achieving this conclusion, Dr. Bruce Levy reviewed clinical information that the conviction-review unit supplied to him — lots of which he didn’t recall having observed prior to. They incorporated Alex’s information from his untimely beginning till dying and Kaye’s obstetric information, which introduced very important context in regards to the well being demanding situations Alex (whose criminal title was once Bryan) confronted prior to he stopped respiring.
“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken child syndrome,” Levy said in a sworn affidavit. “If referred to as to testify now, I might assert Bryan Maze’s mind, on the time of his dying, confirmed no indication, to an affordable stage of clinical simple task, of prior trauma or abuse. As a substitute, the residual mind lesions seen at post-mortem much more likely than now not resulted from a herbal illness procedure.” He went directly to state that he would now classify the kid’s approach of dying as “herbal.”
Levy’s recantation perceived to lift specific weight with one of the crucial 3 judges at the Court docket of Legal Appeals who heard oral arguments within the Maze case. In a separate opinion accompanying Friday’s ruling, Pass judgement on Tom Greenholtz faithful 14 pages to arguing that Levy’s reassessment of the proof demanded severe attention. “When the state’s personal leader clinical examiner recants the very testimony that established the reason and approach of dying, the impact isn’t just to lift new questions. If credited, it calls into doubt the basis of the trial and the reliability of the post-conviction courtroom’s findings, which trusted that very same testimony.”
Greenholtz went additional, including, “Dr. Levy’s revised opinion is that no murder passed off — that the kid died of herbal reasons. This is going past mere war of words amongst mavens in regards to the interpretation of ambiguous findings. It represents a choice via the State’s personal leader forensic pathologist that the factual predicate for a murder prosecution was once absent.”
Maze can practice for permission to attraction to the Tennessee Ultimate Court docket, even though the courtroom grants assessment in just a small fraction of circumstances.
The Court docket of Legal Appeals’ ruling stands as an outlier amongst contemporary appellate critiques, through which shaken child syndrome has come beneath scrutiny. Over the past 18 months, judges in Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey have sided with defendants difficult their shaken child convictions. In October, the Texas Court docket of Legal Appeals granted a keep of execution to Robert Roberson, who was once prosecuted for his 2-year-old daughter’s dying; the keep was once granted beneath the state’s junk science legislation, which permits courts to rethink convictions that relaxation on clinical proof now considered unreliable or out of date.
The Maze case highlights a broader nationwide reevaluation of shaken child syndrome. 40-one other people whose convictions concerned the analysis are recently indexed at the Nationwide Registry of Exonerations.
“Russell Maze stays in jail for a criminal offense he didn’t dedicate,” stated Jason Gichner, govt director of the Tennessee Innocence Undertaking and Maze’s lead legal professional. “Each clinical skilled introduced on the contemporary post-conviction listening to — each for the prosecution and protection — agreed this isn’t a case about abuse. Russell wishes to come back house. We aren’t going to prevent preventing till that day comes.”
