Fenris Wolf
2005-01-19 16:33:02 UTC
DAILY MAIL (London)
January 15, 2005
HEADLINE: This man is serving life for shaking a baby so hard her eyes
bled. Now new evidence suggests he - along with 96 other jailed 'child
killers' - innocent. Is this the most frightening miscarriage of in
British legal history?
BY JOHN SWEENEY
GRAPHIC: FACE OF A 'CHILD-KILLER': BUT PEOPLE WHO KNEW RAY ROCK SAID HE
COULD NOT HAVE KILLED HEIDI
RAY ROCK never saw who smashed his head open with a sock weighted with
billiard balls. A warder at Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire found
him lying in his cell in a pool of blood. He couldn't speak for three
days afterwards or walk for three weeks.
But who cares?
Rock, 32, is the worst scum imaginable. He's serving life - he's now
been moved to Dartmoor Prison - for murdering his girlfriend's baby.
Angered by 13-month-old Heidi's pitiful cries while he babysat at his
Great Yarmouth home, Rock shook her so hard that she was killed by the
violent whiplash effect.
He came out with a story that he'd dropped her and she'd stopped
breathing.
Rock wept crocodile tears and his girlfriend, Lisa Davis, was completely
conned by the coldhearted killer.
Rock would have got away with it, too, had not Heidi's autopsy
discovered a swollen brain and bleeding in the back of the eyes and over
the brain's surface - the three telltale symptoms of what has been
dubbed Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).
He must have done it, no question.
The police told Lisa about the evidence of guilt and Rock was charged
and convicted in 1999 of murdering the baby he protested he had loved.
Detective Inspector Julian Gregory, who led the murder inquiry, said:
'Rock has never shown remorse. Obviously, nothing will bring Heidi back,
but I am pleased that justice has been seen to be done in this tragic
case.' There is only one problem with the conviction of Ray Rock. An
eminent scientist has explained it in language that even the Attorney
General or the Home Secretary might understand: 'Shaken Baby Syndrome is
- because of the lack of evidence to support it - c**p.' Last month, the
Government finally began to catch up when the Attorney General, Lord
Goldsmith, raised the possibility that the convictions of a staggering
97 alleged 'child killers' - imprisoned on the basis of SBS - may be
unsafe.
If Lord Goldsmith's fears prove right, then we are looking at the
biggest and most tragic miscarriages of justice scandal in British legal
history - bigger even than that of the 'cot death' mothers wrongly
convicted of murdering their babies.
In 2003, the courts freed three mothers - Sally Clark, Trupti Patel and
Angela Cannings - jailed partly because of the evidence of the now
discredited expert Professor Sir Roy Meadow and his 'Munchausen Syndrome
By Proxy' theory.
This embodied the notion that mothers deliberately harm their children
to gain attention. Meadow also had a 'law': unless proven otherwise,
'one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder'.
Another 20 people convicted, in part, on the basis of Meadow's flawed
law and theory could yet go free, pending their appeals.
Now, Shaken Baby Syndrome is in the dock for presenting a similar
scientific 'certainty' that many experts believe is neither scientific,
nor certain, but which means that more than 100 people may have endured
the unimaginable hell of convictions for child-killing on the basis of a
mumbo-jumbo theory.
And there are potentially thousands more cases around the world -
including that of British nanny Louise Woodward, convicted by an
American court on the SBS theory.
The science behind SBS is clear: if a dead baby exhibits the three
telltale signs outlined above, then it must have been violently shaken.
According to Detective Chief Inspector Phil Wheeler, the author of the
definitive 2002 Home Office report on the subject, these injuries cannot
be accidental but must have been inflicted.
However, the theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome was based, not on laboratory
science, but on the confession of a mentally ill American woman who said
that she had violently shaken babies under her care.
Her case was written up some 40 years ago by Dr John Caffey, who later
admitted that the evidence was 'meagre', 'circumstantial' and '
manifestly incomplete'.
Despite this, doctors, police and social services embraced the diagnosis
and, from such flimsy beginnings, it 'grew like a snowball'.
Four years ago, Dr Jennian Geddes, a neuro-pathologist at the Royal
London Hospital, now retired, became troubled by the number of Shaken
Baby cases - such as that of Rock - where there was no history of
previous abuse: no broken bones, no bruises and no scars.
Dr Geddes knew that when a baby is in a fatal car crash, it is violently
shaken by the whiplash effect and suffers traumatic damage to nerves
inside the brain.
So she did something no one had done before: she compared the brains of
53 babies and children whose deaths had been attributed to violent
shaking with those of youngsters who'd died in car crashes.
Her findings were astonishing: 50 out of the 53 brains showed no
'whiplash damage' or indeed any evidence at all of a serious head
injury.
And one of the cases she examined where there was no evidence of
whiplash injury of any kind was that of Baby Heidi - allegedly viciously
shaken to death by Ray Rock.
Dr Geddes concluded there had to be another cause of the so called
'telltale signs' of SBS. She and other experts now believe that there
are a number of natural or accidental causes of SBS symptoms, including
seemingly trivial accidents such as falling off a bed from three feet.
But how could a baby falling such a short distance suffer such terrible
injuries? After all, some babies are known to have fallen 20 feet out of
an open window and survived. The answer is not the height of the fall
but exactly how the baby lands.
If the baby lands on its arms or legs, it can survive with a few broken
bones. But if it falls only a few feet and lands on the base of its
spine, an enormous jolt can travel up the spine and 'shock' the brain
stem.
The shock can switch off the breathing mechanism. But the heart will
keep on pumping blood to the brain. It's like pumping water into a
blocked radiator and the brain springs leaks in the weakest parts of the
system: the eyes and the surface of the brain.
Dr Geddes's findings blew apart the assumption that the three previously
recognised symptoms of SBS must necessarily equal foul play. In short,
she destroyed the SBS theory, but only now are the legal and medical
establishments catching up.
Raymond Rock is a big man, over 6ft tall, but in the course of my
investigations into his case, people have told me over and over that he
is unusually gentle.
He had two children with a previous partner and there was no history of
violence or bad temper.
At the birth of one of his children, Rock was complimented by one of the
midwives on his sweet nature.
She asked him if he'd ever thought of becoming a midwife.
On June 2, 1998, he was looking after Heidi, while his girlfriend Lisa
Davis was at work. He said that he heard the child crying, picked her up
and rested her on his shoulder, holding her with one hand while, with
the other, he fiddled with the baby mobile to distract her.
Somehow, she wriggled out of his grasp and fell to the floor, landing on
her bottom. It was immediately apparent that she'd been seriously
injured. She was white and limp. So Rock rang 999. Tapes were played in
court of him begging the operator to hurry the ambulance.
Today, Heidi's mother, Lisa Davis, is torn between her initial disbelief
that Rock was capable of murdering her baby, fuelled by the latest
doubts over the conviction, and the stack of evidence she heard during
Rock's trial.
Rock's family, including two children by a former partner, must live
with the knowledge that that the world sees him as a 'baby killer', a
view which led Rock's fellow inmates to assault him so viciously. The
damage caused by this one case is incalculable.
But of course there are others - 96 of them - including that of Lorraine
Harris, who lost two baby sons. The first, Patrick, died in her arms in
hospital where she'd taken him after he fell ill at home.
Lorraine, from Derby, was accused of shaking him to death, and was
convicted of manslaughter in 2000 and sentenced to four years.
Before she was convicted, she fell pregnant again, and while in prison
suffered the infinitely more terrible life sentence of having her new
son taken from her.
The Family Court - a highly secretive legal system that specialises in
child abuse cases - accepted that, as Lorraine had violently shaken
Patrick to death, her new baby was also at risk and should be the
subject of a forced adoption. She remains haunted by the loss of her
second son for a crime she says never happened.
When we investigated Lorraine's case for BBC1's Real Story With Fiona
Bruce, we found a very similar case to that of Ray Rock.
Patrick - like Heidi - displayed the supposed symptoms of SBS but had no
broken bones or any other evidence of physical abuse.
We discovered additional evidence suggesting that Lorraine may have been
a victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.
Patrick's paternal grandmother had lost two baby boys, both stillborn.
Some cases of stillbirth are linked to a genetic predisposition to
bleeding and this raised the possibility that the same genetic
predisposition also affected Patrick. This would have made it more
likely that a trivial fall would result in the telltale bleeding
symptoms of SBS.
What is clear from Dr Geddes's work and our own investigations is that
no one should be locked up on the basis of SBS, because it is,
scientifically, a fiction.
The big question for the British legal system is: how long can it keep
people in prison for 'child killings' on such a dubious basis?
The Appeal Court won't hear the first four shaken baby cases - including
those of Ray Rock and Lorraine Harris - until June.
But with the Attorney General's announcement in December, at least we
now have the first official recognition that the legal system may have
got SBS horribly wrong.
This followed a Government review into all 297 convictions for the
killings of children under the age of two in the last ten years. The
review was prompted by the successful appeal of triple cot death mother
Angela Cannings - falsely convicted on the testimony of Professor Meadow
- and the judgment that no one should ever go to prison on the basis of
'expert' evidence alone.
The core of the Cannings judgment was expressed by Lord Justice Judge
when he said: 'The question is not "Who murdered these babies" but "Was
there a crime?'' ' But how did we even reach this dreadful state of
affairs? One explanation is to be found in that 2002 report on Shaken
Baby Syndrome by DCI Phil Wheeler, of the Metropolitan Police.
DCI Wheeler sets out the facts, as he sees them: if, at autopsy, a baby
has the three symptoms of SBS, then it must have been violently shaken
to death by a parent or carer.
An internet guide on SBS for fellow detectives put together by DCI
Wheeler states as a certainty that 'the violent whiplash caused by
shaking is inflicted, not accidental'.
DCI Wheeler acknowledges Dr Geddes's research only to rubbish it. But
Wheeler is not a scientist, only a policeman. And not one without
blemish.
Five years ago, Victoria ClimbiE, aged eight, endured 128 injuries as
social services, doctors and police were too busy doing other things to
investigate her agony.
And the name of the police officer held by the subsequent Lord Laming
inquiry to assume 'a great deal of responsibility for the flawed
investigations carried out by those under his command'? DCI Phil
Wheeler.
Nevertheless, Wheeler's report still stands as the official Government
wisdom on SBS.
Of course, it would be unfair to blame the catastrophe on one policeman,
yet nearly 100 people may have gone to jail on the basis of pseudo-
science. Their families have been devastated, their lives wrecked.
Prisoners beat Ray Rock unconscious. One day he may be freed, but
Lorraine Harris can never escape her life sentence: the forced adoption
means she's lost her second boy for ever.
She told me: 'Winning the appeal will help, but it won't get my son
back.
It's a bit late now.' It's a bit late for them all.
John Sweeney's new TV series continues this week: John Sweeney
Investigates: Roman Abramovich, Thursday, Jan 20, BBC2, 9.50pm.
--
Fenris Wolf
RSPCA-Animadversion
http://cheetah.webtribe.net/~animadversion/
SHG
http://cheetah.webtribe.net/~shg/
January 15, 2005
HEADLINE: This man is serving life for shaking a baby so hard her eyes
bled. Now new evidence suggests he - along with 96 other jailed 'child
killers' - innocent. Is this the most frightening miscarriage of in
British legal history?
BY JOHN SWEENEY
GRAPHIC: FACE OF A 'CHILD-KILLER': BUT PEOPLE WHO KNEW RAY ROCK SAID HE
COULD NOT HAVE KILLED HEIDI
RAY ROCK never saw who smashed his head open with a sock weighted with
billiard balls. A warder at Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire found
him lying in his cell in a pool of blood. He couldn't speak for three
days afterwards or walk for three weeks.
But who cares?
Rock, 32, is the worst scum imaginable. He's serving life - he's now
been moved to Dartmoor Prison - for murdering his girlfriend's baby.
Angered by 13-month-old Heidi's pitiful cries while he babysat at his
Great Yarmouth home, Rock shook her so hard that she was killed by the
violent whiplash effect.
He came out with a story that he'd dropped her and she'd stopped
breathing.
Rock wept crocodile tears and his girlfriend, Lisa Davis, was completely
conned by the coldhearted killer.
Rock would have got away with it, too, had not Heidi's autopsy
discovered a swollen brain and bleeding in the back of the eyes and over
the brain's surface - the three telltale symptoms of what has been
dubbed Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).
He must have done it, no question.
The police told Lisa about the evidence of guilt and Rock was charged
and convicted in 1999 of murdering the baby he protested he had loved.
Detective Inspector Julian Gregory, who led the murder inquiry, said:
'Rock has never shown remorse. Obviously, nothing will bring Heidi back,
but I am pleased that justice has been seen to be done in this tragic
case.' There is only one problem with the conviction of Ray Rock. An
eminent scientist has explained it in language that even the Attorney
General or the Home Secretary might understand: 'Shaken Baby Syndrome is
- because of the lack of evidence to support it - c**p.' Last month, the
Government finally began to catch up when the Attorney General, Lord
Goldsmith, raised the possibility that the convictions of a staggering
97 alleged 'child killers' - imprisoned on the basis of SBS - may be
unsafe.
If Lord Goldsmith's fears prove right, then we are looking at the
biggest and most tragic miscarriages of justice scandal in British legal
history - bigger even than that of the 'cot death' mothers wrongly
convicted of murdering their babies.
In 2003, the courts freed three mothers - Sally Clark, Trupti Patel and
Angela Cannings - jailed partly because of the evidence of the now
discredited expert Professor Sir Roy Meadow and his 'Munchausen Syndrome
By Proxy' theory.
This embodied the notion that mothers deliberately harm their children
to gain attention. Meadow also had a 'law': unless proven otherwise,
'one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder'.
Another 20 people convicted, in part, on the basis of Meadow's flawed
law and theory could yet go free, pending their appeals.
Now, Shaken Baby Syndrome is in the dock for presenting a similar
scientific 'certainty' that many experts believe is neither scientific,
nor certain, but which means that more than 100 people may have endured
the unimaginable hell of convictions for child-killing on the basis of a
mumbo-jumbo theory.
And there are potentially thousands more cases around the world -
including that of British nanny Louise Woodward, convicted by an
American court on the SBS theory.
The science behind SBS is clear: if a dead baby exhibits the three
telltale signs outlined above, then it must have been violently shaken.
According to Detective Chief Inspector Phil Wheeler, the author of the
definitive 2002 Home Office report on the subject, these injuries cannot
be accidental but must have been inflicted.
However, the theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome was based, not on laboratory
science, but on the confession of a mentally ill American woman who said
that she had violently shaken babies under her care.
Her case was written up some 40 years ago by Dr John Caffey, who later
admitted that the evidence was 'meagre', 'circumstantial' and '
manifestly incomplete'.
Despite this, doctors, police and social services embraced the diagnosis
and, from such flimsy beginnings, it 'grew like a snowball'.
Four years ago, Dr Jennian Geddes, a neuro-pathologist at the Royal
London Hospital, now retired, became troubled by the number of Shaken
Baby cases - such as that of Rock - where there was no history of
previous abuse: no broken bones, no bruises and no scars.
Dr Geddes knew that when a baby is in a fatal car crash, it is violently
shaken by the whiplash effect and suffers traumatic damage to nerves
inside the brain.
So she did something no one had done before: she compared the brains of
53 babies and children whose deaths had been attributed to violent
shaking with those of youngsters who'd died in car crashes.
Her findings were astonishing: 50 out of the 53 brains showed no
'whiplash damage' or indeed any evidence at all of a serious head
injury.
And one of the cases she examined where there was no evidence of
whiplash injury of any kind was that of Baby Heidi - allegedly viciously
shaken to death by Ray Rock.
Dr Geddes concluded there had to be another cause of the so called
'telltale signs' of SBS. She and other experts now believe that there
are a number of natural or accidental causes of SBS symptoms, including
seemingly trivial accidents such as falling off a bed from three feet.
But how could a baby falling such a short distance suffer such terrible
injuries? After all, some babies are known to have fallen 20 feet out of
an open window and survived. The answer is not the height of the fall
but exactly how the baby lands.
If the baby lands on its arms or legs, it can survive with a few broken
bones. But if it falls only a few feet and lands on the base of its
spine, an enormous jolt can travel up the spine and 'shock' the brain
stem.
The shock can switch off the breathing mechanism. But the heart will
keep on pumping blood to the brain. It's like pumping water into a
blocked radiator and the brain springs leaks in the weakest parts of the
system: the eyes and the surface of the brain.
Dr Geddes's findings blew apart the assumption that the three previously
recognised symptoms of SBS must necessarily equal foul play. In short,
she destroyed the SBS theory, but only now are the legal and medical
establishments catching up.
Raymond Rock is a big man, over 6ft tall, but in the course of my
investigations into his case, people have told me over and over that he
is unusually gentle.
He had two children with a previous partner and there was no history of
violence or bad temper.
At the birth of one of his children, Rock was complimented by one of the
midwives on his sweet nature.
She asked him if he'd ever thought of becoming a midwife.
On June 2, 1998, he was looking after Heidi, while his girlfriend Lisa
Davis was at work. He said that he heard the child crying, picked her up
and rested her on his shoulder, holding her with one hand while, with
the other, he fiddled with the baby mobile to distract her.
Somehow, she wriggled out of his grasp and fell to the floor, landing on
her bottom. It was immediately apparent that she'd been seriously
injured. She was white and limp. So Rock rang 999. Tapes were played in
court of him begging the operator to hurry the ambulance.
Today, Heidi's mother, Lisa Davis, is torn between her initial disbelief
that Rock was capable of murdering her baby, fuelled by the latest
doubts over the conviction, and the stack of evidence she heard during
Rock's trial.
Rock's family, including two children by a former partner, must live
with the knowledge that that the world sees him as a 'baby killer', a
view which led Rock's fellow inmates to assault him so viciously. The
damage caused by this one case is incalculable.
But of course there are others - 96 of them - including that of Lorraine
Harris, who lost two baby sons. The first, Patrick, died in her arms in
hospital where she'd taken him after he fell ill at home.
Lorraine, from Derby, was accused of shaking him to death, and was
convicted of manslaughter in 2000 and sentenced to four years.
Before she was convicted, she fell pregnant again, and while in prison
suffered the infinitely more terrible life sentence of having her new
son taken from her.
The Family Court - a highly secretive legal system that specialises in
child abuse cases - accepted that, as Lorraine had violently shaken
Patrick to death, her new baby was also at risk and should be the
subject of a forced adoption. She remains haunted by the loss of her
second son for a crime she says never happened.
When we investigated Lorraine's case for BBC1's Real Story With Fiona
Bruce, we found a very similar case to that of Ray Rock.
Patrick - like Heidi - displayed the supposed symptoms of SBS but had no
broken bones or any other evidence of physical abuse.
We discovered additional evidence suggesting that Lorraine may have been
a victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.
Patrick's paternal grandmother had lost two baby boys, both stillborn.
Some cases of stillbirth are linked to a genetic predisposition to
bleeding and this raised the possibility that the same genetic
predisposition also affected Patrick. This would have made it more
likely that a trivial fall would result in the telltale bleeding
symptoms of SBS.
What is clear from Dr Geddes's work and our own investigations is that
no one should be locked up on the basis of SBS, because it is,
scientifically, a fiction.
The big question for the British legal system is: how long can it keep
people in prison for 'child killings' on such a dubious basis?
The Appeal Court won't hear the first four shaken baby cases - including
those of Ray Rock and Lorraine Harris - until June.
But with the Attorney General's announcement in December, at least we
now have the first official recognition that the legal system may have
got SBS horribly wrong.
This followed a Government review into all 297 convictions for the
killings of children under the age of two in the last ten years. The
review was prompted by the successful appeal of triple cot death mother
Angela Cannings - falsely convicted on the testimony of Professor Meadow
- and the judgment that no one should ever go to prison on the basis of
'expert' evidence alone.
The core of the Cannings judgment was expressed by Lord Justice Judge
when he said: 'The question is not "Who murdered these babies" but "Was
there a crime?'' ' But how did we even reach this dreadful state of
affairs? One explanation is to be found in that 2002 report on Shaken
Baby Syndrome by DCI Phil Wheeler, of the Metropolitan Police.
DCI Wheeler sets out the facts, as he sees them: if, at autopsy, a baby
has the three symptoms of SBS, then it must have been violently shaken
to death by a parent or carer.
An internet guide on SBS for fellow detectives put together by DCI
Wheeler states as a certainty that 'the violent whiplash caused by
shaking is inflicted, not accidental'.
DCI Wheeler acknowledges Dr Geddes's research only to rubbish it. But
Wheeler is not a scientist, only a policeman. And not one without
blemish.
Five years ago, Victoria ClimbiE, aged eight, endured 128 injuries as
social services, doctors and police were too busy doing other things to
investigate her agony.
And the name of the police officer held by the subsequent Lord Laming
inquiry to assume 'a great deal of responsibility for the flawed
investigations carried out by those under his command'? DCI Phil
Wheeler.
Nevertheless, Wheeler's report still stands as the official Government
wisdom on SBS.
Of course, it would be unfair to blame the catastrophe on one policeman,
yet nearly 100 people may have gone to jail on the basis of pseudo-
science. Their families have been devastated, their lives wrecked.
Prisoners beat Ray Rock unconscious. One day he may be freed, but
Lorraine Harris can never escape her life sentence: the forced adoption
means she's lost her second boy for ever.
She told me: 'Winning the appeal will help, but it won't get my son
back.
It's a bit late now.' It's a bit late for them all.
John Sweeney's new TV series continues this week: John Sweeney
Investigates: Roman Abramovich, Thursday, Jan 20, BBC2, 9.50pm.
--
Fenris Wolf
RSPCA-Animadversion
http://cheetah.webtribe.net/~animadversion/
SHG
http://cheetah.webtribe.net/~shg/