\n<\/p>\n
Despite an extraordinary effort by the district attorney\u2019s office in Nashville, Tennessee, to reverse a murder conviction that its own prosecutors won more than two decades ago, the state\u2019s Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Russell Maze\u2019s conviction on Friday. The court said there was insufficient evidence to prove his innocence, even though the original medical examiner in the case \u2014 whose testimony helped secure the 2004 conviction \u2014 recanted last year, concluding that Maze\u2019s son died of natural causes, not abuse.<\/p>\n
Maze, whose case was the subject of an in-depth article last year by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, was accused of shaking his 5-week-old son, Alex, who later died.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The court\u2019s 2-1 decision followed a sweeping, yearlong reinvestigation of the case by a special team within the DA\u2019s office known as a conviction-review unit. After consulting with experts in pathology, radiology, neonatology and ophthalmology, the unit concluded that Alex died not from shaking but from an undiagnosed medical condition.<\/p>\n
Maze, now 60, was arrested after Alex became nonresponsive in the spring of 1999. He has been behind bars ever since and is serving a life sentence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maze stood trial twice, and in both proceedings, prosecutors presented evidence they said showed Alex was a victim of shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, told jurors that internal bleeding around Alex\u2019s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. \u201cYou would be appalled at what this looked like,\u201d she testified at Maze\u2019s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that \u201cchildren who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in the years since Alex was rushed to the emergency room, doctors and researchers found that the symptoms once considered to be the hallmarks of shaken baby syndrome \u2014 brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and from the retina \u2014 are not always signs of abuse. Long regarded as definitive proof of shaking, they are now understood to have other causes, including accidental falls, illness, infection and congenital disorders.<\/p>\n
In March 2024, the conviction-review unit \u2014 along with attorneys for Maze and his wife, Kaye \u2014 presented their findings at a two-day evidentiary hearing. Kaye, who wasn\u2019t home with her husband when their son became unresponsive in 1999, was nonetheless charged with aggravated assault. Told that an open criminal case could hinder her efforts to regain custody of her son, who did not die immediately, she entered an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge \u2014 a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the hearing, District Attorney Glenn Funk urged the court to overturn their convictions. \u201cEvery single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.\u201d The director of his office\u2019s conviction-review unit, Sunny Eaton, was even blunter. \u201cThe state got this wrong,\u201d she told Judge Steve Dozier.<\/p>\n
Dozier had a long history with the case, having presided over Maze\u2019s trials, appeals and postconviction proceedings. (He also signed off on Kaye\u2019s plea agreement, which spared her a prison sentence.) Medical experts testified at the 2024 hearing that Alex\u2019s symptoms were the result of an undiagnosed medical condition. But Dozier gave this new testimony no more weight than the original testimony from witnesses like Starling, writing that it did not reflect a new scientific consensus \u2014 only \u201cnew ammunition in a \u2018battle of the experts.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The Court of Criminal Appeals\u2019 decision on Friday upheld that ruling, determining that the Mazes \u201cfailed to establish that their scientific evidence is truly \u2018new\u2019 or that this evidence provides clear and convincing proof that Mr. Maze is actually innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n
The opinion gave only perfunctory consideration to a watershed moment in the case: In September 2024, the original medical examiner, who determined Alex\u2019s death to be a homicide, said he\u2019d been wrong. Before reaching this conclusion, Dr. Bruce Levy reviewed medical records that the conviction-review unit provided to him \u2014 many of which he did not recall having seen before. They included Alex\u2019s records from his premature birth until death and Kaye\u2019s obstetric records, which offered essential context about the health challenges Alex (whose legal name was Bryan) faced before he stopped breathing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken baby syndrome,\u201d Levy stated in a sworn affidavit. \u201cIf called to testify now, I would assert Bryan Maze\u2019s brain, at the time of his death, showed no indication, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, of prior trauma or abuse. Instead, the residual brain lesions viewed at autopsy more likely than not resulted from a natural disease process.\u201d He went on to state that he would now classify the child\u2019s manner of death as \u201cnatural.\u201d<\/p>\n
Levy\u2019s recantation appeared to carry particular weight with one of the three judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals who heard oral arguments in the Maze case. In a separate opinion accompanying Friday\u2019s ruling, Judge Tom Greenholtz devoted 14 pages to arguing that Levy\u2019s reassessment of the evidence demanded serious consideration. \u201cWhen the state\u2019s own chief medical examiner recants the very testimony that established the cause and manner of death, the effect is not just to raise new questions. If credited, it calls into doubt the foundation of the trial and the reliability of the post-conviction court\u2019s findings, which relied on that same testimony.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Greenholtz went further, adding, \u201cDr. Levy\u2019s revised opinion is that no homicide occurred \u2014 that the child died of natural causes. This goes beyond mere disagreement among experts about the interpretation of ambiguous findings. It represents a determination by the State\u2019s own chief forensic pathologist that the factual predicate for a homicide prosecution was absent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maze can apply for permission to appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, though the court grants review in only a small fraction of cases.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Court of Criminal Appeals\u2019 ruling stands as an outlier among recent appellate opinions, in which shaken baby syndrome has come under scrutiny. Over the last 18 months, judges in Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey have sided with defendants challenging their shaken baby convictions. In October, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution to Robert\u202f Roberson, who was prosecuted for his 2-year-old daughter\u2019s death; the stay was granted under the state\u2019s junk science law, which allows courts to reconsider convictions that rest on scientific evidence now regarded as unreliable or outdated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Maze case highlights a broader national reevaluation of shaken baby syndrome. Forty-one people whose convictions involved the diagnosis are currently listed on the National Registry of Exonerations.<\/p>\n
\u201cRussell Maze remains in prison for a crime he did not commit,\u201d said Jason Gichner, executive director of the Tennessee Innocence Project and Maze\u2019s lead attorney. \u201cEvery medical expert presented at the recent post-conviction hearing \u2014 both for the prosecution and defense \u2014 agreed this is not a case about abuse. Russell needs to come home. We are not going to stop fighting until that day comes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite an extraordinary effort by the district attorney\u2019s office in Nashville, Tennessee, to reverse a murder conviction that its own prosecutors won more than two decades ago, the state\u2019s Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Russell Maze\u2019s conviction on Friday. The court said there was insufficient evidence to prove his innocence, even though the original medical<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[845,631,5366,160,18612,247,4773,18613,846],"class_list":{"0":"post-32164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-appeals","9":"tag-baby","10":"tag-conviction","11":"tag-court","12":"tag-mazes","13":"tag-propublica","14":"tag-russell","15":"tag-shaken","16":"tag-upholds"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}