Tel: (310) 362-9315
Child Physical Abuse Lawyers, West Los Angeles, Defending
Against False Allegations of Child Physical Abuse and Shaken Baby Syndrome
Child physical abuse is taken very seriously by professionals in variety of fields. The federal government requires doctors, nurses, therapists, teachers, librarians and other caretakers to report suspected cases of abuse. If your child has unusual or unexplained injuries, you could be accused of child physical abuse, be charged, tried and could face a jail or prison sentence.
The Innocence Legal Team can protect you from such false allegations. With four decades of experience, we know that parental abuse is very rare. We also know that the damage of such allegations can ruin your life and sever your relationship with your children.
Decades of Successful Criminal Defense
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Child physical abuse charges can originate with a family’s disciplinary practices, such as spanking or other corporal punishment, from bruises or marks, or internal injuries or fractures that cannot be readily explained. Charges of physical abuse are difficult to defend because
- the laws do not provide clear definitions as to what constitutes actual child physical abuse;
- false accusations are easy to make, especially if there is bruising, swelling or other marks;
- West Los Angeles‘s Child Protective Services can take children away from a parent once an allegation has been made, even if it is false.
- The DA’s office, together with CPA, begins investigations of child physical abuse by believing the allegations are true.
Once in foster care, children are interviewed repeatedly with leading or suggestive questioning that helps to falsify information, not find the truth. You can be charged and jailed and have little or no contact with the children, even if you did not commit a crime.
If You Have Been Accused
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Felony convictions of child physical abuse can be punished with up to 6 years in prison. If you suspect you may be accused, have been charged or contacted by the District Attorney’s office, you need immediate legal representation. The single worst mistake that our clients make is thinking an investigator will believe them when they try to explain what happened.
Investigators are master interviewers and what you say will be used against you during a trial. ?That is why the Innocence Legal Team warns you not to have any contact with the police or DA’s offices without an attorney.
Do not involve yourself in any of the following:
- Pretext Phone Call: The police may have a family member call you to coerce you into apologizing for something you did not do. Your apology will not dismiss the charges against you or appease the person making the allegations. Your apology will only make you look guilty to a jury.
- Search and Seizure: Do not interfere with or resist search and seizure efforts by the police.
- Police Interviews: You are under no obligation to speak to the police so do not be tempted to explain what did or didn’t happen to investigators. At this point, only the evidence matters and you must rely on defense experts to protect you and your family.
SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME DEFENSE
Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) is a term used to describe a constellation of injuries and the mechanism of abuse that causes these injuries. The major signs of SBS are subdural and/or subarachnoid hematomas (bleeding in the membranes that cover the brain), retinal hemorrhages (bleeding in the back of the inner surface of the eyes) and little or no sign of external injury. In some cases there are broken ribs and fractures of the skull. The broken ribs are caused by the manner in which the child is held around the rib cage during the shaking. The fractured skull is caused by the head striking an object during the shaking.
The brain injury is caused by an individual who shakes an infant severely back and forth and is seen generally in children under the age of two. Infants at this age do not have fully developed neck muscles and so the head can be whiplashed back and forth. Because these young infants’ brains do not yet fill the entire brain cavity or skull, the brain becomes bruised as it literally bounces back and forth and rotates inside the skull as the baby is shaken. The rapid acceleration, deceleration and rotation of the brain also tears the bridging veins that cover its surface, which accounts for hematomas, or bleeding in the brain. The combination of surface bruising and the hematomas ultimately lead to cerebral edema, or swelling of the brain.
Not all infants die from SBS but if the swelling of the brain cannot be controlled, the brain tissue deteriorates when it cannot further expand within the skull. It is usually the cerebral edema or brain swelling that leads to death. If the child does not die, brain damage and developmental disabilities are common as a result. The original medical research article on SBS was written by Dr. John Caffey and was entitled “The Whiplash Shaken Infant Syndrome: Manual Shaking by the Extremities With Whiplash-Induced Intracranial and Intraocular Bleeding, Linked With Residual Permanent Brain Damage and Mental Retardation“, Pediatrics Vol. 54 No 4 October 1974.
Battle of the Experts
There rarely are witnesses to abusive shaking; therefore, the case is usually a matter of attempting to re-create what occurred by using medical descriptions and analyses of the injuries. The opinions of these professionals, however, can be contradictory because no one has sufficient scientific data in this area: it is not possible or ethical to create a controlled study that measures the effects of shaking on a real infant’s brain. Unfortunately, opinions are sometimes based on personal biases when there is no scientific information available, which is the case with many child advocacy experts.
Accidental Injury
Child advocacy experts claim that SBS injuries can never be caused by a fall. This is based on the notion that a short fall cannot create the necessary acceleration/deceleration forces that bruise and tear brain tissue. This is not always the case, however. Studies on artificial brains subjected to falls have shown that the acceleration/deceleration forces are forty times greater when the head is suddenly stopped by an object than when the head is shaken in mid air. Government statistical reviews of children who have suffered short distance falls show skull fractures, sub-dural hematomas and sub-arachnoid hematomas. In addition, autopsies of automobile accident victims have described some of these same injuries. It is entirely possible for the brain to be damaged by an accidental fall or sudden, accidental impact.
For that reason, when a parent claims that an accident occurred, the defense attorney must place into evidence all research data showing that the injuries that the child sustained are consistent with the parent’s version of the accident. One of the serious problems with SBS is that researchers have not actually seen a child being shaken and then done an autopsy to study and measure the injuries. Without scientific studies to guide child advocacy experts, SBS is open to exaggerated claims about how violent the shaking must be in order to cause the injuries in any given case. Descriptions of a child having to fall from a third story window or having to be slammed against a wall while swung by its feet have an enormous emotional effect on a jury. Moreover, such unsubstantiated and unscientific stories interfere with the jury’s fair determination as to whether or not the injury was an accident, caused by another caretaker, and whether or not the defendant is guilty of manslaughter, second-degree murder or first-degree murder.
Timing of the Injuries
The Shaken Baby Syndrome is one area of child abuse in which the accusations are leveled at male and female caretakers alike. A mother or a female babysitter is just as likely to be charged with child physical abuse or murder as is a husband or male babysitter. The person that is charged is normally the individual who was caring for the child when the symptoms first became evident.
Child advocacy experts mistakenly believe that the SBS injuries are so severe that the symptoms of such trauma would be immediately apparent, making it impossible for anyone to claim that an injured child appeared normal when it came into his or her care. In other words, there is no time delay between inflicting the trauma and observing its effects.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet prosecution witnesses on cross examination claim that their research supports the opinion that there is no time delay between injury and symptoms. When our researchers analyzed the studies that the child advocacy experts named, they did not find any evidence to support the non-time delay ??theory??. In fact, the main study cited by prosecution experts stated that there could be a delay between the time of the injury and the appearance of symptoms. A two-year old’s brain swells and fills the cavity space over a period, not immediately. And still a number of child advocacy experts continue to make these dangerous and unsubstantiated claims in published studies when there is little or no scientific evidence to support their opinions.
Our researchers have found numerous studies that show that a substantial delay between injury and symptoms is very possible??not within minutes, but after many hours. A delay of hours between injury and symptoms makes it possible that other people were involved in causing the injuries. That is why all the child’s caretakers should be investigated to determine how and when the child sustained such life-threatening physical trauma.
The most important research supporting the delay of time between injury and symptoms follows:
Delayed Deterioration Following Mild Head Injury in Children by J.W. Snoek, J.M. Minderhoud, and J.T. Wilmink, Department of Neurology and Neuroradiology, University Hospital, PO Box 30.01, 9700 RB Groningen, The Netherlands. published in Brain (1984) 107, 15-36
Early detection of delayed traumatic intra-cranial hematomas using near-infrared spectroscopy, by Shankar P. Gopinath, M.D. and others, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, J. Neurosurg./ Vol. 83, September 1995
Head-Injury Patients who talk and deteriorate into coma Analysis of 211 cases studied with computerized tomography, by Ramiro D. Lobanto, MD, and others, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain, J. Neurosurg./ Volume 75/August 1991
Patients Who Talk and Deteriorate, by Gaylan L. Rockswold, MD and Paula J. Pheley, RN, Annals of Emergency Medicine 22:6 June 1993
The National Traumatic Coma Data Bank, Part 2: Patients who talk and deteriorate: Implications for treatment by Lawrence F. Marshall, M.D. and others, UC San Diego, San Diego Medical Center, San Diego, West Los Angeles, J. Neurosurg./ Volume 59/ August 1983
The Time Interval Between Lethal Infant Shaking and Onset of Symptoms, A Review of the Shaken Baby Syndrome Literature, by Marcus B. Nashelsky, M.D. and Jay D. Dix, M.D. , Am. Jur Forensic Med and Path, Vol 16, No. 2, 1995
Conclusions
Any child physical abuse case, including cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome, is extremely difficult to prepare and present to a jury. The cost for the necessary experts is staggering because most of the evidence relies on medical expert testimony and medical research papers. The most serious problems, however, are 1) insufficient research, and 2) the inaccessibility of supporting research. First of all, one simply cannot shake a baby in a lab with monitors on the baby to see what damage is done to the brain and body.
Secondly, supporting studies are often difficult to find or sometimes written in other languages requiring translation. These two factors enable the child advocacy experts to use their own personal or political beliefs as factual evidence. Even the educated public is not familiar with head trauma studies or the complexities of Shaken Baby Syndrome. It is the role of the defense team is to teach the jury the difference between scientific research and the opinions of an advocate. Finally, the defense must educate the jury members on the actual state of knowledge with regard to brain trauma so they can determine the truth of the child’s injuries??and the innocence or guilt of the defendant.
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The cause of injuries to children is often difficult to determine, especially if the children involved are pre-verbal. Your defense team with a Child Physical Abuse Attorney Specialist must build a comprehensive case based on unbiased scientific data in order to prove that you are innocent. Using the best resources available is the only way of truly protecting your children from over-zealous prosecutors and child protection agencies.
When you step into the court room, preparation means everything. With four decades of experience handling child molestation cases for the defense, the Innocence Legal Team knows how to fight false allegations of molestation and abuse.
Our child physical abuse attorneys are not only specialists in this difficult area of law but are supported by a team of other child physical abuse lawyers working together with investigators, expert witnesses and you. Our team prepares every case for trial so that you will be ready for the challenges ahead. Contact us today for more information.