The Hardest Cases: When Children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive

The the number one cause of baby deaths are usually put in care givers and the parents of the child. In Amarillo Texas there was a man named Ernie Lopez was babysitting Asis Vaiz while he was babysitting the bay collapsed. When Asis was rushed to the hospital it was said that’s he had bruses on her head and body. Also vaginal lacerations were found when further examining the baby. Ernie was charged with aggravated assault and the raping of Asis Vaiz and sentenced to 60 years. The doctors called it multiple blunt entries. For the past year and a half Frontline has been investing medical expertise and forensic pathology. They found that some of the medical examiners are not even certified enough to make the accusation they do. They found 24+ cases which have been overturned because of wrong accusations. Monea Tyson was accused for killing her son. The case was based on what the medical examiner said. They found to be a homicide due to head injuries. The that pathologist for the defense say that there were no skull fracture or any other injury to the head. it was discovered that the examiners had lack of board certification, and that another case that a man was on death row because of the examiners false accusation.

                There is little agreement of what causes children to die. An example is shaken baby syndrome,  Melanie Ware did a year in jail because she was accused for the murder of Jaden Page. She was accused of shaking the baby to death. The case was overturn because the examiner who made the accusation was wrong and didn’t look at the lab work that came back for the baby. My opinion about this topic is really shoking I was shocked to hear and know about all these accident that medical dotors who are suppose to certified making wrong accusation. I also learned that this is because with theses kind of cases doctors are already committed to it being a murder case. I did somemore research on the diseases that doctors mix up for murder and my results were: “

Over the next 20 years, Laposata researched and collected interesting cases he saw, and in 2005, he published an article in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology reviewing some of the diseases that had led to child abuse misdiagnoses.

In particular, Laposata's article focuses on blood disorders that can lead to bleeding and/or bruising, including:

■Von Willebrand disease -- a hereditary disorder that prevents blood from clotting properly

■Vitamin K deficiency -- a rare condition where the body can't absorb the vitamin, which is necessary for blood to properly clot

■Leukemia -- cancer of the blood cells

■Ideopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) -- a condition where a low platelet count prevents blood from clotting properly

■Henoch-Schonlein purpura -- an abnormal immune system response that manifests as purple spots on the skin. The cause of this condition is unknown, and it's more common in children than adults.

Laposata created a PowerPoint presentation that highlights the difficulty in diagnosing abuse cases. He shows a photo of a child with bruises from a bleeding disorder next to a photo of a child who was abused and asks which of the cases is abuse. "I've been looking at patients with bleeding problems for years, more than two decades," he says. "And if you show me the two children with the bruises on their legs, I couldn't tell you that that one is the bleeding disorder. I'd have to do the blood test to find out. I also looked at he cases and picked out the one that caught my eye the most and it’s the one that hasn’t been overturned yet the details are such: Her name was Isis Charm Vas and at 6 months old she was a slight child -- fifth percentile in height and weight. When the ambulance sped her to Northwest Texas Hospital on a Saturday morning in October 2000, doctors and nurses feared that someone had done something awful to her delicate little body. A constellation of bruises stretched across her pale skin. CT scans showed blood pooling on her brain and swelling. Her vagina was bleeding, as well. The damage was so severe that her body's vital organs were shutting down. Less than 24 hours later, Isis died. An autopsy bolstered the initial suspicions that she'd been abused. Dr. Joni McClain, a forensic pathologist, ruled Isis' death a homicide and said the baby had been sexually violated. McClain would later describe it as a "classic" case of blunt force trauma, the type of damage often done by a beating. The police investigation that followed was constructed almost entirely from medical evidence. In the end, prosecutors indicted one of the child's babysitters: Ernie Lopez. Today, Lopez is serving a 60-year prison term for sexual assault and is still facing capital murder charges. But in the years since Lopez was sent to the penitentiary, a growing body of evidence has emerged suggesting that McClain and the hospital staffers were wrong about what happened to Isis -- and that her death was not the result of a criminal attack. If Lopez is ultimately exonerated, his case will not be unique.”

Copied from The Hardest Cases: When children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive, www. blogger.com