The assumption that criminals in prison get what's coming to them is deep, and I get flack for helping people convicted of crimes against children escape their due punishment - that being the "justice" doled out to them by other prisoners - by helping them get protective custody. First of all, most pedophiles are already in protective custody of some kind and don't need me to help them stay safe behind bars. Second of all, they were sentenced to prison, not perpetual rape, repeated beatings, or execution on the yards.
There's a reason we don't have that kind of torture as part of our penalty system, though, even when it would seem most just to order it for a man who rapes an infant and leaves the child to die, for example. It's not only dehumanizes prisoners - the victims as well as their punishers - it dehumanizes the rest of us who condone it.
Furthermore, as suggested by this article below, the reality is that the public as well as other prisoners don't know what really happened in these people's lives based on the media reports or even a police report of their crimes. Just because someone has a conviction on paper and is doing time in prison, doesn't mean they're guilty of what the state says they did. Cops and judges and juries can be wrong - they make plenty of mistakes, in fact. National estimates on exonerations from death row suggest that as many as 10% of all serious convictions are wrongful. So when we condemn the "guilty bastards" to repeated brutality by justifying or ignoring prison violence as retribution for one's crimes or perceived crimes, we condemn the innocent to the same as well.
I'm impressed by the AZ Republic's reporting of late - what follows is a good article about a wrongful conviction that was overturned. I hope someday they take up the case of Courtney Bisbee, too...
Above: Wrongfully convicted Courtney Bisbee and her daughter, Taylor Lee.
Even though her prosecution was initiated under Andrew Thomas' office, the current Maricopa County Attorney, Bill Montgomery, refuses to hear new evidence in her case - the recanted testimony of a key witness, who is the brother of the "victim."
Courtney is a little over half way through an 11-year prison term for a child molestation that never occurred.
Support her quest for justice here:
------from the AZ Republic-----
Some in Arizona see convictions overturned
Richard Ruelas
Sept. 15, 2012 10:53 PM
The Republic | azcentral.com
Drayton Witt kept insisting he had nothing to do with the death of
his 4-month-old baby. He said it the night he brought the near-comatose
infant into the emergency room on June 1, 2000. He said it during his
sentencing, following his conviction on murdering the boy by shaking
him. And he was still proclaiming his innocence as he started serving
his 20-year sentence in 2002.
His lamentations didn't gain legal and medical weight until 2012. The
Arizona Justice Project, a volunteer group of attorneys, filed a motion
to toss out his murder conviction based on the evolving science around
what was known as shaken-baby syndrome. The state did not file an
argument in response. Witt was released on May 31, becoming the second
Arizonan in the last two years to see his guilty verdict in a
shaken-baby case erased.
'Shaken baby' diagnosis disputed | More on child abuse
Among those who helped secure Witt's freedom was the 97-year-old
British pediatric neurosurgeon who, in 1971, first identified the trio
of telltale symptoms that became accepted as proof that a baby had been
violently shaken. Attorneys also secured a sworn statement from the
medical examiner who originally ruled the baby died from being shaken.
His revised conclusion was that the baby died of a disease.
Fifteen months earlier, in February 2011, a Buckeye man named Armando
Castillo, 42, had his conviction overturned in the 1998 death of a
toddler. Like Witt, Castillo maintained his innocence throughout. And,
like Witt, Castillo would be imprisoned a long time before attorneys
found medical evidence to back up his story.
In both cases, judges ruled that a jury would likely acquit each man
after hearing the new medical understanding of the evidence.
The overturned convictions didn't erase the charges, just sent the
cases back for a possible retrial. Prosecutors decided to keep pursuing
murder charges in both cases. Castillo pleaded guilty to a reduced
charge to avoid the risk of a retrial. Witt's murder trial is scheduled
for 2013.
Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said that his office still
believes that Witt was responsible for the death of the 4-month-old baby
boy. "Obviously, we believed it the first time around," Montgomery
said.
He said prosecutors now focus more on proving that a child was
injured, not necessarily that he was shaken. Montgomery said speculation
that suspected abused children died from diseases was just
defense-attorney theories.
"I think we're still looking at cases where children were injured," Montgomery said. "How we prove that may change."
That's because a growing body of medical and legal experts,
nationally and internationally, are casting doubt on what became known
as shaken-baby syndrome. Pediatric neurologists and forensic
pathologists say the long-held triad of symptoms -- bleeding on the
brain, swelling of the brain and bleeding in the eyes -- thought to
indicate a baby was violently and intentionally shaken could also be
caused by a host of diseases, including infections.
DePaul University law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer, who wrote a 2009
study on the use of shaken-baby syndrome in courtrooms, said the easily
spotted symptoms became not only a medical diagnosis but also a legal
tool adopted quickly and used convincingly in courtrooms nationwide.
Physicians would testify that a shaken child would become
unresponsive or go limp almost immediately after the abuse. So the last
adult with the child would be the primary suspect. And the shaken-baby
diagnosis also provided a motive: a frustrated caregiver looking to
quiet a crying child.
Some shaken-baby cases included other signs of violent abuse, such as
broken bones, bruises or fractures. But others, like in Witt's case,
had no outward signs of injuries. Cases were built solely on the
symptoms of shaken-baby syndrome.
"(The syndrome) did all of the work," Tuerkheimer said. Jurors would
hear the experts testify with certainty and couple that with an
"inclination to want to convict and hold someone responsible for such an
awful outcome," she said.
In the last half of the 1990s, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office
handled shaken-baby cases at the rate of two a week. During one stretch,
it had a conviction rate, in non-fatal cases, of 84 percent.
Tuerkheimer said many of the defendants were convicted in emotional
trials, while others took plea deals because they saw little chance of
winning. She said there's no way to know whether the Witt and Castillo
cases are isolated wrongful convictions or signs of a systemic flaw that
will produce hundreds of reversals.
"No one has any sense of the numbers here," Tuerkheimer said.
Witt knows he is No. 2, the second shaken-baby conviction in Arizona
to be vacated. But he figures the pattern that police and prosecutors
followed in his case was repeated many more times.
"The system is flawed," he said. "I'm sure there's a lot of people like that."
* * *
Maria Holt's baby son, Steven, was just shy of being 5 months old on
June 1, 2000. Dressed in a blue and white onesie, he slept in his car
seat as Witt dropped Holt off for her evening shift as a waitress at the
Bill Johnson's Big Apple restaurant in north Phoenix.
Witt, then 18, and Holt, then 20, had been boyfriend and girlfriend
since they'd met two years before, but Steven had been conceived with
another man during a breakup. Regardless, Witt saw the baby as his son;
he was in the delivery room when Steven was born, and the child carried
his last name. It was routine for Witt to care for Steven when Holt was
at work; she often called home between tables to check in.
During one call around 8 or 9 that night, Witt told Holt he thought
Steven might have had another seizure. His eyes appeared odd, Witt said,
and he was fussy. Holt said to come get her at the restaurant and they
would take the baby to the emergency room.
Steven had been a sickly baby, in and out of the hospital three times
during his short life, including a six-day stay at Phoenix Children's
Hospital just a month earlier when doctors couldn't get a bead on what
was causing the baby's vomiting and seizures.
On this night, the boy stopped breathing during the 6-mile drive from
the restaurant to Paradise Valley Hospital. Witt pulled over and
climbed into the back seat to perform CPR while Holt took the wheel. At
the hospital, doctors worked to get Steven breathing again. Then the
baby's heart stopped. It took them about 30 minutes to stabilize him,
after which he was flown to Phoenix Children's Hospital.
A doctor at Paradise Valley Hospital, in a report, diagnosed the
cardiac arrest and said the baby was suffering from dehydration and
possibly sepsis, a severe reaction to bacteria. He also expressed
concern about brain injury caused by dehydration, too much acid in the
blood, and not enough oxygen. There was no mention of suspected abuse.
Witt and Holt left Paradise Valley Hospital to drive to Phoenix
Children's. Expecting another long hospital stay, they stopped by their
home to pick up extra clothes.
* * *
The idea that violent shaking of infants could cause brain injury was
first proposed in a medical-journal article in 1971. Not only did it
gain acceptance in the medical community over the next two decades, it
also seeped into popular culture. Child-abuse prevention groups started
awareness campaigns; the phrase "shaken-baby syndrome" entered the
Random House dictionary in 1996.
By 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics produced a position paper
on shaken-baby syndrome, saying that doctors should presume abuse in
any baby under a year old who had head injuries absent obvious trauma,
such as a car accident. The paper, published in the journal
Pediatrics, said the "constellation" of injuries in a shaken baby could not result from an accidental trip or fall.
The article also offered a psychological profile of adults who shake a
child. "Such shaking often results from tension and frustration
generated by a baby's crying or irritability," the journal article said,
"yet crying is not a legal justification for such violence." It went on
to warn that shaken babies were often misdiagnosed, meaning doctors
needed to be extremely vigilant to spot them.
After Steven arrived at Phoenix Children's Hospital, a doctor who
evaluated him wrote that the baby had no bruising or skull deformities,
but showed some bleeding in the eyes. The doctor also noted that "the
infant is flaccid. There is no response to pain."
At 3 a.m., a pediatrician wrote on a progress report that the baby's symptoms "raise the possibility of non-accidental trauma."
Medical records show doctors knew their infant patient had been at
the hospital a month before for projectile vomiting and flulike
symptoms. But by 7 a.m., doctors felt sure of what they were looking at.
"The findings are most consistent with shaken baby, plus or minus
hypoxia injury," read a doctor's progress report on the case. Hypoxia
refers to an injury caused by lack of oxygen.
Steven's condition did not improve. At noon, doctors declared him
brain dead. One wrote the following: "Mom is currently hugging the
patient and we are planning to withdraw support and allow him to
progress to cardiac death later on this afternoon. The police have been
notified of the findings."
Steven was pronounced dead at 3:30 p.m. on June 2.
* * *
In a case where shaken-baby syndrome seems a possibility, events
quickly and simultaneously move along parallel tracks: doctors working
to save a baby, police working to find a suspect.
But once doctors and police believe they are dealing with a
shaken-baby case, they often ignore evidence that might suggest a
different reason for a baby's illness, said Christina Rubalcava, an
attorney with the Arizona Justice Project.
"You're already locked in to what it is," said Rubalcava, an attorney
with Osborn Maledon who volunteered her time on the Witt case. She says
that in general, once a doctor sees the triad of symptoms, a call to
child-welfare agencies and police becomes automatic. The belief in
shaken-baby syndrome "is like gospel to them," she said.
But Kathy Coffman, a pediatrician at Phoenix Children's Hospital who
specializes in abuse cases, denied that doctors automatically diagnose
shaking and ignore disease or infections or other causes. "We go through
all the factors to make sure we're not missing something," Coffman
said.
Coffman, a pediatrician for 20 years, was not at Phoenix Children's
Hospital when Steven was treated and would not comment specifically on
this case. She now is the medical director of a specialized unit at the
hospital, made up of doctors and social workers, that handles suspected
cases of abuse. "I don't think anybody who works in this field, law
enforcement or anybody, is cavalier about making these calls," she said.
"The absolute last thing I want to do," she said, "is have someone go to prison for something they didn't do."
In the early morning hours of June 2, Phoenix police interviewed Witt
and Holt as they sat in a room near their child. The questions seemed
accusatory from the start, Witt said, and he ended the interview. A
worker with the state's child-protection agency, in a report written
later that morning, would say officers described Witt as "short-tempered
and volatile."
After Steven died and Witt and Holt were leaving the hospital to go
home, they found their car missing; police had seized it from the
parking lot to search it for possible evidence. Friends drove them home,
where they found two officers, armed with a warrant, who had been
searching the trailer since 11:30 a.m. -- 4 hours before Steven died --
to find evidence to build a case.
"One thing after another," Holt said. "It's heartbreaking."
The police left at 9:30 p.m. They had pulled up carpet samples and
took some baby items. The next day, officers knocked on the door and
asked to take Witt in for questioning.
"Let's go," Witt said. "I ain't got nothing to hide."
Witt is a man of few words and didn't offer many to police. When
detectives questioned him about what happened to the baby, Witt replied
that he didn't know and that they should ask the doctors.
Witt was booked into jail on charges of first-degree murder and child abuse. He would remain jailed until his trial.
Holt said the arrest was devastating. "I lose my son, and then I lose
the man who's done nothing but love me and love my son," she said. She
had support from her extended family but felt some friends slip away.
When she visited Witt in jail, which was often, she worked to buoy his
spirits: "You'll be home soon," she would say. "This is just a
misunderstanding. We know the truth."
Witt had a public defender who tried to get a plea deal, but Witt
refused to take it. "When they arrested me, I figured somewhere down the
line they'd come to their senses and figure out the right stuff," Witt
said. "But clearly they didn't."
The trial started in February 2002.
"Steven Witt lived only five months," the prosecutor, Dyanne Greer,
told the jury in her opening statement, according to a transcript. "He
died as the result of violent, severe shaking. ... He died at the hands
of a person who was supposed to be the caretaker ... and that man,
ladies and gentlemen, is Drayton Witt."
Holt was called to the stand; she would be the first witness. It
would be her job to tell the couple's story: how they "just clicked"
when they first met through a friend; how Holt's extremely protective
dog immediately warmed up to Witt; how, when she became pregnant by
another man, Witt treated the child as if he were his own. She also told
the jury about the baby's history of illnesses and hospitalizations,
which included a respiratory infection, pneumonia, seizures and
vomiting, and how the medicine he was given only seemed to make him
worse.
After Holt, four doctors and the medical examiner took the stand.
Each testified that Steven's injuries were most likely caused by
shaking. To the jury, the evidence would have seemed strong and
specific: The boy had certain injuries that, in the absence of major
trauma, were possible only if he had been shaken violently. And the
narrow, medically accepted time frame of the onset of the baby's
symptoms pointed to Witt.
Witt, seated at the defense table, still held out hope. But his
defense attorney called only one expert to cast doubt on whether the
injuries were caused by shaking. Karen Griest, a forensic pediatric
pathologist and former New Mexico coroner, said that "shaken-baby
syndrome is sort of a hot topic of debate in the medical community. It's
sort of an evolving process to figure out what is going on."
In closing arguments, the prosecutor painted a picture for the jury of Witt shaking the child.
"The defendant knowingly grabbed Steven, shook him so violently that
he started to seize," Greer said. "Drayton had to know that Steven was
being violently injured while he was shaking him to death, inches in
front of his face," she said.
Jurors found Witt guilty of second-degree murder. When it came time
for Witt's sentencing in April 2002, he told the judge that although he
had been an unruly teenager, he had turned his life around with Holt and
Steven. But he was not apologetic.
"I am not sorry, for I didn't do no wrong," Witt said, according to a
transcript of the hearing. "I came up here to tell you how much my son
meant to me."
The judge sentenced him to 20 years.
* * *
Though Witt asked for protective custody in prison, he said the
request was denied, and he was put into the general inmate population.
Three years into his sentence, he was attacked in the recreation yard by
three men with improvised knives. Witt tucked himself into a ball and
tried to cover his head, but said he was stabbed some 70 times before it
was over. Ten of those wounds went through one or the other of his
hands.
Witt was flown to a Flagstaff hospital, where doctors did surgery to
repair his hands. Holt was at work when she got the call from Witt's
parents telling her of the attack. When she saw him in his hospital bed,
she knew they had to get married.
"Just wanting to make sure that he knew that I was there," she said.
"And no matter what, he knew that if it came to 2020, I might be old and
gray, but that I would be the one standing by that gate (waiting) for
him to come home."
The wedding was in September 2006. The groom wore orange, his "carrot
suit," as Witt called it. Prison rules dictate what a bride may wear: A
wedding dress must have a neckline above the collarbone and sleeves
that cover the arms. And no orange; that color is reserved for inmates.
In the end, Holt just bought a dress she liked -- it was maroon -- and
pulled a T-shirt over it during the ceremony to cover enough bare skin.
Tradition endures even in the strangest of settings. Witt said he
paced in his cell nervously before the ceremony, held just before
visiting hours. He would get to wear his wedding band in prison, but the
bride had to provide prison officials proof of purchase. Guards did
allow the groom to kiss the bride.
"It's emotional, no matter what," Holt said.
At the time of the wedding, all of Witt's appeals had been denied and exhausted. It appeared he would be in prison until 2020.
* * *
In 2009, Deborah Tuerkheimer published her paper, "The Next Innocence
Project: Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Criminal Courts" in the
Washington University Law Review.
"In its classic formulation, SBS comes as close as one could imagine
to a medical diagnosis of murder," Tuerkheimer wrote. "Prosecutors use
it to prove the mechanism of death, the intent to harm, and the identity
of the killer."
Also that year, the American Academy of Pediatrics revised its
position paper on shaken-baby syndrome. It urged physicians to stop
using that term and instead describe injuries as "abusive head trauma."
The group said it urged adoption of the "less mechanistic term" to stop
the focus on shaking. Instead, the journal said, doctors should look at a
wider range of possible causes.
Witt's prison records show that he was a model inmate after his
marriage. He had been moved into protective custody following his
assault. While there, he met Armando Castillo, another man who had been
convicted of shaking a child to death.
The Arizona Justice Project filed its motion in Castillo's case in
April 2010; his conviction was vacated 10 months later. The project took
up Drayton Witt's case in 2011, and the news was a blast of hope, Maria
Witt said. "You get that light sparked back in your life."
Those working on Witt's case assembled a list of medical experts who
reviewed Steven's autopsy photos and medical records. Most concluded
that Steven's death was likely caused by a blockage in the vein that
drained blood from his brain.
The attorneys also spotted a letter in the
New York Times Magazine
from Norman Guthkelch, the British pediatric neurosurgeon who first
wrote about the symptoms that indicated a shaken baby. In the letter, a
response to an article about the changing medical opinions about
shaken-baby syndrome, Guthkelch defended his 1971 paper that concluded
babies can get severe brain damage from shaking. The city under
Guthkelch's name: Tucson.
The Project attorneys asked Guthkelch to look at the records in the
case. He filed an affidavit in support of Witt, which marked his first
legal involvement on behalf of a person trying to reverse a shaken-baby
conviction.
"The death of Steven Witt is the type of case where a diagnosis of
Shaken Baby Syndrome should not have been made," Guthkelch wrote. He
said there were too many other possibilities that could explain the
baby's death, and that while his process offers a possible explanation
for some head injuries, any presumption that an injured child was shaken
was a "distortion" of his theory.
Also key to the case was the affidavit of A.L. Mosley, the county
medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Steven. Mosley was shown
new analysis of his autopsy by doctors who spotted errors in his work.
Most notably, doctors said, autopsy photos showed a blocked and swollen
vein that was not noted in the report.
Mosley, in his affidavit, concluded that "if I were to testify today,
I would state that I believe Steven's death was likely the result of a
natural disease process, not (shaken-baby syndrome)."
Witt's attorneys filed the motion in February. The state did not file
a response. The judge vacated Witt's conviction and ordered his
release.
* * *
The newly cast scientific thought on shaken-baby syndrome is
affecting other cases. A 2007 case against Lisa Randall, a day-care
operator, originally filed as a death-penalty case, was tossed out
before it reached trial. An expert hired by the prosecution in 2010
concluded that the child did not die from shaking as originally thought.
In 2009, prosecutors dropped murder charges against Craig Rettig in a
shaken-baby case from 2004. The defendant's lawyer located experts who
found that the baby died from striking his head on a coffee table, not
from being shaken.
Also, in 2009, Keith Roberts asked that expert testimony about
shaken-baby syndrome not be allowed in his trial on charges that he
killed his infant son. The Maricopa County Attorney's Office argued that
both sides should present their experts and leave it for the jury to
decide. The judge agreed. Roberts took a plea offer the day before his
trial was scheduled to begin. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Witt was released from custody wearing a jail-issued paper suit. He
borrowed a cellphone from a passer-by to call his wife. It was 8 a.m.
She had been told he wouldn't be released until noon. She broke
speed-limit laws driving from the opposite end of town to get him.
Maria Witt said having her husband out of prison is validation.
"To finally have people believe in me," she said, "and be able to
start the grieving process and what we missed out on, and be able to
start on the life that we missed out on, is more precious than
anything."
Drayton Witt, who is working on a construction crew, said he often
feels like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, awakening to find a world where
so much is accomplished by cellular phone, or that there are
self-checkout lanes at the grocery store.
Witt does not want to take a plea deal like his friend, Castillo,
did. He hopes prosecutors drop the case before his trial next year.
He does not blame police or prosecutors for the decade he spent
behind bars. He said officers and attorneys were just doing their job.
And he always figured the truth would win out.
"You keep screaming," he said. "Eventually, someone will hear you."
Reach the reporter at richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com.
