I have recently for two days been following a unique trial in the Swedish Supreme Court (partly present myself). It concerns a case with a father of twins who has been prosecuted because he is said to have abused his small 11-week old son. The twins had been sick with a serious virus desease, and the parents had taken turns beeing awake and taking care of the boys.

It is unbeleivable how society have treated this family, only because of a highly questioned diagnosis. The attorney told in court about how the family right after the event was put into 24-hours surveillance for two months, by the social authorities. They were found to be a good family with no problems and were released.

One year later the mother was on her way to pick up her daughter at the kindergarden when 6 persons approached her (four social workers and two civil police officers) and declared they were to take her twins into custody. There and then. She explained that it was not possible since she was going to pick her daughter up, but got the answer that she did not have to care about here since she had already been taken by the authorities. After that followed a long time struggle to get the children back. The girl was released after only a week, but the twin boys remained in foster care for three long years. Only last summer (2013) were they allowed to return home to their parents.

What is it that makes society react in such a way? When I heard this story during the court hearing I was startled, and when I told my wife about it she was totally upset. Upset that a father trying to awaken his conciousless child who was hardly breathing (we listenede to the phonecall to 112 in court) by shaking it, is accused of abuse! Frightening with all the judicial terms where the prosecutor talks about 'likgiltighetsuppsat' which means the fathter should have been ignorant of the risk of hurting his baby. For the first time in the process, the prosecutor also changed the charges from merely shaking the child to inflicting damage to the head. And this was in the Supreme Court, in the lowest court and court of appeal nothing of this was said to have happened! And now evidence was presented to prove it! The reason was as I understand it that the diagnosis has changed from Skaken Baby Syndrome, to Abusive Head Trauma, which indicates that there might also have been violance against the head. In fact here and in all similar cases there are usually no other proves other than the medical diagnosis. On the contrary all other facts speak AGAINST that abusing might have occured in the way described by the prosecutors.

What happened in this case was that the father went in to the bathroom with the boy because he was screaming. He interpreted this as the boy having difficulties pooping, something which was a usual procedure at this time. Putting the boy on the nursing table taking of the diper usually solved the problem, but not this time. Instead the boy was more and more upset, and abviously something hurt, until he finally fell unconsious. The mother called 112 and was devestated because the eyes were rolling and the boy seemed lifeless. It was at this moment the father told that he had been shaking the baby to, if possible, rewake it.

The shaken baby hypothesis says that if you shake a baby it will have head injuries. Something that can be found out by an Xray, and examination or retinal hemorrages and subdural hemorrages, something you could detect in the case of this boy (it has later been pointed out that the twin brother could very much have the same symptoms as well, but that was never checked out in this case). Theese injuries (or symptoms) are said to possibly lead to permanent injuries or conditions, but that has not been the case here.

The unique with this trial is that it is the first time the Supreme Court of Sweden is concidering a Shaken Baby case as far as I know. The court has (as I previously wrote about here) redirected two former cases to the appeal court, where they will be dealt with this winter.

The reason for the Supreme Court to concider this case was to try the question of intent. In the Tingsrätt (lowest criminal court) the man was sentenced only to pay a fine, since they considered the setting for what happened, but in the Hovrätt (court of appeals), he was sentenced to 1 1/2 years in prison. And the question was whether he should be sentenced to have harmed the child, when he was acting in a state of emergency, in order to revive the baby.

But, the other unique with this is that the question of Shaken Baby Syndrome indirectly also came up to be tried by the Supreme Court. In that way an ongoing scientific debate is now highly judicial relevant. The second day of the trial, the representative of the official Swedish medical advisory board ("Rättsliga rådet") of the Health authority ("Socialstyrelsen") professor Anders Eriksson from Umeå, explained that he can no longer stand for what he had written in his statement one year ago. He is now in a board of SBU, the Swedish Authority for Medical Evaluation who are set to investigate the Shaken Baby diagnosis, and he has realized that there is a real controversy conserning this diagnosis. He therefore explained, that he can not for sure say that the shaking of the baby was the reason for the symptoms detected. The expert called by the defence, professor in radiology at Karolinska Institutet, and former chairman of the Swedish Doctor Society (Svenska Läkarsällskapet) Peter Aspelin, who also Anders Eriksson referred to, in the same way explained that we can not now anything for sure why the injuries, or symptoms found, have occurred.

With those two more or less coherent expert witnesses it would of course be strange should the Supreme Court decide to declare the father guilty, but after all the strange things in the Swedish Judicial system I will be suprised of nothing. Especially after having read the book "Mannen som slutade ljuga" (the Man who stopped lying, by Dan Josefsson), about Sture Bergwall (aka Thomas Quick), who in the nineties was convicted with eight murders and 10 years later freed of all charges. But in those cases all the trials were conducted in the lowest criminal courts, so I do hope that the Swedish Supreme Court will be more thorough, and free the father of three from all the charges. It will be significant not only for that man, but for many parents in Sweden (and perhaps even abroad) who have wrongfully been convicted with abusing their children. 

Please see this trailer of an american documentary about Shaken Baby Syndrome which is soon on show!