Dr. Bruce Levy, a Nashville, Tennessee, medical examiner who testified under oath 24 years ago that Russell and Kaye Maze’s young son, Alex, had been shaken to death by his father now says, “Oopsie!”—he was wrong.
“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken baby syndrome,” he stated in a sworn affidavit. “If called to testify now, I would assert Bryan Maze’s 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.” He swears that would now classify the child’s manner of death as “natural.”
Gee, that’s nice. The father, Russell Maze, was convicted of aggravated child abuse before Bryan’s death and of murder after the child’s death . He is now serving a life sentence, and has been in prison for more than two decades.
The sudden attack of clarity by the medical examiner seems to have been provoked by an in-depth article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. It revealed new evidence that suggested Bryan died not from shaking but an undiagnosed, underlying condition. The Nashville district attorney’s office began re-investigating the case in 2023.
Because Levy’s trial testimony was decisive in Russell Maze’s conviction, there is a significant chance that he will eventually be released, but that is far from certain. In May, a lower-court judge, despite hearing two days of testimony from experts who found no evidence that Bryan had been shaken, ruled, “The court does not find an injustice nor that the petitioner is actually innocent based on new scientific evidence.” Yet both the DA’s office and the original medical examiner now agree that the crime Russell is in prison for life for committing never occurred.
Evidence is also mounting that “shaken baby syndrome” is mistakenly diagnosed more often than was once believed. Brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and behind the eyes, the supposed markers of the condition, can also be caused by a wide range of natural and accidental causes.
“If called to testify today,” Levy stated in his recanting affidavit, “I would refute the previous testimony of Dr. Suzanne Starling that Bryan Maze was definitely a victim of shaken baby syndrome and that there was no other explanation for his condition.” That position almost certainly would have been enough to defeat the argument that Bryan’s father was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The five-year-old’s first five weeks of life included 13 days in a neonatal intensive care unit, and he subsequently had chronic health problems that required medical attention on seven different occasions in the following month. “I do not believe many of these records were previously provided for my review,” Levy wrote in his affidavit.
During a hearing reconsidering the conviction, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, the chief medical examiner in Knox and Anderson counties, opined that Dr. Levy had been “too busy to really dedicate enough time to study this case thoroughly.” “Sometimes the easiest thing is just to copy and paste” previous medical conclusions, she said.
Levy is currently a professor of pathology and informatics at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
And Russell Maze is still in prison.
[WordPress’s AI bot says that I should tag this post “Book reviews.”]
Ethics Alarms 
Shaken baby syndrome
Compositional bullet lead analysis
Drug sniffing dogs
Melted furniture springs
Black smoke
Concrete spalling
All things that were once used to convict people of crimes, but shouldn’t have been.
Add “blood spatter analysis”…..
Please add “Hair and Fiber” analysis to that list. Thank you.
And bite marks.
What about ‘ear prints’ (actually used a couple times)?
I didn’t include hair, fiber, or blood spatter because there is information you can get from that that is useful, it is just blatantly misused by many analysts. The ones I listed were always based on complete garbage or (dogs) prone to such misuse as to be almost meaningless.
I am understanding the sentiment behind Darth Vader summarily executing officers for failure…
Am I the only one who thought that was a photo of Bill Clinton with Chelsea?
Now that you mention it.
Funny.
Shaken baby syndrome has been known to being falsely diagnosed for at least thirteen years, but many people are still in prison after being wrongly convicted. Pediatric neurosurgeon Dr Norman Guthkelch who first observed the condition found that medical examiners were not considering other possible causes of the children’s injury.
How many hundreds or even thousands of people are in prison because of misdiagnosis?
One is one too many.
These medical examiners need to be executed.
Reminded that this guy: https://www.seattlechildrens.org/directory/kenneth-w-feldman/
Is still employed after this investigation twenty years ago:
https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/persecuted-parents-or-protected-children-1092970.php
https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/suspicions-cost-one-family-a-son-they-wanted-to-1092971.php
https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/where-the-odysseys-of-some-parents-took-them-1093008.php
Had a run into that fucker. Technically didn’t, but he accused my family of abusing my middle kid without even physically examining him – nor did he agree to meet with us in person. Our pediatrician had to stand up to him to stop the harassment in the presence of hospital management and law enforcement. Cost us thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees.
Assholes like these who destroy other’s lives to advance their career deserve outlawry, but I’ll settle for them spending as much time in prison as their victims did.
Our area had 2 or 3 small children killed by parental abuse. The authorities had been notified…and were only investigating the people who reported the abuse (the father’s family). The mothers eventually killed the children.
A friend had a grandchild being abused and took the child to the hospital to report it. The hospital and police separated everyone, accused the father of the abuse, and tried to get the child to accuse the father. The 12 year old insisted it was the mother. The authorities called the mother and gave her 3 hours notice that they were coming. When they arrived, the mother wouldn’t let them into the house or let them talk to her boyfriend. They questioned the child while the mother held her arm. The child denied everything he said at the hospital while his mother squeezed his arm. The result was that the father was reduced to supervised visits.
DHS is incompetent. They are worse than incompetent, they are ideologically trained to use DHS as a weapon against fathers and their families and to shield abusive mothers from consequences. They care nothing for the actual children.
I am lucky I don’t have small children now. Since the pediatricians are told to separate the child from the parent and ask the child about firearms, etc, and then lecture parents about firearms safety or report them to the police. I would probably get arrested because I would demand to know the qualifications of the pediatrician to tech gun safety. I would demand to see their NRA certifications loudly. I would demand to report them to the AMA for working outside their certified scope.