For decades, a small group of specialists at Starship Hospital’s child protection unit have played a central role in some of NZ’s most serious physical child abuse cases. Their opinions trigger police investigations, child removals, criminal prosecutions and prison sentences. In many cases, their medical findings are treated as the starting point for everything that follows. But what happens if some findings are wrong?
It took three weeks of evidence, 30 witnesses and four hours of deliberation for a jury to reach a verdict that will reverberate far beyond the Dunedin courthouse it was delivered in.
Captured in the season finale of Melanie Reid’s latest award-winning investigative podcast, Diagnosis of a Crime, the recent criminal trial of a professional athlete marked what may be the first time the opinions of New Zealand hospital paediatric doctors were seriously challenged in court by international medical experts.
The evidence heard during the trial, and the result, has drawn attention to a developing global controversy that has been likened to Satanic Panic, a moral hysteria fuelled by pseudo-science that gripped institutions around the world in the 1980s and 1990s and led to dozens of wrongful convictions. (In New Zealand, this played out in the Christchurch Civic Creche case.)
Over the past three years, Reid and her team have been investigating a series of cases involving allegations of non-accidental injury in infants, covered extensively in two podcasts, Fractured and Diagnosis of a Crime, on Newsroom’s investigative podcast arm, Delve.
They obtained the medical files, scans and x-rays used to accuse and convict parents of causing the injuries, then engaged internationally recognised specialists in radiology, orthopaedics, pathology, genetics, obstetrics and neurology from England, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia and the US to review them.
These experts were asked a simple question: do the medical findings support the conclusions reached by the New Zealand doctors?
In the first case a mother, Zita, was sent to prison for two years and seven months after she was convicted of injuring her baby following a diagnosis of non-accidental injury from Starship. Overseas experts the Delve investigations unit engaged concluded her daughter’s injuries were likely the result of severely low vitamin D and a prolonged, traumatic birth.
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