Regardless of a rare effort by the district lawyer’s workplace in Nashville, Tennessee, to reverse a homicide conviction that its personal prosecutors gained greater than 20 years in the past, the state’s Court docket of Legal Appeals upheld Russell Maze’s conviction on Friday. The courtroom stated there was inadequate proof to show his innocence, though the unique medical expert within the case — whose testimony helped safe the 2004 conviction — recanted final yr, concluding that Maze’s son died of pure causes, not abuse.
Maze, whose case was the topic of an in-depth article final yr by ProPublica and The New York Occasions Journal, was accused of shaking his 5-week-old son, Alex, who later died.
The courtroom’s 2-1 determination adopted a sweeping, yearlong reinvestigation of the case by a particular crew throughout the DA’s workplace referred to as a conviction-review unit. After consulting with consultants in pathology, radiology, neonatology and ophthalmology, the unit concluded that Alex died not from shaking however from an undiagnosed medical situation.
Maze, now 60, was arrested after Alex grew to become nonresponsive within the spring of 1999. He has been behind bars ever since and is serving a life sentence.
Maze stood trial twice, and in each proceedings, prosecutors introduced proof they stated confirmed Alex was a sufferer of shaken child syndrome. The diagnosing physician, Suzanne Starling, advised jurors that inner bleeding round Alex’s mind and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You’d be appalled at what this seemed like,” she testified at Maze’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “youngsters who fall from three or 4 flooring onto concrete will get an analogous mind damage.”
However within the years since Alex was rushed to the emergency room, medical doctors and researchers discovered that the signs as soon as thought of to be the hallmarks of shaken child syndrome — mind swelling and bleeding across the mind and from the retina — aren’t at all times indicators of abuse. Lengthy thought to be definitive proof of shaking, they’re now understood to produce other causes, together with unintended falls, sickness, an infection and congenital problems.
In March 2024, the conviction-review unit — together with attorneys for Maze and his spouse, Kaye — introduced their findings at a two-day evidentiary listening to. Kaye, who wasn’t residence along with her husband when their son grew to become unresponsive in 1999, was nonetheless charged with aggravated assault. Instructed that an open legal case may hinder her efforts to regain custody of her son, who didn’t die instantly, she entered an Alford plea to a diminished felony cost — a plea that permits defendants to just accept punishment whereas sustaining their innocence.
On the listening to, District Lawyer Glenn Funk urged the courtroom to overturn their convictions. “Each single medical professional, utilizing present science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are literally harmless of the crimes for which they have been convicted,” he stated. “It’s my responsibility as district lawyer to ask the courtroom to vacate these convictions.” The director of his workplace’s conviction-review unit, Sunny Eaton, was even blunter. “The state bought this fallacious,” she advised Choose Steve Dozier.
Dozier had an extended historical past with the case, having presided over Maze’s trials, appeals and postconviction proceedings. (He additionally signed off on Kaye’s plea settlement, which spared her a jail sentence.) Medical consultants testified on the 2024 listening to that Alex’s signs have been the results of an undiagnosed medical situation. However Dozier gave this new testimony no extra weight than the unique testimony from witnesses like Starling, writing that it didn’t mirror a brand new scientific consensus — solely “new ammunition in a ‘battle of the consultants.’”
The Court docket of Legal Appeals’ determination on Friday upheld that ruling, figuring out that the Mazes “failed to determine that their scientific proof is actually ‘new’ or that this proof supplies clear and convincing proof that Mr. Maze is definitely harmless.”
The opinion gave solely perfunctory consideration to a watershed second within the case: In September 2024, the original medical examiner, who determined Alex’s death to be a homicide, said he’d been wrong. Earlier than reaching this conclusion, Dr. Bruce Levy reviewed medical information that the conviction-review unit offered to him — a lot of which he didn’t recall having seen earlier than. They included Alex’s information from his untimely start till dying and Kaye’s obstetric information, which provided important context in regards to the well being challenges Alex (whose authorized identify was Bryan) confronted earlier than he stopped respiratory.
“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken child syndrome,” Levy acknowledged in a sworn affidavit. “If known as to testify now, I might assert Bryan Maze’s mind, on the time of his dying, confirmed no indication, to an inexpensive diploma of medical certainty, of prior trauma or abuse. As a substitute, the residual mind lesions seen at post-mortem extra seemingly than not resulted from a pure illness course of.” He went on to state that he would now classify the kid’s method of dying as “pure.”
Levy’s recantation appeared to hold explicit weight with one of many three judges on the Court docket of Legal Appeals who heard oral arguments within the Maze case. In a separate opinion accompanying Friday’s ruling, Choose Tom Greenholtz devoted 14 pages to arguing that Levy’s reassessment of the proof demanded critical consideration. “When the state’s personal chief medical expert recants the very testimony that established the trigger and method of dying, the impact isn’t just to lift new questions. If credited, it calls into doubt the muse of the trial and the reliability of the post-conviction courtroom’s findings, which relied on that very same testimony.”
Greenholtz went additional, including, “Dr. Levy’s revised opinion is that no murder occurred — that the kid died of pure causes. This goes past mere disagreement amongst consultants in regards to the interpretation of ambiguous findings. It represents a dedication by the State’s personal chief forensic pathologist that the factual predicate for a murder prosecution was absent.”
Maze can apply for permission to attraction to the Tennessee Supreme Court docket, although the courtroom grants evaluation in solely a small fraction of instances.
The Court docket of Legal Appeals’ ruling stands as an outlier amongst latest appellate opinions, by which shaken child syndrome has come below scrutiny. Over the past 18 months, judges in Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey have sided with defendants difficult their shaken child convictions. In October, the Texas Court docket of Legal Appeals granted a keep of execution to Robert Roberson, who was prosecuted for his 2-year-old daughter’s dying; the keep was granted below the state’s junk science law, which permits courts to rethink convictions that relaxation on scientific proof now thought to be unreliable or outdated.
The Maze case highlights a broader nationwide reevaluation of shaken child syndrome. Forty-one folks whose convictions concerned the analysis are presently listed on the National Registry of Exonerations.
“Russell Maze stays in jail for against the law he didn’t commit,” stated Jason Gichner, government director of the Tennessee Innocence Venture and Maze’s lead lawyer. “Each medical professional introduced on the latest post-conviction listening to — each for the prosecution and protection — agreed this isn’t a case about abuse. Russell wants to come back residence. We’re not going to cease combating till that day comes.”
