Regardless of a unprecedented effort by the district legal professional’s workplace in Nashville, Tennessee, to reverse a homicide conviction that its personal prosecutors received greater than twenty years in the past, the state’s Court docket of Prison Appeals upheld Russell Maze’s conviction on Friday. The courtroom stated there was inadequate proof to show his innocence, although the unique medical expert within the case — whose testimony helped safe the 2004 conviction — recanted final 12 months, concluding that Maze’s son died of pure causes, not abuse.
Maze, whose case was the topic of an in-depth article final 12 months by ProPublica and The New York Instances Journal, was accused of shaking his 5-week-old son, Alex, who later died.
The courtroom’s 2-1 choice adopted a sweeping, yearlong reinvestigation of the case by a particular crew inside the DA’s workplace generally known as a conviction-review unit. After consulting with specialists 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 turned 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 “kids who fall from three or 4 flooring onto concrete will get an identical mind damage.”
However within the years since Alex was rushed to the emergency room, docs 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 — are usually not all the time indicators of abuse. Lengthy considered definitive proof of shaking, they’re now understood to produce other causes, together with unintentional 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 dwelling together with her husband when their son turned unresponsive in 1999, was nonetheless charged with aggravated assault. Informed that an open legal case might 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 enables 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 skilled, 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 legal professional to ask the courtroom to vacate these convictions.” The director of his workplace’s conviction-review unit, Sunny Eaton, was even blunter. “The state acquired this unsuitable,” she advised Decide Steve Dozier.
Dozier had a protracted 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 specialists 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 replicate a brand new scientific consensus — solely “new ammunition in a ‘battle of the specialists.’”
The Court docket of Prison Appeals’ choice on Friday upheld that ruling, figuring out that the Mazes “failed to determine that their scientific proof is really ‘new’ or that this proof offers 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 unique medical expert, who decided Alex’s dying to be a murder, stated he’d been unsuitable. Earlier than reaching this conclusion, Dr. Bruce Levy reviewed medical information that the conviction-review unit supplied to him — lots of which he didn’t recall having seen earlier than. They included Alex’s information from his untimely delivery till dying and Kaye’s obstetric information, which supplied important context in regards to the well being challenges Alex (whose authorized identify was Bryan) confronted earlier than he stopped respiration.
“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken child syndrome,” Levy acknowledged in a sworn affidavit. “If referred to as to testify now, I’d 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 considered at post-mortem extra doubtless 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 Prison Appeals who heard oral arguments within the Maze case. In a separate opinion accompanying Friday’s ruling, Decide 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 is not only to boost new questions. If credited, it calls into doubt the inspiration 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 specialists in regards to the interpretation of ambiguous findings. It represents a willpower by the State’s personal chief forensic pathologist that the factual predicate for a murder prosecution was absent.”
Maze can apply for permission to enchantment to the Tennessee Supreme Court docket, although the courtroom grants evaluate in solely a small fraction of circumstances.
The Court docket of Prison Appeals’ ruling stands as an outlier amongst current appellate opinions, during 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 Prison 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 legislation, which permits courts to rethink convictions that relaxation on scientific proof now considered unreliable or outdated.
The Maze case highlights a broader nationwide reevaluation of shaken child syndrome. Forty-one individuals whose convictions concerned the prognosis are presently listed on the Nationwide 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 legal professional. “Each medical skilled introduced on the current post-conviction listening to — each for the prosecution and protection — agreed this isn’t a case about abuse. Russell wants to return dwelling. We’re not going to cease combating till that day comes.”
