In recent years, Pamela Colloff has focused on exposing the role that junk science plays in our criminal justice system. She began this project preoccupied by a central question: In cases that rest on bad science, why is the criminal justice system better at preserving error than correcting it? This was particularly true, she found, of people who were convicted based on evidence that purported to show that an infant had suffered from shaken baby syndrome, a largely debunked diagnosis that has stubbornly persisted in the courts, even as it has led to a string of wrongful convictions across the country. Colloff found the little-noticed reason why; 16 years ago, advocates rebranded it “abusive head trauma.” This allowed it to live on in the courtroom despite a growing body of evidence that shows its signature symptoms don’t always signal abuse but rather have a range of natural and accidental causes. Today, she found, it continues to shape criminal prosecutions and child welfare investigations, separating children from their parents and sending mothers and fathers to prison.
For her initial story, Colloff examined the near impossibility of undoing such a conviction, even after the science behind it has fallen apart. In “What Would It Take to Free Russell Maze?,” she looked at a case from 2004, when a Tennessee father was tried for murder following the death of his young son. She gained unprecedented access to the Nashville district attorney’s office, embedding with a new generation of prosecutors as they reinvestigated the case that their own office had previously tried and fought to uphold on appeal. With this extraordinary view, she followed each step of prosecutors’ yearlong investigation — which ultimately led them to conclude that Maze was innocent. Then she told the astonishing story of what happened next, when they could not free him.
Next, Colloff looked to the present day. She had noticed how many parents were still being charged, decades later, in cases that were eerily reminiscent of the Maze case. Colloff wanted to make clear that this was not just a problem of the past, and so she sought to write about a family who was currently facing criminal charges because of an abusive head trauma diagnosis.
In “He Frantically Called 911 to Revive His Infant Son. Now He Could Face 12 Years in Prison.,” Colloff showed that 20 years after Maze’s conviction, little has changed. She tells the gutting story of Nick Flannery, a young father who faces more than a decade in prison because a doctor speculated that his 2-month-old had been shaken, despite not a single outward sign of abuse. This speculation, Colloff shows, triggered a series of calamitous decisions for the family in both criminal court and the child welfare system.
