By Seamus McGraw
(Continued)
Statistics show that parents are often the prime suspects in infant slayings
When Jason Midyette was brought into an emergency room late last winter with a fractured skull and 27 broken bones, some of them already healing, only to die 10 days later, he became one of thousands of children nationwide who have died as the result of traumatic and possibly intentional injuries over the past decade. Between 2000 and 2004, the most recent years for which federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports are available, more than 3,000 young children died as a result of homicide, and nearly 40 percent of them — 1,195 — were, like Jason, less than a year old when they died.
Of all the confirmed homicides involving children under 5, more than half were killed by their parents, according to the BJS, and in the majority of those cases, the victims were young boys, killed by their fathers or some other male with access to them.
And in fact, the numbers may be significantly higher because despite advances in forensic science in recent years, infant deaths that might otherwise be considered suspicious or worse may be erroneously classified or in some cases missed altogether. In many places, police and other agents who respond to reports of child deaths or injuries lack sufficient training or experience to detect telltale signs of abuse or neglect, and even trained medical personnel can sometimes overlook critical clues.
But even when, a clear determination can be made — as the Boulder medical examiner did in July, when, after months of review by a team of outside experts, he declared Jason's death a homicide — it can still be difficult for prosecutors to make a criminal case.
The first hurdle that prosecutors must clear is, ironically, often their own humanity and tenderness. Though their jobs force them to confront the worst aspects of human behavior, prosecutors interviewed for this story noted that when confronted with a child's death their first reaction is often compassion. As Steven Farman, a veteran prosecutor who spent years working child abuse cases in New Jersey's busy Essex County prosecutor's office put it, "the obvious problem you have initially is that you have a big dichotomy between people who don't want to think that anybody could harm a child and a discrepancy in terms of the forensic evidence."
In such cases, prosecutors almost always rely on the forensic evidence, said Farman, now a deputy state attorney general in New Jersey. But that is seldom a slam dunk. Even when the forensic evidence seems to be clear and compelling, as it appears to be in Jason's case — suggesting a pattern of abuse over a period of time and all but ruling out brittle bone diseases as a factor in the child's death — prosecutors know that they will have to build an airtight case in order to persuade jurors to overcome their own reluctance to believe that anyone could so callously treat a vulnerable infant.
To do that, they must first wait for the autopsy reports, which typically lay out what was done, but leave open the question of who did it, and then go beyond them.
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