By Seamus McGraw
(Continued)
Crime scene investigations often yield little in infanticide probes
While statistics show that in most cases, fathers, and slightly less often mothers, are responsible for the violent deaths of children under 5, other suspects — caregivers, other family members, even strangers — must be considered and ruled out, prosecutors say. That can be time-consuming.
And even when the focus narrows to a single suspect, or to multiple family members, investigators and prosecutors are then faced with the challenge of dissecting their stories.
That can be a particularly difficult task in cases of suspected child abuse and homicide involving middle-class and affluent families, prosecutors say.
Whereas poor urban or rural families often have long histories of contact with state agencies, be it law enforcement or child protective services, which can indicate patterns of abusive or negligent behavior, what happens behind the closed doors of more affluent families remains hidden. As a result, when family members who have no history of significant criminal behavior and no record of child abuse or neglect deny any knowledge or involvement in a child's death, prosecutors must rely on other evidence.
Often, the suspected crime scene yields little. It is a tragic truth that infants are fragile, and deadly injuries can be inflicted on them without leaving the signs of a struggle that one would find when an adult is attacked or injured.
Because the child is too young to speak, and because others who might have contact with the child are— like prosecutors and juries — only human and are naturally inclined against assuming that anyone might harm the child, circumstantial evidence can be hard to come by. Even when it is obtained, it is often far from conclusive.
Those challenges are even more difficult to surmount in cases where legally savvy potential suspects, realizing that anything they say can be used against them, hire attorneys and say nothing, as the Midyettes have done.
When that happens, authorities have little to fall back on except for the forensics. But no matter how strong a forensic report may be, it is never fool proof, prosecutors say.
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