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The DA Says He's Innocent. He Might Spend Life in Prison Anyway

When new scientific evidence casts doubt on convictions, the justice system has no easy path to freedom — even when it’s the prosecutors doing the asking.

So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.” Eaton also needed to make sense of a set of X-rays suggesting that Alex’s left clavicle had been fractured and a recording of an interrogation that prosecutors characterized as an admission of guilt. Eaton needed qualified medical experts to evaluate the evidence in the Maze case, but she thought the public vilification of doctors might still give pause to one she wanted to talk to: Dr. Michael Laposata, who previously served as chief pathologist at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville. But, she explained, “He underwent CPR, which, if a clavicle fracture was present, is a sufficient explanation for such a fracture.” Mack’s review of the records, which included several CT scans and an MRI of Alex’s brain, led her to conclude that the infant had suffered not from abuse but rather from “an ongoing, abnormal, natural disease process.”

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