Defense medical experts contend Danyel Smith was wrongly convicted in 2003 of the shaken-baby murder of his 2-month-old son because Chandler died from natural causes brought on by seizures and a premature birth.
Yet Gwinnett County Superior Court Judge Ronnie Batchelor has denied Smith’s extraordinary bid for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence. The 30-page order, written by Gwinnett prosecutors and signed by Batchelor on Sept. 25, said credible and reliable evidence continues to show “that the medical findings in this case remain indicative of non-accidental abusive trauma.”
Smith will appeal the decision “as we continue the fight to undo this wrongful conviction,” said Mark Loudon-Brown, one of his lawyers.
“We are devastated for Mr. Smith and deeply disappointed in this ruling,” Loudon-Brown said. " … The evidence conclusively showed that Mr. Smith is innocent, yet he remains in prison.”
Credit: Pete Corson
Credit: Pete Corson
Batchelor presided over evidentiary hearings held between March 29 and April 11. Eleven witnesses testified, including eight defense experts who said Chandler died from natural causes, not abuse. The state presented experts who testified in support of the murder conviction.
Smith, who took the stand at his trial more than two decades ago, insists he did not kill his son. Last year, he was offered a deal by Gwinnett prosecutors to plead guilty to the crime in exchange for a sentence of time-served, meaning he would be released from prison after more than 20 years of incarceration.
The case has attracted attention because of the controversy over shaken-baby death diagnoses. Experts have testified that scientific advances have led to a major shift in how the medical community diagnoses the condition. Even the terminology has changed; what used to be called shaken baby is now labeled abusive head trauma. Such testimony and findings have led to a number of exonerations of people convicted of killing infants through violent shaking.
But some of these experts have also become pariahs in certain segments of the medical community and have been wrongly branded “child abuse deniers,” Keith Findlay, who founded the Wisconsin Innocence Project and has written extensively on the subject, said in a recent interview.
Findlay was one of the experts who testified on Smith’s behalf before Batchelor. He has spent years helping lawyers overturn what he believes were wrongful convictions in shaken-baby death cases.
The order signed by Batchelor said that while the defense’s experts disagreed with the state’s witnesses’ conclusions that Chandler’s death was a homicide, the defense experts did agree that violently shaking an infant can cause brain damage and death. As for the evidence and testimony brought by Smith, it “has not shown that recent scientific studies materially undermine the foundations of the evidence used to convict him at trial.”
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