Palmer trial alleges shaken baby injuries

PALMER — For the next couple of weeks a jury will be mulling one question — was it child abuse that landed a 3-month-old in the hospital with severe brain injuries or something else?

There’s a lot of ways to ask that question. More pointedly, it would read: “Did the child’s parents, Shannon Silook and Michael Ponte, commit an assault on the child back in November 2009?”

Their attorneys, of course, don’t believe it was an assault. But prosecutor Trina Sears plans to prove it was. On Tuesday, ,they brought in Alaska’s only pediatric neurolog ist. Dr. Roderick Smith was asked to recall the day he examined the child. He said he’d do his best, but “to me that’s about 6,000 patients ago.”

Smith said the child had severe brain trauma and hemorrhaging in her eyes.

“You see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids who have falls or bike wrecks or sports injuries that don’t have that,” he said.

He said the girl was agitated, convulsing and in a “very disorganized state,” so his diagnosis was based mostly on tests and other evidence.

His process, Smith said, is to try to come up with as many alternate explanations for a set of injuries as he can. That is especially so when evidence seems to be pointing to abuse. He said he differs greatly from pediatricians who work with child protection agencies.

“I don’t see things in quite the same black-and-white way that they do,” he said.

Nobody said the baby had fallen from a great height or been in an accident. Even if it wasn’t something that someone witnessed, he said, it would be something they noticed later.

“You would think something would be wrong that day, that she was not herself,” he said.

He said that eventually, he was left one most likely scenario.

“I was very worried that this was an abusive head injury,” he said. “I never want to make that conclusion.”

Nationwide, the science around shaken baby syndrome has recently come under fire. Defense attorneys Greg Parvin and Jon-Marc Petersen indicated that the larger national story about shaken babies is going to play out in this case.

The New York Times and a PBS documentary program have both done pieces poking holes specifically in cases where people were charged with assaulting children by shaking them.

Both the Times and Frontline found cases in which what looked like clear-cut shaken baby injuries were overturned with new evidence.

“There is no exact count of shaken-baby prosecutions, but law-enforcement authorities think that there are about 200 a year. In an estimated 50 percent to 75 percent of them, the only medical evidence of shaken-baby syndrome is the triad of internal symptoms: subdural and retinal hemorrhage and brain swelling,” The Times reports.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.