Colorado Law Blog

Camryn Jakeb Wilson was bathed in TV lights the day he was born, celebrated on the local news as Summit County, Ohio 2008 New Year's baby after his arrival at 12:33 a.m. on January 1.

Just 12 weeks later, he quietly died in his mother's arms, the victim of shaken baby syndrome. Camryn was critically injured, with bleeding inside his head and in the backs of his eyes, and several broken ribs -- some of which, according to the autopsy, turned out to be older injuries. Medical personnel at the hospital determined the combination of injuries could only mean abuse.

Camryn's father, Craig R. Wilson, 28, of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, is scheduled for a pretrial hearing on murder and other charges August 20. Police say he confessed to shaking and squeezing the infant after arguing with his wife about a past romance. But he has pleaded not guilty to all the charges and faces trial in September.

The National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome estimates as many as 1,400 babies annually are injured or killed by shaking. According to the center, 70 percent to 79 percent of people convicted of killing or hurting babies are men. The average age of perpetrators is 24, and 82 percent are either the parent of the victim or the live-in boyfriend of the mother.

Shaken baby syndrome, violently shaking an infant for just a few seconds can cause:

• Brain injury leading to paralysis, mild to severe cognitive impairment, cerebral palsy
• Blindness
• Broken bones
• Death

Normal activities such as bouncing a baby on one's knee, tossing it in the air or jogging with a baby on one's back do not cause shaken baby syndrome.

Camryn was blind and incapable of feeling someone touching him, he could not breathe on his own, and if he lived he would never be aware of his surroundings or even be capable of thinking, family members said. After almost two weeks of waiting for a miracle that would never come, his mother, Crystal Wilson, decided to withdraw life support. Various relatives took turns holding him as he gradually slipped away.

Camryn's father was not among them as he remained in jail. Sheriff's deputies took Craig Wilson to the funeral home for a brief, private viewing of the infant's body the night before the funeral.

How to deal with crying - Steps to take if a baby is crying and you are getting flustered:

• Lay the baby on its back in its crib
• Put the crib rails up
• Leave the room
• Close the door
• Distract yourself with relaxing activities for a few minutes
• Call a friend or relative to take over if necessary

For more information and tools for coping with crying, visit the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome at http://www.dontshake.org.

Posted by Linda Chalat at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recent pediatric heart transplants performed in Colorado have created disturbing questions about determinations as to when a patient is dead. For decades, determine that a donor’s brain has completely stopped working before harvesting organs for transplant. In the case of at least three infants, each was on life support and showed little brain function, but did not meet the criteria for brain dead.

With their families’ consent, the newborns were taken off ventilators and surgeons in Denver removed their hearts minutes after they stopped beating. The hearts were successfully transplanted, and the babies who received the transplanted hearts survived.

In the first case, doctors waited for three minutes after the heart stopped before death was declared. Then the waiting time was reduced to 75 seconds on the recommendation of the ethics committee to reduce the chances of damage to the heart. State laws stipulate that donors must be declared dead before donation, based on either total loss of brain function or heart function that is irreversible. Some medical ethicists contend that the Denver cases fail to meet this criteria since it was possible to restart the transplanted hearts in the recipients.

The Denver transplants were done over three years; one in 2004 and two last year. The three donor infants had all suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen when they were born. On average, they were about four days old when life support was ended. The hearts were given to three babies born with heart defects or heart disease.

The procedure is gaining acceptance and it has been termed donation after cardiac death. The federal government and organ banks are encouraging the practice as a way to make more organs available and give more families the option to donate. But the approach raises legal and ethical issues because it involves children and because, according to some legal commentators, it violates laws governing when organs may be removed for transplants.

Not surprisingly, as the method has gained acceptance, the number of cardiac-death donations has steadily increased. Last year, there were 793 cardiac-death donors, about 10 percent of all deceased donors, according to United Network for Organ Sharing. Most of those were adults donating kidneys or livers.

The heart is rarely removed after cardiac death because of damage resulting from lack of oxygen. In brain-death donations, the donor is kept on a ventilator to keep oxygen-rich blood flowing to the organs until they are removed.

The Denver cases are detailed in today’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. The editors noted that the controversial article was published to promote discussion of cardiac-death donation, especially for infant heart transplants.

There were nine other potential cardiac-death donors at the hospital during the same period, but there wasn’t a suitable recipient in the area for their hearts, the report said.

Posted by Linda Chalat at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A new study, which is to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, concludes that personal injury plaintiffs – victims of accidents, medical malpractice, legal malpractice, etc. – and plaintiffs in contract disputes typically improve their outcome by settling. The mistake of turning down settlement offers and proceeding to trial, and doing worse than the offer, was typically made in contingent fee cases.

The findings were based on a study of 2,054 cases that went to trial from 2002 to 2005. One of the authors did note that the vast majority of cases do settle — from 80 to 92 percent by some estimates — and there is no way to know whether either side in those cases could have done better at trial.

Defendants made the wrong decision by proceeding to trial far less often, in 24 percent of cases, according to the study; plaintiffs were wrong in 61 percent of cases. In just 15 percent of cases, both sides were right to go to trial — meaning that the defendant paid less than the plaintiff had wanted but the plaintiff got more than the defendant had offered.

On average, getting it wrong cost plaintiffs about $43,000. For defendants, the cost was much greater: $1.1 million.

Posted by Linda Chalat at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If a murder is committed and a handgun found at the scene, would you expect the police to hand the gun over to the defense attorney? Essentially the Boston police and the Suffolk district attorney's office did the equivalent when they decided to hand over a possibly faulty ventilator to the manufacturer and let it examine the device that shut down during a power outage and led to the death of a 15-year-old.

Josh Wall, first assistant district attorney, explained that police and prosecutors gave the device to the company so trained engineers at Pulmonetic Systems Inc., the manufacturer, could confirm that the ventilator shut off during the power outage, and determine why.

Wall said the engineers could retrieve the information without disassembling the device, which he described as a sort of "black box" that may have recorded any alarm that went off. The company will videotape the retrieval of the data, Wall said.

Fernando's mother, Ilia Torres, said she had not hired a lawyer but would pursue a lawsuit if she learned a mistake by the manufacturer or the contractor that supplied the device - New England Home Therapies - led to the death of her son, who was born with cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and mental retardation.

The reported serial number of the ventilator places it among more than 10,000 machines recalled by the company in 2004 because of the potential for the backup battery to fail. Torres said police did not tell her the ventilator was going to be returned to New England Home Therapies, the contractor for the state's low-income health insurance program that supplied Vargas's ventilator, and sent to Pulmonetic.

The assistant D.A. said that while police and prosecutors are still investigating Vargas's death, they do not believe anyone is criminally responsible. Yet the fact that the ventilator may have been subjected to a national recall didn't suggest a direct link to the cause of death?

Posted by Linda Chalat at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)