Chris Pamplin looks for the lessons to draw from an expert witness who spoke against perceived wisdom & got into deep water
Publicly confronting dogma is a risky business that can have long-lasting consequences. Galileo was found guilty of heresy in 1615 for claiming the Earth moved around the sun. He was finally exonerated by the Catholic Church in 1992. Thankfully, Waney Squier didn’t have to wait quite as long.
Challenging professional dogma
Dr Squier, a consultant at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and lecturer at Oxford University, has practised as a neuropathologist since the 1970s, and in the late 1980s she developed a medico-legal practice. Her work included cases involving babies who had died from suspected non-accidental head injuries (NAHI). The balance of medical opinion at that time was that the so-called triad of injuries (subdural hematoma, retinal haemorrhage and encephalopathy) was itself indicative of a non-accidental head injury. However, by 2003, Squier came to doubt the majority view and the reliability of previous medical evidence (including her own) in cases of shaken baby syndrome. It seems this was due, at least in part,
