There has undoubtedly been a grave miscarriage of justice in the conviction of Alan Yurko of Orlando, Florida, who was accused of “shaken baby syndrome” and was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. The error seems to have arisen because of fashionable adherence to a diagnosis now in vogue, and to a desire to blame one single preventable occurrence for an infant death. Everything is supposed to be preventable nowadays.

Surely Alan held his 10-week-old son by the heels and slapped him on the bottom after he began wheezing, spat up and stopped breathing, but he did not cause his son’s death; he was trying to resuscitate him.

Actually the infant died from a concatenation of circumstances, having been born prematurely, weighing 5 lbs. 8 oz., of a malnourished mother with several medical problems. After becoming pregnant, she became sick and remained so during her pregnancy, often to the point of dehydration, going from her original weight of 130 lbs. down to 120 lbs. at one point and finally coming back to her original weight of 130 lbs. at the time of delivery. She said she was too sick to take her prenatal vitamins.