The Child Cases: Lessons From Canada

by Joseph Shapiro

June 30, 2011

Tammy Marquardt, now 39, spent 14 years in prison for a crime she didn't commit.

ONE CLICK EXCERPTS

Medical and legal experts often disagree on how to determine the cause of a child's unexpected death. One result is that parents sometimes are wrongly accused of murder and sent to prison. No place has uncovered a bigger problem — or dealt with it more directly — than Ontario, Canada. That change can be seen in the arc of Tammy Marquardt's life.

In 1993, Marquardt was sleeping in her apartment in Oshawa, Ontario, when her 2-year-old son, Kenneth, cried out for her. When she got to his crib he was tangled in the sheets, and by the time the emergency workers arrived, he had stopped breathing.

Marquardt, then 21, was charged with smothering and killing her son. When she insisted she was innocent, no one believed her.

Marquardt, who was pregnant again, was sentenced to life in prison.

This past February, Marquardt nervously faced a wall of reporters and photographers outside a courthouse in Toronto after an appeals court overturned her conviction. Justice Marc Rosenberg told her there had been "a miscarriage of justice" and that she had been convicted because of a "flawed" and falsified autopsy report that found she had smothered her child.

Marquardt is one of at least a dozen people prosecuted for killing children in Ontario based on what later turned out to be tainted medical evidence. Courts in just the past few years have overturned several of those convictions, and more are under review.

READ MORE...  The Child Cases: Lessons From Canada

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Related Links:
* Rethinking Shaken Baby Syndrome
Jospeh Shapiro, NPR
* The Hardest Cases: When Children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive
Pro Publica
* Doctors Often Get It Wrong in Deaths of Children
John Johnson, Newser Starr
* Shaken Baby Syndrome Story & Metropolitan Police Witness Interference
Lisa Blakemore Brown, Psychologist
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