Dr. Waney Squier. Copyright Photo by Les Wilson. Photo courtesy of Daily Mail.

by Christina England
Health Impact News

This year, Health Impact News has been regularly reporting on the disturbing case of pediatric neuropathologist and expert defense witness Dr. Waney Squier, who, in March 2016, was found guilty of serious professional misconduct by the UK’s General Medical Council, for daring to disagree with the medical establishment over the “science” behind shaken baby syndrome.

However, as everyone knows, there are two sides to every story. After winning her appeal in October and recently returning to work, Dr. Squier finally broke her silence to tell the world her side of the story.

Throughout her ordeal, the Daily Mail have been publishing regular updates on her case and on December 10, 2016, they wrote:

Early in 2010, the mild-mannered neuro-pathologist, now 68, was reported to the General Medical Council by police for ‘deliberately misleading’ judges and juries in Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) cases.

They continued:

Today, recovering from her long ordeal, she is battered but unbowed.

Most of all, she is worried that many of the convictions of parents and carers accused of killing babies by shaking them have been wrong. She believes it could be half of the cases or considerably more.

Dr. Squier told reporters that she believed that it was time for a public inquiry into how this syndrome is still being used to condemn innocent people in the family and criminal courts. She stated:

Parents were being accused on the basis of it, yet it is only an hypothesis with no scientific evidence to support it.

According to the Mail, there are an estimated 250 SBS cases going through the criminal and family courts in Britain every year. If Dr. Squier is correct in her findings, then the majority of these cases should have never gone to court in the first place.

Who Reported Dr. Waney Squier and Why

When a medical professional suspects that a baby has been violently shaken, they will examine the baby for the “triad” of injuries associated with shaken baby syndrome (SBS). These are subdural haematoma (bleeds inside the brain), retinal haemorrhages (bleeds behind the eyes) and cerebral edema (swelling or inflammation inside the brain).

For many years, Dr. Squier had wholeheartedly believed in the triad of injuries associated with SBS; however, her views were about to be challenged.

In an article written in 2005, the website Justice Denied stated that in the early part of her career, Dr. Waney Squire had accepted the validity of the SBS theory.

They wrote:

Dr. Squier accepted the validity of SBS and testified during a number of trials as a prosecution witness that the existence of the triad of signs supported that the baby had been injured or died as a result of abusive treatment. Lorraine Harris’ trial in 2000 for manslaughter in the death of her four-month-old baby son Patrick was one of the trials during which Dr. Squier testified the triad of SBS signs were present. Harris was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.

After Harris’ conviction Dr. Squier learned that the research of British neuropathologist Dr. Jennian Geddes resulted in the discovery that injuries associated with the SBS triad can occur naturally, including that bleeding is triggered in some babies from a lack of oxygen. Dr. Geddes suggested that there should be physical evidence that a baby suffered physical trauma before determining that abuse (SBS) occurred.

In fact, it was only after studying Dr. Geddes’ evidence and reading his papers in full that Dr. Squier began to question the validity of the SBS theory. She told Justice Denied:

A light went on in my head. I became concerned that the whole basis for shaking was poor.

Dr. Squier decided to reexamine the evidence that she had presented to the court in reference to Lorraine Harris and began to question her decisions. In an unprecedented move, she decided to prepare a report for Harris, explaining how she now believed that her trial testimony was incorrect because her baby had no physical injury and it was possible that the baby had died from natural causes.

Justice Denied stated:

Based on the new evidence in Dr. Squier’s report that the jury had not had available, England’s Court of Appeals quashed Harris’ conviction on July 21, 2005.

Until this point, no one had questioned Dr. Squier and she was thought to be a leading professional in the field of SBS. However, the moment that she began to question the theory and speak out on behalf of parents, things began to change.

See: Dr.Waney Squier Wins her Appeal but Banned for Telling the Truth in Court

In an interview with UK’s radio host Richie Allen, Dr. Squier explained the story in full. She explained that shortly after she began to challenge the SBS theory in court, she was reported to her governing body, the General Medical Council (GMC), by the Metropolitan Police “for virtually having an opinion.”

Police Plan to Stop Experts from Bringing Science into the Courtroom

Baffled by why the police would want to destroy Dr. Squier’s career, Mr. Allen asked her if she knew why.

Her answer, we are sure, will shock everyone who has ever been falsely accused of shaking their child.

She stated that:

It was soon after I was reported in April 2010 that I realized what had been going on because the police who reported me, two of the policemen, the head of the Metropolitan Police Child Abuse Squad, went over to a big shaken baby convention in the United States and gave a lecture; he gave a detailed account of what he was doing in this country to increase rates of conviction. And essentially what he described was a campaign to get rid of defence experts who bring science into the courtroom because it confuses the juries, we would report them to their regulatory bodies, we would report them to the Human Tissue Authority. And he described that he’d had meetings with several doctors and lawyers and so on and members of the Crown Prosecution Service and that they had made every attempt to get rid of defence experts in these cases.

Dr. Squier explained that a friend of hers, a lawyer who was at the conference, had taken detailed notes of what had happened. The first thing she did when she found out about the lecture was to contact the Metropolitan police and ask for a copy of his PowerPoint presentation. She told listeners that she had followed her letter with a Freedom of Information request.

She continued, by explaining that it had taken another four years for her to receive a copy of that PowerPoint, which was heavily redacted.

She stated that:

It had very little information in it.

I also made a Freedom of Information request, to get details of those meetings, and again I got pages and pages of black paper but one sentence remained which was, ‘It is unlikely that Dr. A. or Dr. B. will any longer be employed as defence experts in these cases.’

In other words, a group of so-called ‘officers of the law’ are meeting in secret, to find a way to boost conviction rates and prevent justice from being done in our courts.

Even more terrifying, if their actions are successful, then tens of thousands of innocent parents, grandparents and caregivers could spend the rest of their lives in prison for a crime that they did not commit.

Dr. Squier concluded her courageous interview by saying that she was bowled over by the amount of wonderful support that she had received both from her colleagues and the parents who had written letters to support her.  However, she stated that:

I am obviously deeply saddened that I was found to have misled the courts, mostly based on my use of scientific literature and I am sorry that I cannot give evidence in courts, although I am not sure that I actually would again because of what I have been through; it was a pretty harrowing experience.

But what is so sad is that others won’t do it either, so other people who are very good, excellent specialists in their fields, will not go to court and stand up to the mainstream view because they are afraid that what happened to me may happen to them as well. So we are left with this terrible situation in our courts, where there is nobody willing to stand up and challenge the shaken baby hypothesis in the courts.

In her work as a pediatric neuropathologist, Dr. Squier has been responsible for saving the lives of thousands of infants worldwide and she has helped many parents get the justice that they deserved. However, thanks to the actions of others, the UK has lost an absolutely excellent defence expert and terrified others from ever challenging mainstream views.

Health Impact News would like to extend their thanks to this brave professional who was unafraid of speaking the truth in her bid to get justice.

We would also like to thank Richie Allen for his work.

See, Waney Squier “The Establishment Nearly Destroyed Me For Questioning Shaken Baby Syndrome!, on The Richie Allen Show: