Mary Case

"Star" witness for the Prosecution gives her opinion of judges and juries ability to understand medical evidence.
(WAV file format)

Q. " well, what is the relationship of the old subdural hematoma to the present condition …?"

A. "It's an indicator of prior injury, in my opinion prior shaken baby syndrome. It does not mean that the forces the second time around are any the less to cause all of these new injuries. You still have to have the same forces. So it doesn't have a significance that way. Its significance is just this is not the first time the similar things have happened. "

And later…

" There are such things as rebleed. We see--if you see them, you tend to see them in elderly. But if you see them in children, which is pretty rare--and I have seen a case or 2--often there with neurosurgical things being done on a child for another reason, and little bit of bleeding happened. And then a couple weeks later, the blood vessels are real fragile that are trying to heal this process, this old bleed, and a trivial trauma, a minor trauma can come along and break those, the same way you can have a scab and in kind of a minor trauma to that scab, and it rebleeds a little. And in that case, then, you get a slow process of some extra blood accumulation, either within the original blood clot or next to that blood clot.

"Usually we don't see any clinical signs of all, but if we did, they're slow signs. Somebody's increasing irritability or something else like that. It doesn't really lead to any catastrophic problems at all. There's nothing sudden. There's nothing massive. There's nothing--there's really not a whole lot to it. But it's something which we might want to get CTs and see if the neurosurgeons would want to go in and drain some blood out or something." Page 393 and 394.

Trial Testimony of Randall Alexander:

Georgia v. Braddy

Questioned by Defense Attorney Michael Moore

"If you get a subdural in about 10 to 14 days, new blood vessels are forming. The body is trying to absorb the back of the clot you have inside, and new blood vessels are forming. And then the, it doesn't really happen spontaneously, but a minor trauma can come along, a bump or something, and because these are somewhat delicate, the blood vessels, it's possible, you wouldn't usually see it, but it's possible to get some bleeding either within that same blood clot or it can extend just a little bit away from the blood clot itself." (Pg 31, LL 7-15).