On the witness stand in March 2000, Dr. Janet Squires was unequivocal: The injuries suffered by the 13-month-old girl were “absolutely classic” signs of shaken baby syndrome. Commonly referred to by its acronym, SBS is a diagnosis based on the belief that a certain combination of injuries found in a baby or toddler could only be caused by violent shaking.

“When a baby is shaken their head flops back and forth like this,” she testified, demonstrating the violent force needed to cause injury. “And the rotational forces through the brain literally sort of shear the tissues of the brain.”

Coming from the then-director of pediatrics at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Squires’s testimony would be crucial to the conviction of Andrew Wayne Roark, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for violently shaking his girlfriend’s daughter, causing permanent brain damage.

Roark insisted he was innocent. Three years earlier, in July 1997, Roark was babysitting the child, referred to in court documents as B.D., while her mother was at work. He took B.D. to the doctor for a regular check-up, then fed her ravioli for lunch before giving her a bath. According to Roark, the infant slipped in the tub, hitting the back of her head, but she seemed fine and Roark put her down for a nap. When he went to check on her, however, he found her face down next to the bed. She was limp, pale, and barely breathing. Roark called 911. At Children’s Medical Center, Squires determined that B.D. had been violently shaken. Roark was arrested that night and charged with injuring her.

A few years later, Squires would play a key role in securing a guilty verdict against another man, Robert Roberson, whom she said had violently shaken his 2-year-old daughter to death. “You really have to shake them really hard back and forth and then you typically slam them against something,” she testified at Roberson’s trial. “It’s an out of control, angry, violent adult.” Roberson, who maintained his innocence, was sentenced to death. (Squires did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

In the years after both men were sent to prison, the symptoms once believed to be indicative of SBS were called into question. For years, doctors like Squires had claimed that a triad of symptoms — subdural hematoma, brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhage — could only be explained by violent shaking. But subsequent research demonstrated that it is physically impossible for a human to cause such injuries by shaking alone and that each of the symptoms could be the result of myriad medical causes. To date, 34 people convicted based on SBS have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

In 2013, Texas enacted a first-of-its-kind law, allowing people prosecuted on the basis of junk science to challenge their convictions. Roark successfully argued to his trial court that SBS had been discredited and that he was entitled to a new trial. Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed that key medical experts in Roark’s case would not testify the same way if the trial were to take place today: “We find that if the newly evolved........

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