Shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma struggles to find a solid scientific foundation, largely because of a circularity confound, the same diagnostic features under study serve as the basis for categorising cases for research purposes. In an attempt to overcome this circularity, researchers have turned to confessions as a sorting criterion in the research, under the belief that confessions are independent of the diagnostic features and hence not subject to circularity. However, none of the research examines the nature and reliability of the confessions, or the interrogations that produce them; they simply accept the confessions as true, reliable, and independent. Research on interrogations and false confessions, however, along with extensive and wholly consistent anecdotal evidence, strongly suggest that SBS/AHT confessions are largely if not entirely produced by interrogator reliance on the diagnostic findings. That reliance undermines both the independence of the confessions, and hence their ability to break free from circularity, and the reliability of these confessions as a group. On the current state of knowledge, confessions cannot be relied upon to substitute for science to support the SBS/AHT hypothesis.

As humans, our perceptions and judgements are naturally coloured by our beliefs, experiences, and desires. Consequently, two individuals with different mindsets or working in different contexts may interpret the same information in markedly different ways (i.e., cognitive bias), especially when that information is ambiguous. In forensic and medico-legal settings, cognitive bias can influence expert decision-making in ways that produce costly miscarriages of justice. In this chapter, we first review the sources of cognitive bias, including irrelevant contextual information, base rate expectations, stress, and allegiance. Then, we review research showing that cognitive bias can affect medical diagnoses of living individuals as well as post-mortem manner-of-death judgments, and we discuss the reactions to these findings. Lastly, we describe best practices for mitigating the impact of cognitive bias and maximising the value of medico-legal judgments.

New scientific developments, addressed throughout this book, which challenge the SBS hypothesis present challenges for courts that relied upon the outdated and unchallenged hypothesis to convict caregivers of child abuse. The law is notoriously slow to respond to scientific advances, and its strong fealty to finality makes reopening old convictions, even those that are dependent on flawed science, procedurally difficult. This chapter addresses the challenges posed for courts by shifting SBS science and analyses the bases, and slowly developing movement to reopen old SBS convictions based upon outdated and flawed science.

In this chapter we explore Vietnamese socialist legality by asking to what extent law is used instrumentally or has been transformed to produce a normative conception of justice reflecting Western liberal rule-of-law principles. Drawing on He and Warren, we characterize Vietnam as a deliberative authoritarian state. At the outset we note the adoption of socialist legality, and other relevant socialist principles and practices, and set out how these have been changed in the last thirty years. Subsequently, we explore whether party instrumentalism has ceded its authority to law and legal institutions through an examination of constitutional debate and lawyer advocacy targeting the criminal justice system, particularly wrongful conviction. While socialist legality and its successor, the socialist law-based state, have and continue to be reshaped and challenged, legal instrumentalism remains the potent force constraining rights-based liberal notions of legality in Vietnam.

The Williams’ gang slaves illustrate the long history of wrongful convictions of defendants of color in US courtrooms as well as the compatibility of slavery with incarceration. Still, it was not until the demise of slavery as an institution that black and brown people became a majority of those incarcerated. That trend continues to the present. The latest innovation in the long history of racism and the carceral state is the emergence of private, for–profit prisons and the prison–industrial complex. Much like the domestic slave trade of another time, captives of color are redistributed to locations where their labor is in highest demand for the profits of others. But already by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the historical memory of the internal slave trade was growing dim, the rich history of slavery in the very capital of the United States forgotten.