Russell Maze will remain in prison, where he has spent the past 25 years after a jury convicted him of abusing and ultimately killing his infant son, Alex. On Thursday, Judge Steve Dozier issued an order denying the request to reopen his petition for post-conviction relief.
The decision came a month after a two-day hearing in which the Tennessee Innocence Project and the Davidson County District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit — which had conducted an exhaustive study of the case — argued that Maze was not guilty of murder. Maze’s conviction rested on a diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome, and numerous medical experts testified that they believed this was incorrect, and that new scientific evidence both ruled out abuse and offered any number of possible alternative medical explanations for baby Alex’s death. A detective testified that a Vanderbilt doctor’s early diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome shaped their investigation to the point of excluding other possibilities.
On the first day of that hearing, Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk gave a short statement, saying that based on “clear and convincing evidence,” it was his “duty to ask the Court to vacate and dismiss the case.”
Judge Dozier disagreed with that characterization.
“The Court is unconvinced the ‘new scientific evidence’ presents substantially more than different opinions on extant proof,” Judge Dozier wrote in his decision. “The Court cannot conclude that Petitioner has established by clear and convincing evidence that ‘no jury would have convicted him in light of the new evidence’ presented at this post-conviction hearing.”
Russell’s wife and Alex’s mother, Kaye Maze, was also seeking to have her conviction vacated. Her petition was also dismissed.
Shortly after the decision was handed down, Funk told the Banner, “I stand by the investigation and conclusions of the Conviction Review Unit.”
After six exonerations, this marks the first time the CRU has been unsuccessful in getting a conviction vacated. The unit receives hundreds of applications but has only taken a select few to court.
Background
On May 3, 1998, Alex Maze was rushed to Vanderbilt University Medical Center after his father, Russell, found him unresponsive and not breathing. Alex had been born premature, already had a host of health problems, and was less than two months old at the time. Not long after he arrived at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, child abuse specialist Dr. Suzanne Starling examined him. His injuries included bruising on his face and abdomen, bleeding around the brain and behind both eyes, severe cerebral swelling, and evidence of restricted blood flow in the brain consistent with stroke.
“This constellation of injuries is seen in abusive head trauma,” Dr. Starling noted. She then told detectives that the only possible cause of Alex’s injuries was violent shaking, and they questioned Russell and Kaye Maze accordingly. Alex was placed in foster care, and his parents were both arrested. Kaye pleaded guilty to reckless aggravated assault in the hopes that being out of prison would enable her to regain custody of Alex.
At trial, Dr. Starling testified that “there’s really nothing else that causes all three layers in the entire back of the retina to be obscured by all this blood.” Russell’s attorneys did not call a qualified medical expert to refute the Shaken Baby Syndrome diagnosis, and he was convicted of murder.
A new trial was ordered because the jury had not been properly instructed to consider lesser charges. Then Alex died, and the charge was upgraded to murder. A second jury found Russell guilty in 2001. He lost an appeal in 2006, then filed for post-conviction relief in 2007 on the basis of ineffective counsel but was denied.
In their analysis of the case, the Conviction Review Unit noted that Dr. Starling had not reviewed Alex’s pediatric records, nor had she looked at his mother’s medical history, which included a difficult pregnancy that ended with an induced premature delivery. The five medical experts the CRU consulted with for their lengthy report all agreed that baby Alex did not die of abuse. Some of those experts, including Knox County chief medical examiner Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, and pathologist and blood disease expert Dr. Michael Laposata, subsequently testified at the March hearing.
Dozier’s conclusions
Judge Dozier’s decision gave substantial weight to the two preceding trials, both of which found Russell Maze guilty. “Subjectively,” he wrote, “opinions have been offered for more than two decades on the same facts.”
Baby Alex’s injuries “have been chronicled at length,” Dozier wrote, and “while the present witnesses have added their opinions to the lengthy evidentiary history, this additional information is not considered as standalone proof.”
The judge also characterized the witness testimony at the hearing “as new ammunition in a ‘battle of the experts.’ ” And he noted that this “battle” was not waged in the normal way.
“All parties acknowledged the unconventional nature of the proceedings,” Judge Dozier wrote — calling attention to the fact that the hearing did not conform to a traditional adversarial format. With the Tennessee Innocence Project and the Conviction Review Unit both on the side of vacating the conviction, there was no opposing counsel to cross-examine the medical experts. Instead, Dozier found himself playing the part of “fact-finder,” rather than “strictly a dispassionate arbiter” of two opposing sides.
To that end, throughout the hearing, Dozier frequently interjected and questioned the witnesses, who he noted, “disagreed with each other,” “definitively asserted different etiologies” and “disagreed with unspecified medical ‘opponents.’ ” While Dozier allowed that all of the experts “agreed they did not believe the injuries were trauma inflicted,” he “diminishes the value of the newly presented evidence where fresh opinions were offered but not probed” by cross-examination.
As a matter of “housekeeping,” Judge Dozier dismissed the testimony of a former MNPD detective who worked on the case. “The Court observes that [she] does not qualify as an expert explaining new scientific evidence,” Dozier wrote, “and the Court declines to put any weight or value on her testimony.”
The decision did not make reference to a request for leave to file an amicus brief submitted by former assistant district attorneys Brian Holmgren and Katrin Miller, who prosecuted the Maze case.
The Mazes have 30 days to appeal Judge Dozier’s decision. Attorneys for Kaye Maze have already filed a notice of appeal with the court.