Excerpt from the Mississippi Today Article on Tasha:
“Our perspective on this case has always been that a mistake was made,” said West Virginia Innocence Project Director Valena Beety, who took on Shelby’s case in 2011 while working at the Mississippi Innocence Project.
Though medical examiner LeRoy Riddick originally ruled the child’s death as a homicide, he reviewed medical records and re-examined his own files in 2015, learning that Bryan had a seizure disorder. Had Riddick known of the seizures during the autopsy and trial, he would have approached the case differently, he stated in an affidavit. Riddick officially revised Bryan’s death certificate, recording the manner of death as an accident.
The attorney general’s office, which is defending the conviction for the state, maintains that Bryan died of blunt force trauma, and that prosecutors did not entirely rely on a shaken baby syndrome diagnosis during the trial, according to a brief filed with the appeals court. The state also argues that the evidence Shelby is presenting on appeal — including Riddick’s changed opinion — is not new. A spokesperson for the agency declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
“There is no evidence that Bryan fell off the bed from a standing position, without protecting his head in any way…There was no evidence that Bryan suffered from a seizure disorder,” the state wrote in its brief.
Beety questions how her client, standing under 5 feet tall, could have been physically able to shake Bryan — a 3-foot-tall toddler weighing 30 pounds — with that much force. Shelby had given birth to her daughter by emergency cesarean section less than two weeks prior to Bryan’s death, and her doctor had ordered her to bed rest, Beety added.
