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The post Marshall Ramsey: Inspiration appeared first on Mississippi Today.

PEARL — You could call Mississippi State’s 10-9 baseball victory over Southern Mississippi many things. “Crisp” is not one.

Let’s put it this way: State pitchers walked 11 batters and hit another. State fielders committed three errors, leading to three unearned runs. All that – and State still won.

The Bulldogs, down 9-6, plated four runs in the bottom of the eighth inning to beat their down-state rivals before an announced crowd of 6,542 at Trustmark Park.

State had plenty of help from the Golden Eagles, who walked eight batters and hit five more. Combined, that’s 19 walks and six hit batters. Little wonder the game lasted nearly three and a half hours. Casey Stengel, the Baseball Hall of Fame manager, once said of his 1962 New York Mets, the worst team in Major League history: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

The much more pertinent question on a wonderfully balmy February Tuesday night: “Can’t anybody here throw a strike?”

Afterward, back-slapping, high-fiving State players didn’t seem to mind the circumstances. They were pleased with the victory, their third straight, and coach Chris Lemonis perhaps told us why in his opening statement of the postgame press conference.

“You’ve got a really good opponent over there, and it’s rivalry,” Lemonis said. “People say there’s no rivalry in baseball, but there is. We’ve got really good baseball teams in our state and that’s a well-coached team over there. This was exciting.”

Some perspective: State, which won a National Championship in 2021, lost 30 of 56 games last year. The Bulldogs lost three of their first six games this season, but have now won three straight against strong competition. This was no time to be choosy.

“We’re not perfect, but we’re competing,” is the way Lemonis put it. “This gives us some momentum.”

Two portal transfers continue to give the Bulldogs much reason for hope of a bounce-back season. Second baseman Amani Larry, who played last year at New Orleans, slugged a two-run home run and scored three times himself. Samford transfer Colton Ledbetter contributed a triple, two runs scored and three runs knocked in. Granted, it’s a small sample size just six games in, but Ledbetter leads the team with a .400 batting average, three home runs and 19 RBI, while Larry has contributed two homers, 13 RBI and is hitting a robust .371. Said Lemonis: “Those two guys are special.”

Those two guys knocked in five runs and scored five in a one-run victory. Besides special, they were absolutely essential.

Nationally ranked Southern Miss, which got off to an impressive 4-0 start, has now lost three of its last four. Walks are a huge reason. Southern Miss led the nation in strikeouts/walks ratio last year and walked fewer than three batters per nine innings. This season, Eagle pitchers have walked 40 batters in just 73 innings. Big difference.

The Eagles lost five pitchers who could have returned this season in the 2022 Major League draft. Another, Chandler Best, suffered an injury that required Tommy John surgery. Of the five pitchers USM sent to the mound Tuesday night, three were freshmen. Youngsters such as Nick Monistere and J.B. Middleton throw in the mid-90s and have a world of potential. But there’s a learning curve at work here.

Say this for both State and USM. If facing really good competition makes you better, these two teams should improve quickly. State goes to Frisco, Texas, this weekend to face Ohio State, Oklahoma and Cal in the Frisco College Baseball Classic. Southern Miss will host always strong Dallas Baptist for a three-game set. DBU, which swept the Golden Eagles last season, are 7-1, having lost only to No. 10 TCU. Yes, and after that series, the Golden Eagles go to defending national champ Ole Miss for a mid-week game.

Both the Bulldogs and Eagles better buckle up. Even more importantly, they need to throw strikes.

The post Amid 19 walks and 6 hit batsmen, State claims 10-9 win over USM appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippians would be prevented from placing an initiative on the ballot to ease or erase the state’s strict anti-abortion laws under the legislation passed late Tuesday by the House Constitution Committee.

Senate Joint Resolution 533, as amended by the House Constitution Committee Tuesday, would not allow citizens to gather enough signatures to place an issue on the ballot regarding abortion.

House Constitution Chair Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, said the decision to prevent addressing abortion via voter initiative came up through consultation with other House members.

“It was decided it would be the House position,” Shanks said. He would not say which legislators were involved in the discussions, but House Speaker Philip Gunn has been a leading anti-abortion advocate during his tenure in the Legislature.

“Regardless of what the issue is, I think people should have the right to have it considered through the initiative process,” said Rep. Bryant Clark, D-Pickens. “It is almost like a dictatorship telling the people they have the right to speak except on this issue or that issue.

READ MORE: Restoring Mississippi ballot initiative process survives legislative deadline

“Regardless of what the issue is, I think the people should have the right to vote.’

Legislation is being considered this session to restore the initiative process that was deemed unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court in a 2021 ruling.

Besides fixing the concerns that led to the Supreme Court declaring it unconstitutional, the proposal changes the old initiative process by allowing voters to bypass the Legislature to add or amend general law instead of changing the Constitution.

READ MORE: Is ballot initiative a ‘take your picture off the wall’ issue for lawmakers?

Both the House and Senate proposals increase the number signatures of registered voters needed to place an issue on the ballot from about 106,000 under the old system to about 240,000.

Disagreement over the number of signatures needed to place an issue on the ballot resulted in efforts to revive the initiative process dying during the 2022 session. While the bill Shanks passed has the same signatory requirements as the Senate bill, Shanks said he still supports the lower threshold, but feared the Senate might kill the proposal at the lower signature requirement. He said he still hopes to get a lower threshold during negotiations on the issue with Senate leaders later in the session.

“We will have to work that (required number of signatures) out in conference,” Shanks said. Conference committees are formed to hammer out differences between the House and Senate versions of legislation.

The issue banning abortion initiatives had not been publicly discussed this session until Tuesday’s Constitution Committee meeting.  But after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this past summer there is no national right to an abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade, laws banning most abortions in the state went into effect.

Since then, the issue of abortion has been on the ballot in six states. In each of those elections, the citizens voted in favor of maintaining or expanding abortion rights.

Gunn and other politicians always have maintained Mississippi is an ardent anti-abortion state. But in 2011, Mississippi voters overwhelmingly rejected a so-called personhood amendment that would have defined life as beginning at conception.

The Supreme Court ruled Mississippi’s initiative invalid in 2021 because it required signatures of registered voters to be gathered equally from five congressional districts as they existed in 1990. In 2000, the state lost a congressional district based on the results of the U.S. Census. The new proposal just requires the signatures to be gathered equally from the congressional districts regardless of how many there are.

The post House bill would revive ballot initiative but prevent voters using it for abortion rights appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law Tuesday a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans minors in Mississippi, calling it part of “a war on objective scientific truth” and “basic biology.” 

Effective immediately, Mississippi’s estimated 2,400 trans children will no longer be able to receive gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormone therapy from in-state providers. The legal risk for trans children and their families seeking care out of state is unclear. 

House Bill 1125, called the “Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures (REAP) Act, would strip doctors who provide this care of their medical license and tort claim protections. Anyone who aids and abets this care for trans children could be liable for civil damages for up to 30 years after a child receives gender-affirming care. Insurers and Medicaid would be prohibited from reimbursing families for this care. 

Reeves cast the law as a way to protect Mississippi’s children but during a press conference would not say if he had spoken with a single child in Mississippi who had been harmed by gender-affirming care. 

“I’m not going to reveal private conversations that I’ve had, but I will tell you that I don’t have to,” he said. “I think it’s just intuitive to them that it’s happening here, and if you listen to some of these children that allow themselves to go through this and talk to them five years later, talk to them 10 years later, what you’re going to find is, it has been harmful to them in ways.” 

Gender-affirming care is evidence-based and research has shown it significantly reduces suicidality in trans youth who receive it. 

Advocates and providers like Stacie Pace, a nurse practitioner who owns the only clinic in the state that provided gender-affirming care to trans kids this year, have warned that HB 1125’s passage will harm the mental health of trans youth in Mississippi. 

“The number one thing, if this bill goes into effect? A lot of dead kids,” Pace told Mississippi Today earlier this month. “This law goes into effect, it is, in my opinion, the direct cause of youth suicide.” 

HB 1125 is part of a wave of anti-trans legislation this year in Mississippi and across the country. It was one of more than 30 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced by lawmakers this session. Its signing makes Mississippi the third state to ban gender-affirming care for minors this year after Utah and South Dakota. 

Similar legislation passed in Arkansas and Alabama has been stayed by the courts. It’s unclear if there will be a legal challenge to HB 1125 in Mississippi. 

“To trans youth in Mississippi, we love you, I love you, you have support,” said Jensen Luke Matar, a trans activist who joined a small protest on the steps of the Walter Sillers Building. “Don’t give up. Be strong. Be exactly who you are, because you are beautiful and perfect.” 

Reeves was joined at the press conference by Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh, who gave a short speech, as well as several Republican activists and representatives from the Alliance Defending Freedom and Madison County Moms for Liberty. 

Walsh said he was encouraged to see Mississippi join the national movement that he has helped build against “gender ideology madness.” He said the ban on gender-affirming care is similar to other accesses that American society denies children, like alcohol, credit card accounts and mortgages.  

“The kids cannot choose any of this,” he said. “They cannot consent to it. They can’t understand what they’re doing, and what the long-term effects or even short term effects are gonna be.” 

Reeves echoed Walsh later in the press conference about the importance of age restrictions.

“I’m highly against 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds getting these types of surgeries, but the Libertarian in me kind of says if that’s what you want to do to your body, okay, but not to children,” he said. 

The ban on puberty blockers for trans children, Reeves said, will likely apply even in cases in which a trans child needs medication for a non-gender-dysphoria related condition like precocious puberty. Reeves did not speak in detail when asked by a reporter if it will now be more risky for doctors to prescribe puberty blockers to any Mississippi child simply because they might be trans. 

Also in attendance were the co-authors of the bill, Rep. Gene Newman, R-Pearl, Rep. Nick Bain, R-Corinth, and House Speaker Philip Gunn. Sen. Joey Fillingane, who handled the bill’s passage in the Senate, joined the press conference in time to take a photo with Reeves and other lawmakers. 

READ MORE: Mississippi lawmaker cited trans teen surgeries that never actually happened

The post Reeves signs bill banning gender-affirming care for trans minors appeared first on Mississippi Today.

We value the thoughts and opinions Mississippi Today readers have on news and other current events, which is why we’ve committed to listening and responding to topics that matter to readers. We want to know what you are curious about so we can get you the answers you need.

We recently published an investigative series into the state’s only child abuse pediatrician that shows how he’s sometimes blurred the line between medicine and law enforcement and how his decisions can tear families apart. This month, we ask you:

The post Ask us about child abuse pediatrics in Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Athena Lindsey, a teacher and policy fellow with Teach Plus Mississippi, repeatedly heard the same concern when surveying teachers in the lead-up to the historic 2022 teacher pay raise: “Every time you see a pay increase, the insurance premiums always go up, so you never really get to feel the actual pay raise.”

Insurance premiums for public employees rose 6% on Jan. 1 of this year, the fifth consecutive year with an increase. The report of the Teach Plus Mississippi survey showed lower insurance premiums as the third highest policy priority for teachers, behind two related to pay increases. 

“A lot of them in the survey said that they had second jobs just for that reason, because the insurance plans were ridiculous,” said Lindsey.

The average teacher salary in Mississippi is $53,000, which drops to $40,990 after taxes and retirement contributions, according to calculations by Mississippi First. Premiums for individuals on the plan make up 1% of their take home pay, but 25% for employees with their family on the state insurance.  After premiums, take home pay for employees with their family on the plan drops to $30,910. 

Five teachers interviewed by Mississippi Today expressed growing frustration with the rising costs and falling benefit quality. State officials say these changes were made to counter rising health insurance costs that are causing financial deficits, with the reserves of the state plan dropping $119 million over the past nine years. Legislators say they are looking to address this problem next session. 

The state health plan served nearly 194,000 state employees and their dependents in 2021, the most recent year for which there is data. Most people opt for the “Select” plan with more benefits, but the number of people on that plan has been slowly falling since 2016. 

Premium costs have remained largely unchanged for individuals on the single-employee plan, but people whose families also receive insurance through the state plan have seen more significant increases. 

Per state law, the state contributes 100% of the premium cost for basic coverage for employees. Employees pay between $20-46 monthly for individual coverage if they opt for the plan with more benefits. The state does not contribute to premium costs for children and spouses, making family coverage significantly more expensive. Prices range between $124 and $840 a month, and vary based on the number of dependents and quality of coverage. 

Mississippi is one of two states in the Southeast that doesn’t pay any extra towards premiums for family coverage, according to figures compiled by the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration that were presented at a 2021 hearing. Rep. Kent McCarty, R-Hattiesburg, introduced a bill this session for the state to pay 50% of dependent premiums, but it died in committee. 

“A lot of jobs are offering coverage for dependents already, and a lot of times teachers leave to take those jobs, so we thought this could be a way to make the teaching profession more competitive with others and keep teachers in the classroom,” he said. 

A recent report published by Mississippi First studied why teachers are leaving the classroom. In it’s survey, 42% said they could not afford deductibles, premiums, or other health care costs not covered by insurance, and financial insecurity was closely linked with risk of leaving the classroom. 

“Any improvement in this area, whether that is reducing cost for teachers or improving the quality of the plan, is all going to necessitate more resources from the state,” said Toren Ballard, K-12 policy director for Mississippi First. 

This gap between individual and family premiums is common in the teaching profession. According to a 2020 report published by the Southern Regional Education Board, teachers pay an average of $200 less in monthly premiums for single plans than private sector employees, but an average of $257 more in premiums for family plans.  

Megan Boren, project manager with the board, said her study of teacher compensation found most states in the Southeast have work to do because of the sizable cost gap between single and family coverage. Boren said she would not single out Mississippi as struggling in this area, but pointed to Alabama, Virginia, and Florida as exemplar states that have successfully kept costs down for employees. 

“A lot of this is just tied to how health insurance is set up, and there’s not a lot of wiggle room or great strategies that an employer, government or otherwise, can take on these pieces,” Boren said. “Our hands are quite tied because of the way health insurance is structured in this country and some of the general policies around that.” 

A bill moving through the Legislature this session would study the state health insurance system and make recommendations for legislation to be proposed in 2024. The task force, proposed by Senate Education Committee Chairman Dennis DeBar, R-Leaksville, would focus on the financial solvency of the plan, rate increases, benefits and comparisons to other Southeastern states. 

“I just want to see a deep dive into why expenses keep going up and up,” DeBar said. “I don’t want insurance (costs) to be a deterrent to getting insurance and doing yearly check-ups, because on the back end, medical conditions may be worse off if people don’t treat them.”

Some teachers share his concern that current rates are discouraging employees from seeking preventive care. 

“I get that if you have a catastrophic year, it’s there for you, but this should be so much more in a state that is so unhealthy,” said Jason Reid, a teacher in the DeSoto County School District. 

Reid, a two-time cancer patient, has hit his out-of-pocket maximum with both diagnoses and experienced the safety net that the plan can provide, but said that because of rising costs, most of his colleagues feel like they never see a benefit. Reid added the insurance plan usually isn’t stopping people from becoming teachers, but that it is driving them away. 

Advocates say a lack of investment from the state is also driving away other state employees. Brenda Scott, the president of the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees, said teachers got a “decent” raise last year, but that for other state workers, raises are “very rare.” 

Scott said she would like to see raises for state employees to make it easier for them to afford premium increases when they come along, or for the state to expand Medicaid to give employees more coverage options.

READ MORE: Q&A: What is Medicaid expansion, really?

“They’re not expanding Medicaid, which is meant to cover the working poor,” she said. “There’s a lot of state employees who would fit into that category.” 

Adding to frustration with the insurance premium increase are other changes to the plan.

Multiple teachers expressed frustration with the declining quality of prescription drug coverage since the switch from Prime Therapeutics to CVS Caremark, a change that state officials said was made to save money on rising healthcare costs. 

Renee Webber-Butler, a teacher in the Perry County School District, was informed after the switch that the ADHD medicine her 16-year-old son takes would no longer be covered. He had tried multiple medications and had negative side effects with some before finding success with Vyvanse, the medicine that was no longer being covered. 

“I explained to him what was going on, and he said, ‘Mom, I’m not going to have to take that medicine where I'm mean and angry am I?’” Webber-Butler said. “How do you look at your kid and say, ‘Well, son, I’m sorry but … on educator salaries, we can’t (pay out of pocket.)’”

She said they found another medicine for him that will be covered, but called it “ridiculous” that her son has been on three different medicines in six months. 

Cindy Bradshaw, the administrator of the state health insurance plan, said the switch to CVS Caremark, as well as the deductible and premium increases in recent years, are adjustments to balance the finances of the health insurance plan. The plan has been spending more on care than premiums could cover every year since 2016, which has significantly decreased the surplus reserves of the plan. The surplus was $247 million in 2012 and had dwindled to $64 million by the end of 2021, according to the plan’s actuarial report for 2021. 

During the 2022 legislative session, the state health insurance plan was given $60 million in American Rescue Plan funds, and a bill has passed out of committee to give the plan another $30 million in federal pandemic relief funds this session. 

When discussing the incremental actions of the state board that manages the health insurance plan, Bradshaw said, “We’re trying to softly land a plane instead of having a big crash.”

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The post State insurance premium hike blunts teacher pay raise appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Senate Education Committee Chairman Dennis DeBar, R-Leaksville, announced in a committee meeting Thursday that he wants to fully fund public schools this session through “minor” changes to the state’s funding formula.

The funding formula used to allocate money to public schools, otherwise known as the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), was established by the Legislature in 1997 and has been consistently underfunded every year since 2008. MAEP funding provides the state’s share of funding for the basic operations of local school districts, ranging from teacher salaries to textbooks to utilities.

The Tuesday announcement from DeBar came as a surprise to some political observers since MAEP has been fully funded just twice since it was fully enacted in 2003. And it has been the subject of intense public, legal and legislative debate about the actual amount of money public schools need.

According to the Parents’ Campaign, an education advocacy group, MAEP was underfunded by $273 million for the 2022-23 school year and by $3.3 billion since 2008. But still, it is generally the largest state expenditure each year. In the 2022 session, the Legislature appropriated $2.1 billion for MAEP.

DeBar made the comment during the Senate Education Committee’s discussion of House Bill 1369, which would have adjusted the method of calculating the number of students in a school district for the purposes of school funding. The bill would switch to counting based on the number of students enrolled in the district instead of measuring student attendance.

The bill also contains other sections of the law that established the MAEP program, creating the possibility of modification to other aspects of the law before the session ends. The specific changes to the funding formula have not yet been introduced and most likely will not be finalized until the end of the session, when House and Senate leaders meet in conference committees to negotiate differences.

“We’re bringing forth these code sections with the goal in mind to make some minor technical changes to the MAEP formula itself,” DeBar said. “The goal is to fully fund MAEP this year, and this is our vehicle to make it happen.”

The MAEP has consistently been the subject of fierce legislative debate. In the 2010s, both then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who is now governor, and House Speaker Philip Gunn proposed scrapping MAEP for a new formula. They argued MAEP was too expensive to fully fund. Others argued that the equity funding features of MAEP have helped less affluent districts by providing additional state funds for them, and that the goal should be to amend the formula and fully fund it. The proposal to scrap MAEP passed the House, but was surprisingly defeated in the Senate. It marks a rare instance where a proposal endorsed by both presiding officers was defeated.

Several Mississippi advocacy groups tried in 2015 to let voters take matters into their own hands through the ballot initiative process, proposing a vote on forcing lawmakers to fully fund MAEP each year. But before voters were given a chance to decide at the ballot boxes, lawmakers for the first time introduced an alternative initiative to go on the same ballot. The original initiative failed at the polls after much politicking and contentious public debate.

Efforts to fully fund the formula this legislative session come as the state is experiencing record revenue growth with a surplus heading into the 2023 session of nearly $4 billion, thanks in part to the economy being spurred by millions in federal COVID-19 relief funds.

Education advocates have said they are pleased by the move to fully fund MAEP, but are waiting to see what the changes to the funding formula are.

“We have trusted (Sen. DeBar) and he has proven himself to be trustworthy,” said Nancy Loome, executive director of the Parents’ Campaign. “Our expectation is that it’s not going to be anything that would be damaging to public schools, but we’re going to wait and see.”

The post Senate leader wants to fully fund public education for just the third time since 2003 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

After months of contention, extended postpartum health coverage coverage for Mississippi moms is one step closer to becoming law. 

The House Medicaid Committee, in its first meeting this legislative session, voted Tuesday to advance legislation that would extend postpartum Medicaid benefits from two months to a year. 

“This bill demonstrates that we as policymakers also recognize that our commitment to life cannot end once a baby takes his or her first breath,” said Rep. Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg.

READ MORE: FAQ: What is postpartum Medicaid extension, exactly?

Health professionals and medical organizations have long recommended the policy change. Citing data that shows Mississippi’s already-dismal mortality rate is getting worse, they say health problems continue for people who give birth for far longer than two months postpartum. The legislation has the potential to affect thousands — two-thirds of babies born in Mississippi are born to people on Medicaid. 

Dr. Dan Edney, state health officer, told Mississippi Today the passage of this legislation is “absolutely necessary” to improve health outcomes in Mississippi. 

“This is low hanging fruit for us … because we have way too many of our moms dying related to pregnancy,” Edney said. “It’s one of the worst health disparities that we have.”

“I’m so proud to see where we’re moving with postpartum. Everybody that’s in this wheelhouse agrees — there are no dissenters.”

Until now, House leadership has made the final steps toward the legislation becoming law impossible – despite the fact that most representatives support the legislation, according to a survey conducted by Mississippi Today. 

Over the past two years, the Senate has passed multiple measures to extend postpartum coverage in Mississippi. House Speaker Philip Gunn blocked the legislation from coming to a vote last year in the House and appeared poised to do so again this year.

But Gov. Tate Reeves, who has adamantly opposed the legislation, reversed course this weekend and urged state politicians to pass it. 

Following his announcement, Division of Medicaid Executive Director Drew Snyder, whose department for months has refused to take a stance on postpartum coverage extension, wrote a letter on Feb. 27 to House Speaker Philip Gunn voicing his support for the legislation’s passage. The Division of Medicaid is housed under the governor’s office.

Gunn subsequently said that he would not block the legislation from coming to the House floor, as he did during the 2022 legislative session, though he appeared to walk the statement back slightly in an interview with SuperTalk on Feb. 28.

“I noticed on your website here you say that Speaker Gunn is going to let the people vote,” Gunn said. “Well, we’ve not decided to do that yet. We decided to move the bill out of the committee and keep it alive.”

In his letter, Snyder estimated the policy change would cost the state $7.1 million, according to House Medicaid Committee Chair Joey Hood, R-Ackerman. The state currently has $3.9 billion in surplus funds. 

Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, said during the meeting that he was disappointed that it took the leadership of the state feeling like their backs were “against the wall” for this legislation to pass the committee. 

“It is a shame that we have to wait for the political winds to turn or somebody that feels like they’re not going to be able to be reelected to do something like this,” he said. “This is a moment that we should be celebrating the lives of women who actually bring life. But yet, it is a political ploy in this process.”

About the allegation of political theater, Hood had “no comment” in an interview with reporters.  

As the state expects thousands more births following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last summer to overturn abortion rights, McGee said this measure is necessary to protect the lives of Mississippians and their babies — by providing longer postnatal care, the risk of preterm birth lowers. Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate, preterm birth rate and low birthweight rate in the country. 

“Healthy moms equal healthy babies, and if we care about babies, we must show that we care for and value their mothers,” she said. 

Despite the legislation’s passage in the house committee, now its future is up to Hood — he decides when and if it makes it onto the House floor. 

Following the meeting, Hood said there was “no timetable” regarding when the legislation might make it to the House.

“It’s on the calendar. We’re just going to continue to work it through the process,” he said, citing a line he’s repeated to the media in recent weeks. 

“You know how the legislative process is,” he said. “We still have a long way to go.”

If the legislation passes, Mississippi will join 29 other states that have extended postpartum Medicaid coverage to one year.

READ MORE: ‘Mississippi moms can’t wait’: Doctors urge legislators to extend postpartum coverage

The post House Medicaid Committee passes postpartum coverage extension appeared first on Mississippi Today.

This story is the first part in Mississippi Today’s “Shaky Science, Fractured Families” investigation about the state’s only child abuse pediatrician crossing the line from medicine into law enforcement and how his decisions can tear families apart. Read the full series here.

Dr. Scott Benton arrived in Mississippi in 2008 with a mandate to help ensure the University of Mississippi Medical Center stopped getting sued for failing to diagnose child abuse.

Dr. Dan Jones, then UMMC’s vice chancellor for health affairs, had been troubled by the lawsuits following the hospital’s oversights. Benton would later say that Jones wanted to know what the hospital could do to stop this from happening again. 

The answer, in part, was Benton, whom Jones recruited to lead a new organization called the Children’s Justice Center. Based at Children’s of Mississippi in Jackson, the center’s mission is to prevent and identify child abuse and neglect. 

Right after he arrived, Benton led a two-year effort to develop a surveillance protocol for the entire hospital. Under the protocol, any child admitted to the hospital with trauma – like cuts or broken bones – is screened for potential abuse. 

The center was renamed the Children’s Safe Center and now has branches around the state where children can be examined for signs of abuse. 

In the 14 years since Benton arrived in Mississippi, he has helped to change the state’s policies, procedures and resources around child abuse. But the success of his center is difficult to measure as the evaluations he conducts are private, and abuse and neglect cases in youth court are sealed, too. 

Benton’s career parallels the growth of a unique medical specialty called child abuse pediatrics. Board-certified child abuse pediatricians must demonstrate knowledge of psychology, forensic medicine, neurology and much more. They say their combination of skills makes them uniquely able to determine when abuse has occurred. 

Within children’s hospitals around the country, child abuse pediatricians can investigate caregivers they suspect of abuse, make referrals to child protective services, and testify in criminal proceedings. Their work can save children’s lives, and it may be particularly important in Mississippi, which had the country’s highest rate of child deaths due to abuse or neglect in 2021. 

But parents who say they’ve been wrongly accused, some doctors in other specialties, and sometimes even child abuse pediatricians themselves say the specialists can be too quick to allege abuse and insufficiently careful in considering other explanations.  

And in Mississippi, where he is the only board-certified child abuse pediatrician, Benton has played a particularly powerful role in determining when parents are investigated for child abuse, with limited oversight or consequences for making accusations that are unsubstantiated. 

Mississippi Today has uncovered three instances in recent years where parents allege he got it wrong. In each case, there were other explanations or potential medical conditions for the injuries the children exhibited that were not fully vetted by Benton or his team before their caregivers were accused of child abuse.

Parents are often unclear they are being investigated for child abuse when interacting with Benton and his team, they say. Benton said he and his team introduced themselves as “pediatricians from the Children’s Safe Center.”

Benton, through communications officers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, declined an interview request regarding this investigation from Mississippi Today. The communications officers responded to a limited number of a detailed list of questions and findings Mississippi Today shared with UMMC before publication and received statements from Benton but few direct responses or refutations.

“We walk a fine line between protecting abused children and protecting innocent parents,” Benton said in a statement. “I’m very cognizant of that. I emphasize that fact with staff, and I take that responsibility very seriously.” 

In a separate statement, Dr. Mary Taylor, chair of the UMMC Department of Pediatrics, said Benton is “a respected member of our Medical Center staff” who has earned national certifications. 

“As medical director of the Children’s Safe Center, Dr. Benton has the difficult role of evaluating the evidence in cases of suspected child abuse in any form and rendering a decision based on his training, many years of experience and deep knowledge of the medical literature. He and his team of trained child abuse specialists provide evidence-supported medical opinions to many governmental agencies that are tasked with ensuring the safety of children. Often times, these children cannot speak for themselves and Dr. Benton’s medical opinions are one part of a defined system of agencies that examine the totality of available evidence about suspected child abuse with the goal of protecting children from exposure to abusive environments.

“UMMC supports the critical work Dr. Benton does through the Children’s Safe Center and values the service he provides to the state as the only board-certified child abuse pediatrician.”

A pediatrician’s path evolves with a new medical specialty

Benton started his medical career in the 1990s, in his native Louisiana. His path in medicine evolved in tandem with the growth of a new medical specialty in child abuse.  

During his second year of residency, he completed a clerkship in “pediatric forensic medicine” — what is now called child abuse pediatrics. He then took a job in pediatrics at the Louisiana State University medical school, which included training at the Center for Child Protection in San Diego, now called the Chadwick Center, and elsewhere.

Benton found himself at the center of a small but increasingly influential field. He became one of the charter members of the Ray E. Helfer Society, an organization of physicians who work on preventing and diagnosing child abuse. 

“There’s only a few of us that do this,” he once explained in a deposition. “We recognized that this was building up a body of knowledge that was greater than that of just a general pediatrician… We started thinking that we could possibly have a subspecialty in the late 90s, early 2000s.”

Benton and colleagues applied to the American Board of Pediatrics for the designation. 

They argued they offered something unique: an ability to draw together insights from a range of specialties in order to diagnose a crime. 

“You have to first show the fund of knowledge, what the factual bases are, you have to compile a full literature, as in any other subspecialty,” Benton said in a 2017 deposition. 

In 2009, the board offered a certification exam for the first time. Benton holds certificate number 20 in child abuse pediatrics. Today, there are 330 board-certified child abuse pediatricians across the United States. 

Around the country, child abuse pediatricians report suspected abuse and neglect to child protective services, and then may provide evidence to help the state remove a child from his or her family’s custody. In some states, CPS also provides funding for their work. 

Their credentials lend their determinations substantial weight in the eyes of CPS caseworkers, police, prosecutors and judges: A Marshall Project analysis found that reports of suspected abuse by medical professionals to child welfare agencies are 40% likelier to be substantiated than reports by non-medical professionals.

A ProPublica and NBC Investigation found that only about 5% of child welfare investigations nationwide lead to determinations of physical or sexual abuse.

And around the country, Black children are disproportionately likely to be investigated. One 2017 study found that half of all Black children in the US experience a CPS investigation by age 18, compared to less than a quarter of white children.

The three families featured in this series are white.

Benton has testified that his job requires him to “provide service to child protection, law enforcement and Mississippi prosecutors.” He started providing expert testimony soon after he began his medical career, first testifying in a case in September 1996. 

Critics of this medical specialty — including defense attorneys and some doctors in other fields — argue that child abuse pediatricians are susceptible to bias because of their frequent and close interactions with law enforcement.

At one conference on shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma, a speaker presented defense expert testimony alongside a picture of Pinocchio. The event concluded with doctors and prosecutors singing a song mocking skeptics of the diagnosis to the tune of, “If I only had a brain.”

State public defender André de Gruy drew a parallel between child abuse pediatricians and medical examiners housed in the Department of Public Safety — both are scientists who say their work is objective, but who work closely with law enforcement and prosecutors. That may shape their interpretations.

“I think (Benton) is going to find abuse because he has a bias towards finding abuse, in my opinion,” de Gruy said. “In most of the cases, I suspect he finds abuse and there is abuse. But I think that there are the cases, the close calls, which is where the trouble comes in, where he’s going to find abuse but someone else will look at it and not.”

Child abuse pediatricians and many colleagues in other medical specialties and fields like law enforcement and social work see their work as essential to identifying and intervening in cases of abuse. They say they follow the evidence.

Dr. Christopher Greeley, who leads the child abuse pediatrics team at Texas Children’s Hospital, told NBC News that he and colleagues always work to rule out alternative explanations before making an accusation of abuse. 

“We don’t say, ‘Eh, take the kid away,’ in a sort of flippant manner,” he told the news station. 

Greeley, a past president of the Helfer Society who also chairs its public relations committee, did not respond to emails from Mississippi Today seeking an interview.  

Mississippi’s only child abuse pediatrician builds a new surveillance system 

When Benton moved to Mississippi in 2008, the state was under pressure to improve protections for abused children. A federal lawsuit in 2004 charged that the state was failing to prevent abuse and neglect of kids in the foster system. In response, the Legislature created the Children’s Justice Center in 2007, aiming to standardize and professionalize investigations of suspected abuse. 

In an interview with the Clarion-Ledger in 2012, Benton explained that while working in New Orleans, he had developed one of the country’s “largest and (most) innovative child abuse programs” with the Audrey Hepburn Children At-Risk Evaluation Center. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of his family’s material possessions and left them displaced from their home. 

“It was during this time that I was recruited to be the medical director of the (UMMC) center and met with former Gov. Haley Barbour, now Gov. Phil Bryant, numerous legislators, then-University of Mississippi Medical Center Chancellor Dr. Dan Jones, and Pediatrics Chair Dr. Bev Evans,” he told the paper. “This solidified for me that Mississippi was serious about developing an academic forensic medical response for abused and neglected children.” 

Benton’s UMMC colleagues welcomed his arrival. Dr. Christopher Blewett, a pediatric surgeon who now works in Missouri, told Mississippi Today that before Benton came to the hospital, the bulk of the work to investigate child abuse and provide evidence during criminal proceedings fell to doctors like him because they were the ones who would see and operate on children with physical trauma sustained from abuse. 

Benton, who also lived next door to Blewett when they were both in Mississippi, was “a godsend,” Blewett said. His training equipped him to recognize patterns of injury that could point to abuse, and he largely took over the work of testifying in court. 

Blewett said he completely trusts Benton, whom he describes as devoted to his work. He recalled phone calls at 10 p.m. to discuss whether to release a family from the hospital or keep them another day or two so Benton, who frequently travels to testify in court, could interview them in person. 

“Obviously it takes a special person to do that work,” Blewett said. “This is just short of like an SVU detective in many cases. It can be pretty grim at times.”

Benton made a similar point during his Clarion-Ledger interview. Other specialists are reluctant “to get involved with the medico-legal evaluation of children,” he told the paper.

In Mississippi, rates of child maltreatment are higher than the national average. And in recent years, the number of child deaths reportedly caused by abuse and neglect in Mississippi has risen, from 15 deaths in 2007 to 38 in 2020 and 49 in 2021. That year — the most recent year for which such data is available — the state had the country’s highest rate of such deaths, at 7.07 per 100,000 children, compared to a national average of 2.46.

Today, Benton sees patients at the hospital suffering from severe trauma, supervises an outpatient sexual abuse clinic, and examines kids. Child Protective Services, police, lawyers, psychiatrists, pediatricians and emergency rooms refer children to the center. 

Benton told Mississippi Today that the state’s child abuse hotline receives about 30,000 calls annually, and about a third of these are substantiated. The Safe Center saw 2,400 children last year, he said. 

He also implemented a “high-risk surveillance system,” under which Benton’s team evaluates any child who comes to UMMC with certain injuries or symptoms. The triggers for such evaluation are wide-ranging, according to procedures obtained by Mississippi Today. They include any bone fractures, burns including “significant sunburns” and “all trauma warranting admission.”

Benton’s mandate was to ensure hospital staff missed no warning signs for abuse. 

“The general teaching previous to that time was not adequate to keep an open mind about whether parents or caregivers could be abusers,” he told attorneys for a defendant in a fatal child abuse case during a deposition. 

The stakes are high on either side, he said. While an incorrect accusation can have serious consequences for a parent, failing to detect abuse can put a child’s life at risk. 

“I do think we try to get it right, and I’m not aware that there’s any overcalling going on,” he said. “Nationally, if you look at the statistics on the epidemiology, it’s always the opposite direction. We just take the person at hand and don’t go any further.”

Benton has emphasized that the protocol for reviewing cases he implemented provides protections for caregivers and a systematic exploration of potential causes of injury.

“Before I came here, anyone they thought who had injured the kid was kicked out of the hospital,” he told a group of Mississippi public defenders a decade ago in a recorded presentation Mississippi Today reviewed. 

“That was part of their protocol. And I said, ‘Alright, who am I supposed to get the history from? Who am I supposed to figure out whether there’s a medical explanation for… some of these bleeding findings? So we quickly reversed that… We had to have multiple conferences to explain to them a concept you already understand: innocent until proven guilty … We’ve got several kids where we’ve made medical diagnoses where the nurses were like ‘Oh my God, I was ready to crucify this parent,’ and the kid turned out to have a (inaudible) aneurysm in their brain that was mimicking head trauma.”

In an email to Mississippi Today, Benton said the surveillance system does not give him total decision-making power in every case. 

“The high-risk surveillance system is a review of other professionals (sic) work and is not an independent investigation by the children’s safe center,” he wrote. “However, if I feel by review that a case should be reported for state CPS investigation, I contact the medical provider involved in the case or the child’s primary care provider and discuss my concerns with them. It is up to them at that point whether they agree with my concerns. This interaction is documented in the child’s medical record.”

It is not clear whether Benton meant that the other medical providers in the case must make the decision to involve CPS. He and UMMC communications officials repeatedly declined Mississippi Today’s interview requests and responded directly to only a small number of questions sent via email. 

When Mississippi Today asked for clarification on this particular point, UMMC did not respond. 

The law gives doctors and law enforcement an incentive to allege abuse any time it appears possible. It protects people who make a good faith report of abuse or neglect from any liability if they get it wrong, while failure to report can lead to a fine and up to a year in prison. 

But Benton has said keeping “an open mind” does not mean jumping to conclusions about whether abuse has occurred. The Clarion-Ledger asked him what adults should do if they suspect a child is being abused. 

“My first advice would be to not overreact,” Benton said. “Listen to the child.” 

He encouraged “passive listening,” in which a caregiver repeats back what a child says in a questioning tone. 

“Then be silent and wait for further response,” he said. 

Once you suspect abuse, call the state child abuse hotline. 

He also pointed to social factors that can contribute to abuse, like caregivers being out of work, displaced, or otherwise stressed. And most physical abuse, he said, is related to “inadequate parenting skills coupled with frustration.” Benton added that stressful situations involving feeding, crying and misbehavior could cause “an otherwise sane caregiver to lose patience.”

As the doctor charged with accusing caregivers of child abuse, Benton is acquainted with angry denials and furious criticism. 

“My experience has been over the years that I’m often called a liar or told that I misrepresent what people say to me, so I always audio record my conversations,” he said on the stand during a 2014 trial. “That way no one can say I said something I didn’t, you know, and it protects the other person.”

Two of the mothers featured in this series attempted to obtain the recordings of their conversations with Benton in the hospital but were unable. One was told she must have an attorney, and the other could not get in touch with an employee of the Children’s Safe Center, where the recordings are housed.

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A controversial diagnosis 

Child abuse pediatricians like Benton are trained to recognize signs of abusive head trauma, formerly known as shaken baby syndrome (SBS), and often provide expert testimony in trials. For decades, three findings were considered indicative of the syndrome: subdural bleeding, retinal bleeding and swelling of the brain. 

Questions about abusive head trauma comprise 10% of the certifying exam for child abuse pediatricians, more than almost any other topic on the exam. (Child fatalities and musculoskeletal injuries comprise 4% and 8% of the exam, respectively.) 

Thousands of people in the U.S. have been convicted of shaking a baby to death since the 1970s. 

Yet the scientific bases of the diagnosis are increasingly coming under question. A 1987 study reviewed 48 cases of “shaken baby syndrome” in the Philadelphia area and found that of the 13 fatalities, all had signs of impact, too. Biomechanical studies, including one published in 2022, have also found that forceful shaking of an infant will cause injury to the neck before the brain, although neck injuries have not been considered diagnostic of the syndrome. 

Retinal hemorrhage, once regarded as conclusive proof of the syndrome, has been seen in infants who died from causes like meningitis or an obstructed airway. 

Researchers have also found that short falls can generate much more force than shaking, and a 2001 study that looked at children’s falls from playground equipment — but did not include infants — found that short falls could cause death, as well as retinal bleeding, and could be preceded by a lucid interval. 

Critics of these studies say biomechanical models are not real infants. It’s impossible to test the theory on babies. 

The dispute over the science plays out in courtrooms around the country. The Washington Post reported in 2015 that at least 16 people in the U.S. had overturned their convictions since 2001, as judges determined that new information created reasonable doubt as to their guilt. 

Indeed, a 2018 “consensus statement” published in the journal Pediatric Radiology was written in response to what the authors described as “speculative theories that cannot be reconciled with generally accepted medical literature” now being advanced during trials. The statement explained the injuries could be caused by shaking alone, shaking and impact, or impact alone. 

“There is no controversy concerning the medical validity of the existence of AHT, with multiple components including subdural hematoma, intracranial and spinal changes, complex retinal hemorrhages, and rib and other fractures that are inconsistent with the provided mechanism of trauma,” the statement said. 

The idea that shaking alone could cause fatal injuries in infants was introduced in 1971 by British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch. He published a two-page paper in the British Medical Journal titled “Infantile Subdural Haematoma and its Relationship to Whiplash Injuries” that established the link between shaking and head injuries in infants. 

With his research, Guthkelch was attempting to solve a problem he kept encountering in his practice. Small children showed up to the hospital where he worked with bleeding on the surface of their brains, but with no broken bones or bruises to indicate they had been abused. He reviewed 23 cases of alleged child abuse, with subdural hematoma in 13. In five of those cases, there was no external sign of injury, and Guthkelch theorized their injuries could have been caused by shaking. 

In the years that followed, doctors were trained to strongly suspect abuse if children came in with subdural hematomas, brain swelling and bleeding in the retinas. A guide to investigating child abuse published by the Justice Department in the late 1990s called retinal hemorrhage in babies “for all practical purposes, conclusive evidence of shaken baby syndrome in the absence of a good explanation.”

Prosecutors have won convictions with no eyewitnesses to the alleged shaking and no theory as to why the defendant would shake the infant, with little evidence beyond a doctor’s diagnosis based on a supposedly definitive set of symptoms. 

For prosecutors, shaken baby syndrome provides a tidy narrative: It is “a medical diagnosis for murder,” as Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University and expert on shaken baby syndrome convictions put it in her 2009 article in the Washington University Law Review. 

In 1996, Wisconsin day care provider Audrey Edmunds was convicted of murder in the death of a 7-month-old baby in her care. The prosecution’s argument hinged on what was then regarded as medical fact: The presence of retinal hemorrhage, subdural bleeding and brain swelling — plus the absence of another explanation for those findings — provided a powerful indication the baby had been shaken. And the timing of the baby’s decline purportedly proved Edmunds was responsible. Her defense did not challenge the science around shaken baby syndrome. 

In 2008, however, Edmunds was granted a new trial. A judge determined that “a shift in mainstream medical opinion” on shaken baby syndrome meant a new jury could have reasonable doubt as to her guilt. The district attorney dropped the charges, and Edmunds was freed. 

The outcome cast a spotlight on the controversy brewing over the diagnosis. 

Guthketlch himself went on to express horror that prosecutors were using the diagnosis he had popularized to convict parents and caregivers when there was no other evidence of abuse. He spent the final years of his life reviewing controversial SBS cases and noted a high proportion of the children in them had a history of underlying illnesses or conditions that could explain their injuries, but that these issues were rarely considered in medical reports. 

“While society is rightly shocked by any assault on its weakest members and demands retribution, there seem to have been instances in which both medical science and the law have gone too far in hypothesizing and criminalizing alleged acts of violence in which the only evidence has been the presence of the classic triad or even just one or two of its elements,” Gulthkelch wrote in a paper published in the Houston Journal of Health Law & Policy in 2012. “Often, there seems to have been inadequate inquiry into the possibility that the picture resulted from natural causes.”

In 2009, the American Association of Pediatrics issued a policy statement recommending doctors stop using the term “shaken baby syndrome” and instead use “abusive head trauma,” a terminology shift to describe the clinical findings instead of the mechanism of injury. The statement said injuries could be caused by shaking, impact, or some combination of both. 

To critics, the name change presents an obvious problem: If the injuries can also be caused by impact, and defendants’ accounts of what happened describe an accidental impact, how can doctors be certain the injuries were caused by abuse?

Child abuse pediatricians say the science of abusive head trauma is sound, and that when a child has a specific set of symptoms, a different diagnosis is unlikely. They argue that critics of the diagnosis are putting kids at risk. 

“The controversy exists among just a few individuals predominantly traveling on the defense circuit, some of whom are making $600,000 a year providing testimony that is factually scientifically counterintuitive, counter science,” Benton said in one sentencing hearing in 2018, “so I wouldn’t call that controversy when the people — I mean, you’re making it as if it’s balanced. Is it controversy? Yes, we’re very upset when somebody misuses science in the furtherance of a child who in our estimation has been abused.”

Reading a newspaper, finding a homicide

When Benton arrived in Mississippi, he understood the Children’s Justice Center had a decade of guaranteed funding thanks to the state’s $100 million settlement with WorldCom Inc., a telecommunications company that collapsed in a multibillion-dollar fraud scandal. It turned out that was a drastic overestimate. Instead, he had a few years’ worth of funding, and he had to look for other revenue streams.

That was how the case of a man named Jeffrey Havard first came across his desk. Havard was convicted of capital murder in the death of his girlfriend’s 6-month-old daughter in 2002, and sentenced to death. The prosecution’s theory was that Havard had sexually assaulted the baby and shaken her to death. 

The director of the center read a story in the Clarion Ledger about Havard’s case by longtime investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell. The state Supreme Court had just rejected an appeal from Havard, but Mitchell had interviewed a pathologist who reviewed medical records and concluded there was no evidence of sexual assault or of homicide, and that the baby’s injuries were consistent with Havard’s claim that he had dropped her. 

The center’s director thought Benton could potentially apply his expertise to the case. Helping to right an injustice might boost name recognition and funding for the center.

But Benton didn’t see an injustice. 

“As I read the facts as put forth in the above sources,” he wrote to Mitchell on March 15, 2012, referring to the newspaper article and the state Supreme Court decision upholding Havard’s conviction, “I believe they support a homicide.”

Mississippi Today health editor Kate Royals contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: Kate Royals, Mississippi Today’s community health editor since January 2022, worked as a writer/editor for UMMC’s Office of Communications from November 2018 through August 2020, writing press releases and features about the medical center’s schools of dentistry and nursing.

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The post Mississippi’s child abuse pediatrician works between medicine and the justice system. Can he be objective? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

This story is the second part in Mississippi Today’s “Shaky Science, Fractured Families” investigation about the state’s only child abuse pediatrician crossing the line from medicine into law enforcement and how his decisions can tear families apart. Read the full series here.

At Jeffrey Havard’s trial in 2002, medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne testified the Adams County man had shaken 6-month-old Chloe Britt to death. Her injuries — bleeding in both her brain and retinas — were “consistent with a person violently shaking a small child.”

More than a decade after Havard was convicted and sentenced to death, Hayne changed his mind. 

At a hearing in 2017 to determine whether Havard would receive a new trial, Hayne said he believed the science had evolved, and that Chloe could not have died by shaking alone, though he still thought her death was a homicide. The claim that had put Havard on death row — an injury to her rectum meant he had sexually assaulted the baby — disintegrated, as three different experts and Hayne himself now said there was no evidence of sexual abuse. 

Havard had long maintained he had been giving Chloe a bath when she slipped from his arms and her head hit the toilet. He put her to bed, and not long after, her mother found her “blue and not breathing.” She died at Natchez Community Hospital on Feb. 21, 2002. 

Three defense experts testified in that 2017 hearing that the autopsy findings were consistent with the short fall onto a hard surface Havard had described. 

“Chloe died from an impact, a blunt force impact to the head,” said Dr. Michael Baden, former chief medical examiner of New York City and a frequent defense witness in shaken baby syndrome cases. “The shaking of the baby is irrelevant.”

The state called only one witness: Dr. Scott Benton. His testimony helped persuade the judge not to grant Havard a new trial. 

Benton was among the first doctors in the country to earn board certification in child abuse pediatrics, a field formally established in 2009. Operating at the intersection of pediatric medicine and forensic pathology, such doctors say they have the tools and expertise to diagnose a crime that specialists in other fields could miss. 

Another part of their job is testifying in criminal proceedings involving child abuse. Benton has been a prolific witness, testifying hundreds of times since the mid-1990s. He is the only child abuse pediatrician in Mississippi, one of nine states with just one such specialist. 

In an email to Mississippi Today, Benton said the Children’s Safe Center as a group, including him, provides testimony about 12 times a year.

A Mississippi Today investigation found Benton’s testimony has helped keep two Mississippians convicted of shaken baby syndrome behind bars, even though the original expert in each case had changed their conclusions.

Testifying for the prosecution in a Louisiana murder trial, he incorrectly characterized the possible consequences of a rare genetic disorder, claiming it had never been linked to the brain bleeding and swelling that preceded a child’s death, when it had, in multiple peer-reviewed journal articles.

He nearly always testifies against defendants. In one case in which he did testify for the defense, he charged double the hourly rate he has charged Mississippi prosecutors. And his testimony in that case, in which the child survived, struck a different tone from what he gave the prosecution in another shaken baby syndrome case with some similarities, allowing for more uncertainty about the cause of the victim’s injuries.

“I’ve never encountered any system in which a child abuse pediatrician’s work is consistently and meaningfully reviewed,” said Katherine Judson, executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that advocates for more rigorous and objective scientific evidence in courtrooms. “These folks who testify, it’s very infrequently that I see meaningful review of their work by somebody who’s objective. And honestly the same is true throughout forensic science — we’re always fighting for meaningful review of what analysts are doing.”

Benton declined Mississippi Today’s requests for an interview. He and officials at the University of Mississippi Medical Center also declined to answer a list of questions from Mississippi Today and to respond to a list of reporters’ findings. 

“As medical director of the Children’s Safe Center, Dr. Benton has the difficult role of evaluating the evidence in cases of suspected child abuse in any form and rendering a decision based on his training, many years of experience and deep knowledge of the medical literature,” said Dr. Mary Taylor, pediatrics department chair at UMMC, in an emailed statement to Mississippi Today.

“He and his team of trained child abuse specialists provide evidence-supported medical opinions to many governmental agencies that are tasked with ensuring the safety of children. Often times, these children cannot speak for themselves and Dr. Benton’s medical opinions are one part of a defined system of agencies that examine the totality of available evidence about suspected child abuse with the goal of protecting children from exposure to abusive environments.”

A doctor takes on ‘the disingenuous defense people’

Testimony at Havard’s 2017 hearing mirrored a bitter debate within the medical and criminal justice communities. Neurologists, biomechanical engineers, pediatricians and forensic pathologists — along with defense attorneys — have increasingly raised questions about the science behind the decades-accepted diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome. 

On the stand, Benton minimized the controversy describing efforts by “the disingenuous defense people” to “attack erroneously the science that supports an abusive event.” 

Hayne had claimed at Havard’s 2002 trial that shaking alone had killed Chloe. At the 2017 hearing, Benton said he agreed with Hayne’s more recent determination that  Chloe had died of  “shaken baby syndrome with impact or blunt force trauma.” When pressed, he acknowledged that he concluded Chloe’s cause of death was “blunt force head trauma”—a possibility never raised in the 2002 trial.

From the late 1980s through the late 2000s, Hayne performed the vast majority of autopsies in Mississippi, usually with a caseload about seven times above national standards. His testimony helped prosecutors win convictions in high profile cases, some of which were later thrown out because his claims were not supported by science. In 2008 the state ended his contract, but there has never been a systematic review of the cases in which his testimony helped lead to convictions.

Havard’s lawyers also asked Benton about an email he sent to investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, who had written an article raising questions about Havard’s guilt. “As I read the facts put forth in the above sources, I believe they support a homicide,” he wrote in 2012. 

On the stand five years later, Benton said he was surprised he had done that. 

“I am a careful person,” he said. “First of all, that is not a medical document. I was not offering a medical opinion. I was offering to help, asking for information. Again, I should have waited for more information. Something about the articles that I don’t have or recall what triggered it, but it was the team at the moment that thought, hey, you can help this person, and then whatever I read had some concerns, because it sounded (like the) typical litany in the media attacking Shaken Baby Syndrome as unscientific. Maybe so, maybe not.” 

In the end, Adams County Circuit Judge Forrest A. Johnson ordered a new sentencing hearing for Havard, but not a new trial. The new evidence was enough to get him off death row, but he is still serving life without parole. 

In Mississippi, at least 11 people have been convicted of shaking a baby to death since 2000. 

Those convicted have continued to try to appeal based on new science. In two of those cases, including Havard’s, testimony from Benton has played a key role in preventing people from getting new trials. 

Havard’s attorneys told Mississippi Today the case against their client was based on “flawed medicine and junk science” long before Benton got involved, said Jackson-based attorney Graham Carner.

“Fortunately, Dr. Benton recognizes this about the sexual assault allegation — which every single expert who has looked at this case for the state or the defense says is unfounded,” Carner said. 

“Dr. Benton’s opinions about SBS, though, are speculative and subjective. They are not the product of a dispassionate scientist but an admitted advocate. Essentially, Dr. Benton’s opinion is that there was child abuse in this case because he says so. That’s not science, and it is dangerous in a courtroom.” 

Providing testimony in child abuse trials around the South

According to his curriculum vitae, Benton has provided expert testimony in more than 350 legal proceedings since 1996, from custody disputes to youth court cases to murder trials across Mississippi as well as in Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama. 

His testimony creates a funding stream for the Children’s Safe Center at the University of Mississippi Medical Center — one critics including defense attorneys and law professors say can create a sense of alliance with law enforcement and an incentive to side with their interpretation of events. 

Records obtained by Mississippi Today show that from July 2015 through February 2022, Benton’s testimony generated more than $140,000 in funding for the center. That’s just a small fraction of the center’s overall budget, which is mostly funded by the state and federal grants. 

Resource- and time-strapped public defenders often don’t hire expert witnesses at all, said state public defender André de Gruy. In Mississippi, a judge must approve motions for funding for such witnesses. 

The state’s public defense system is a patchwork, with part-time defense lawyers in many counties on fixed-rate contracts representing defendants. In counties without funded public defenders’ offices, they are selected by judges who have an incentive to speed up the process and keep costs down. The more time public defenders spend on a case, the less money they make per hour. 

Contract public defenders “either do their own investigation or it doesn’t get done,” de Gruy said. “You look at the prosecution side and they’re all … fully funded offices with support staff and investigators and victim witness coordinators, and they don’t have to worry about whether or not the lights are gonna get cut off because they’re in a county building.”

Although Benton’s value on the stand derives from his expertise in medicine and science, he generally plays for only one team. A UMMC spokesperson said he has testified for the defense “five or six times to his recollection.”

In a deposition in 2017, Benton told Havard’s attorneys he had never testified on behalf of a defendant accused of killing a child. And in every fatal shaken baby syndrome case in which he had testified as of then, he had concluded the syndrome caused the child’s death. 

Havard’s case came to his attention because a colleague read a newspaper article that discussed questions about the validity of the conviction. The colleague surmised Benton might be able to contribute to Havard’s defense.

Instead, he wound up testifying for the state. His contract with the Attorney General’s Office stipulated he would be paid $175 an hour to review documents, prepare reports and testify in the case. Records obtained by Mississippi Today show the Children’s Safe Center received $14,251.68 for his work in the case.

The hourly rate of around $175 is somewhat low for a medical doctor, de Gruy said.

“I’ve heard people who’ve gotten experts that said Benton got this wrong,” de Gruy said. “But I’ve never heard that Benton went outside of the established norms of his field or that he fabricated evidence or anything.”

De Gruy pointed to Hayne and Michael West, a dentist whose now-discredited bite mark analysis helped send defendants to death row, as examples of expert witnesses whose work was very wrong for decades and went unchallenged because defendants often couldn’t afford to hire expert witnesses of their own. 

Benton’s testimony is different, and de Gruy said he thinks the doctor usually makes the right calls. But in “close calls,” another professional might make a different determination after reviewing the same evidence.

If such cases make it to court, a jury decides who’s right — but they may never hear from an expert witness for the defense. 

A rare genetic disorder has been associated with brain bleeding. Dr. Benton said it hasn’t. 

Benton has been testifying in cases involving shaken baby syndrome for more than two decades, sometimes providing critical information for the prosecution when there were no eyewitnesses and other evidence was only circumstantial. 

On April 3, 1998, 11-month-old Brenda Boudreaux’s mother found her listless in her bed. For the last week, she had been vomiting regularly and suffering from diarrhea but had never been so hard to rouse. 

At West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, Louisiana, a CT scan found bleeding in her brain. In combination with bleeding retinas, a pediatric ICU doctor determined she was suffering from shaken baby syndrome. A neurosurgeon who operated also found “extremely elevated intracranial pressure,” which he attributed to the syndrome as well. 

Benton, who lived in Louisiana at the time, also saw her at the medical center, while she was in a coma. He concluded Brenda had suffered from “Shaken Infant Impact Syndrome and possibly a variant of it called Tin Ear Syndrome.”

After the surgery, she spent a month recovering at a hospital and then went home. But her mother said she was never again the lively and happy baby she had been.

Brenda was hospitalized again in August 1998 and diagnosed with hydrocephalus, an abnormal buildup of fluid in the brain, which doctors also attributed to shaken baby syndrome. A doctor performed surgery to release fluid and bring down the swelling in her brain. He noticed “a tiny hole … leaking a little bit of fluid,” indicating a risk for infection: if fluid could get out, bacteria could get in. Because of that, he inserted a temporary drain that could be replaced with a permanent shunt later. 

“That operation went well,” the surgeon, Dr. John Steck, would later say. “That night Brenda had a problem and died.”

Her mother’s boyfriend, Randy Richthofen, had been alone with Brenda for about two hours in the evening before her mother first brought her to the hospital in April. He was charged with second degree murder.

During his trial, the prosecution frequently asked doctors on the stand about a rare genetic condition Brenda had called Adams-Oliver Syndrome. The symptoms vary widely. Shortened limbs and missing pieces of skull and scalp are hallmarks.

One of Brenda’s arms “stopped at the elbow,” as her mother said during the trial. Her other hand was missing three fingers, and she had an artificial eye. Benton also noticed “a little piece of her skin” at the back of her head that had not grown properly from birth. 

No geneticist testified. Instead, each doctor — who acknowledged they lacked expertise in the syndrome — said they knew of no relationship between Adams-Oliver and Brenda’s symptoms. Benton went into the greatest detail, explaining how he ruled out Adams-Oliver as a factor in Brenda’s injuries. 

“We accessed the large international and national databases … everything ever known about it (the disorder),” he testified. “As best as we can read, of all the children that have been diagnosed with this, and from what we can gather from the medical records of Brenda, the brain and the developmental function is normal, meaning they have normal intelligence and normal brain function.”

The bleeding in Brenda’s brain and the hydrocephalus could not be associated with her genetic condition, Benton said. 

But scholarly articles on Adams-Oliver published before 2000, when Benton testified, indicate otherwise. 

One 1994 study published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics documented people with the syndrome exhibiting “mental retardation” and hydrocephaly.

“She developed acute hydrocephaly at age 7 days and required a ventriculo-peritoneal shunt,” the authors wrote of one patient. “The infant died at age 3 months during cardiac catheterization.”

A 1993 case report in the Archives of Disease in Childhood documented a child who nearly died from bleeding in the brain associated with scalp and skull defects.  

It’s not clear if Benton read the studies, which were published in peer-reviewed medical journals, or if he did not actually review “everything ever known about” Adams-Oliver. What is clear is that his claims directly conflicted with scientific information available at the time.  

Instead of considering her genetic disorder, Benton determined she had been shaken. 

At Richthofen’s trial, he invoked the triad of symptoms related to shaken baby syndrome diagnosis without using that word. 

Richthofen was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He remains in prison today. 

Doctors’ testimony key to conviction

Matthew James Nolan, a young father in Louisiana’s Sabine Parish, south of Shreveport, quit his job to spend more time with his newborn son, Caleb. On the morning of June 27, 2002, Nolan carried his son into the kitchen to give him a bottle. While preparing the formula and holding Caleb in one arm, Nolan would later say, he dropped the baby, who landed on his buttocks and back on the kitchen floor, and almost immediately stopped breathing. 

Nolan was charged with second-degree murder. 

The primary evidence against him was the medical experts’ testimony about Caleb’s injuries, which were used to establish the prosecution’s theory of how Caleb had died — shaking, possibly with impact — and who had done it based on the timing: Nolan. 

During the bench trial, four doctors testified: Caleb’s regular pediatrician, a critical care doctor who treated him before he died, the coroner, and Benton.

The critical care pediatrician gave her opinion as to what could have caused Caleb’s injuries: “Severe shaking, possibly with what some people call shaken impact syndrome where the baby is shaken but the head’s also hit on something.” 

Benton gave a computer presentation on shaken baby syndrome and explained why he, too, didn’t believe Nolan’s explanation. A fall from about four feet would not have caused retinal bleeding and subdural hemorrhage, he said. And such a fall should have caused visible injury to the skin or skull, and there was none.

Instead, Caleb had a “diffuse brain injury” that could only have been caused by acceleration and deceleration forces, like those generated by shaking. 

The bleeding was concentrated on the left side of Caleb’s brain. But Benton insisted that didn’t mean there had been an impact there. 

Benton dismissed the suggestion that bruising on Caleb’s buttocks could have been caused by a fall like the one Nolan described.

“The diaper is like an airbag,” he said on the stand.

For Betty Maupin, Nolan’s mother and Caleb’s grandmother, that line stands out when she thinks back on her son’s trial.

“Don’t tell me a 3-week-old infant — their little necks are like noodles,” she said. “They tell you to be so careful, support their head. But that’s OK — you can drop them from about 42 inches. if they drop on their diaper, it’ll act as an airbag.”

Nolan’s defense called no medical experts to refute Benton’s testimony. 

At 23, Nolan was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Because he had opted for a bench trial at the advice of his attorney, only one person — the judge — decided the outcome. 

“They never said exactly (how or why he would have killed his son) other than they would just bring up — ‘shake and slam. Shake and slam,’” Maupin said. “Dr. Benton has a lot of cases. Shaken and slammed.”

Nolan is still in prison. He was recently transferred from Angola to Elayn Hunt, making Maupin’s drive to see him about an hour longer each way. Her son’s experience showed her the power doctors can wield within the criminal justice system. 

“There’s an injury, but if a doctor says it was not accidental, they’ve ruined the family’s life,” she said. “That’s the part that I guess is disturbing the most to me– how a doctor’s opinion can destroy a family.”

Benton’s style as an expert witness has led defense attorneys to raise concerns about his credibility.

In 2015, Trenique Faciane of Lacombe, La., was charged with second-degree murder in the death of 22-month-old Madison Parrott, a foster child in her care. Faciane had no criminal record. She was accused of beating the child with a hair brush, shaking her and dropping her in a bathtub. Faciane said she had been trying to wash ointment off the little girl in the tub when, slippery and sliding around, she hit her head on the faucet. The cause of death was multiple blunt-force trauma with bleeding in the brain. 

Attorney James Blazek, representing her pro bono, reached out to Benton in 2016 in hopes he could provide expert testimony during her trial. Blazek said Benton agreed to assist. 

But in 2017, Blazek learned the prosecution had hired Benton. 

“I’ve never had a case where an expert witness discussed the matter with me and then received material from me and had … what I considered a confidential discussion do that,” he said. “In my opinion, I think it was highly unusual, highly unethical.”

A defense attorney in a Mississippi case in 2018 asked Benton on the stand about Blazek’s accusations. He said he had spoken with Blazek, but denied that he had agreed to consult with him. Benton and UMMC did not respond to Mississippi Today’s questions about the case. 

Faciane entered an Alford plea to manslaughter, meaning she did not admit she was guilty but that a guilty verdict would be the likely outcome of a trial because attorneys felt that as a Black woman accused of killing a white child on trial in St. Tammany Parish, she would be unlikely to be acquitted, Blazek said. The sentencing hearing became almost a trial on its own, as Faciane continued to maintain her innocence.

Faciane was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and Benton’s testimony was key.  

“Dr. Benton, the expert in pediatric forensic medicine, who is well-known in this area and throughout the Southeast, has examined hundreds if not thousands of injured children, some of whom were abused, some of whom were not abused,” Judge Richard A. Swartz Jr. said in announcing the sentence. “His opinion was based on the medical records, the photographs of the child. And his opinion was that it was trauma, and the trauma to Madison Parrott was not accidental nor self-inflicted.”

Benton’s testimony keeps shaken baby syndrome defendant in prison

Not long after Havard’s 2017 hearing, the state of Mississippi hired Benton  to push back on another appeal effort. 

Tasha Shelby was convicted of capital murder in 2000 in the death of her fiance’s 2-year-old son Bryan Thompson IV. Prosecutors alleged she had killed the child by shaking his head and banging it against something. She was sentenced to life in prison. 

But in the weeks before his death, little Bryan’s eyes had been bloodshot, and relatives noticed he would sometimes stare into space in a way that made his grandmother wonder after his death whether he had been having seizures.

In 2015, the medical examiner who had ruled little Bryan’s death a homicide reexamined medical records and his own files. He concluded a family history of seizures may have played a role in the toddler’s death, and revised the manner of death from homicide to accident. 

Shelby sought a new trial based on that revised opinion and on the evolution of the science behind shaken baby syndrome. 

During the hearing to decide whether she would receive a new trial, the state again designated a single expert witness: Dr. Scott Benton. 

Shelby’s attorneys filed a motion to exclude his testimony.

“His report proffers opinions on cause and manner of death and biomechanics, notwithstanding his lack of experience or training in forensic pathology and biomechanics,” the memo claimed. 

The memo also pointed out the report Benton provided to the state included a chart organized around questions that had nothing to do with medicine. Looking at pieces of evidence, he asked “New since trial?” and “Would produce a different result or verdict?”

“The inclusion of this chart demonstrates that Dr. Benton interprets his role here not as an objective expert offering a medical opinion to the court, but as a member of the State’s legal team itself, skewing his opinion to specifically support the State’s theory,” Shelby’s attorneys wrote. “His bias taints his conclusions, and renders his report unreliable.”

The court denied the motion, finding Benton was qualified in child abuse pediatrics and pediatric forensic medicine. 

During Shelby’s hearing, Benton testified he believed neither seizures nor a short fall played a role in little Bryan’s death. He said the injuries had to have happened within a tight time frame, hours before the boy was declared dead. 

Though there were indications of external impact, Benton said there also had to be “an element of acceleration/deceleration” — of shaking. 

Here, too, he minimized the idea that “shaken baby syndrome” is a controversial diagnosis. 

“There certainly have been challenges to the concept and there certainly has been some evolution as (to) our understanding it,” Benton said. “But as we sit here today, the majority of physicians that are involved in these types of determinations have accepted that shaking, certainly shaking with impact, is injurious to a child. Additionally, shaking alone is considered to be injurious to a child.”

Shelby’s defense presented four expert witnesses, including the medical examiner who had originally testified for the state a decade and a half earlier. 

A Harrison County Circuit Court judge declined to grant Shelby’s appeal. In upholding that decision, the Court of Appeals cited Benton’s testimony as determinative: his willingness to say what had been said at her first trial effectively negated the new perspectives her attorneys presented.

The hearing was “a battle of experts,” the court wrote. “Dr. Benton was a qualified expert witness, and he responded to each of the points raised by Shelby’s experts.”

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A different view of doubt when testifying for the prosecution

In 2022, when Benton was an expert witness for the defense in an Alabama head trauma case, his testimony took a different approach in evaluating the possible explanations for the victim’s injuries. 

Two-month-old Kian Mixon came to the hospital with a brain bleed, retinal hemorrhages, a busted lip and bruises or discoloration behind his ears, according to court documents. His father, Michael Mixon, was charged with aggravated child abuse. 

This time, Benton listed the range of explanations for subdural hematoma.

“There’s a long list of things that can cause subdural hematomas, the most common of which is trauma,” he said.

He rattled off the other explanations: metabolic disorders, bleeding disorders, brain abnormalities, collagen vascular diseases.  He had also considered and ruled out these explanations in his written report on Shelby. But on the stand in her case, he emphasized that subdural hematoma was most commonly caused by “tearing of the bridging vessels,” which run between the skull and the brain’s surface.

“To get the tearing of those vessels, you need to have that acceleration/deceleration,” he said. 

In the Mixon case, he said it was impossible to know whether the child had experienced seizures because the hospital had apparently not performed the proper testing.

“Many of the head injuries, particularly with involving the bleeds that we see here, have what’s called non-convulsive seizures,” Benton said. “So we already suspect the child may have had a seizure by what the father reported. That has the sounds of a seizure and the recovery from a seizure. You can’t just look at an infant or all infants and know that they’re seizing. You have to put an EEG on them.”

Yet when he evaluated little Bryan’s injuries and the history given by his family — describing spells of staring into space and other behaviors they believed indicated seizures — Benton minimized that information as evidence that the child had had seizures, even though no EEG had been performed. 

He also said a seizure would not have caused little Bryan’s injuries.

“The literature is clear that the most common cause of subdural hematoma and subarachnoid hemorrhages in this age group is trauma whether accidental or inflicted,” he wrote in his report on Shelby. “It is usually from severe acceleration/deceleration force; i.e. whiplash motion with or without impact.” 

In Mixon’s case, Benton argued that medicine could not use the evidence to precisely date the child’s brain bleed, meaning the defendant couldn’t be identified simply because he had most recently been with the child. 

Testifying against Shelby, he concluded that little Bryan’s injuries had been sustained after 9 p.m. the night before he died, based in part on the autopsy findings of the child’s brain, which implicated Shelby.

When you bleed, Benton said then, the body quickly breaks down the red blood cells and sends in inflammatory cells. Within a few hours, the bleed looks different.

“There were intact red cells with no organization, which means that blood is fresh and that the body hasn’t yet had time to respond to it,” he said. 

Testifying on behalf of Mixon just a few years later, he said “blood can look fresh on a CT for up to two weeks. So you can’t look at it and say that it happened in a specific time interval. That’s not possible.”

He was comparing two different types of evidence: autopsy records and CT scans. Yet his testimony in the Mixon case allowed for the possibility that a brain injury could be undetected for days or weeks.

There’s also evidence to suggest that red blood cells in subdural hematoma can look intact at autopsy for much longer than the several hours Benton cited in Shelby. A 2019 study published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Legal Studies looked at infants up to 3 years old who were diagnosed with subdural hematoma during autopsies after their deaths. The study found that red blood cells looked intact or nearly so for 24 hours after the child’s injury. “Distinct” disintegration of the red blood cells was generally seen only after 48 hours. 

“That’s just a key part of their case. In this, it’s Tasha because she is alone with the child for this particular period of time,” Valena Beety, an attorney for Shelby, told Mississippi Today. “But if you back it up six hours, she’s not alone. If you back it up 12 hours, she’s not alone.”

In the Mixon case, Benton made twice as much per hour as he charged the state of Mississippi when he testified against Jeffrey Havard: $350 an hour. 

Mixon was found not guilty.

“The win could not be possible without the testimony of Dr. Scott Benton from the University of Mississippi,” Mixon’s attorneys wrote on Facebook. “His expert opinions in pediatrics and forensic medicine educated the jury as to the timing of the alleged injuries. Multiple jurors said that was the deciding factor for their verdict.”

After the state Supreme Court ruled against Shelby, her legal team filed a federal appeal. In early February, a federal magistrate judge found that she should have filed her federal appeal for post-conviction relief earlier, before Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of the documents in her case and set off what Beety calls the “goose chase” to obtain medical records. 

The judge also said her claims about the unreliability of the science around shaken baby syndrome were not sufficient proof of innocence. Other courts have viewed the controversy as “a battle of the experts,” and that’s what happened here, the judge wrote.

“Shelby presented experts that concluded SBS was no longer a sound diagnosis; while the state presented an expert that testified there was a ‘general acceptance,’ of the diagnosis,” the judge wrote, referring to Benton. 

Shelby’s legal team is appealing the decision.

Mississippi Today health editor Kate Royals contributed to this report.

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The post This doctor’s testimony has helped put people in prison. Some say he doesn’t always get it right. appeared first on Mississippi Today.