This man is serving life for shaking a baby so hard her eyes bled. Now new evidence suggests he—along with 96 other jailed  'child killers'—is innocent. Is this the most frightening miscarriage of justice in British legal history?

Daily Mail Jan 15

RAY ROCK never saw who smashed his head open with a sock weighted with billiard balls. A warder at Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire found him lying in his cell in a pool of blood. He spent weeks in hospital and couldn't speak for three days or walk for three weeks. But who cares?

Rock, 32. is the worst scum imaginable. He's serving life - he's now been moved to Dartmoor Prison — for murdering his girlfriend's baby.

Angered by 13-month-old Heidi's pitiful cries while he babysat at his Great Yarmouth home. Rock shook her so hard that she was killed by the violent whiplash effect.

He came out with a story that he'd dropped her and she'd stopped breathing. Rock wept, crocodile tears and his girlfriend, Lisa Davis, was completely conned by the cold-hearted killer.

Rock would have got away with it, too, had not Heidi's autopsy discovered a swollen brain and bleeding in the back of the eyes and over the brain's surface — the three tell-tale symptoms of what has been dubbed Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).

He must have done it, no question. The police told Lisa about the evidence of guilt and Rock was charged and convicted in 1999 of murdering the baby he protested he had loved.

Detective Inspector Julian Gregory, who led the murder inquiry, said: 'Rock has never shown remorse. Obviously, nothing will bring Heidi back, but I am pleased that justice has been seen to be done in this tragic case.'

There is only one problem with the conviction of Ray Rock. An eminent scientist has explained it in language that even the Attorney General or the Home Secretary might understand: 'Shaken Baby Syndrome is — because of the lack of evidence to support it — c**p.'

Last month, the Government finally began to catch up when the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, raised the possibility that the convictions of a staggering 97 alleged 'child killers' — imprisoned on the basis of SBS — may be unsafe.

If Lord Goldsmith's fears prove right, then we are looking at the biggest and most tragic miscarriages of justice scandal in British legal history — bigger even than that of the 'cot death' mothers wrongly convicted of murdering their babies.

In 2003, the courts freed two mothers - Sally Clark and Angela Cannings — who had been jailed partly because of the evidence of the now discredited expert Professor Sir Roy Meadow and his 'Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy' theory.

This embodied the notion that mothers deliberately harm their children to gain attention. Meadow also had a 'law': unless proven other­wise, 'one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder'.

Another 20 people convicted, in part, on the basis of Meadow's flawed law and theory could yet go free, pending their appeals.

Now, Shaken Baby Syndrome is in the dock for presenting a similar scientific 'certainty' that many experts believe is neither scientific, nor certain, but which means that more than 100 people may have endured the unimaginable hell of convictions for child killing on the basis of a mumbo-jumbo theory.

And there are potentially thousands more cases around the world — including that of British nanny Louise Woodward, convicted by an American court on the SBS theory.

The science behind SBS is clear: if a dead baby exhibits the three tell­tale signs outlined above, then it must have been violently shaken.

According to Detective Chief Inspector Phil Wheeler, the author of the definitive 2002 Home Office report on the subject, these injuries cannot be accidental but must have been inflicted.

However, the theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome was based, not on laboratory science, but on the confession of a mentally ill American woman who said that she had violently shaken babies under her care.

Her case was written up some 40 years ago by Dr John Caffey, who later admitted that the evidence was 'meagre', 'circumstantial' and 'manifestly incomplete'.

Despite this, doctors, police and social services embraced the diagnosis and from such flimsy begin it 'grew like a snowball'.

Pour years ago, Dr Jennian Geddes, a neuro-pathologist at the Royal London Hospital, now retired, became troubled by the number of Shaken Baby cases — such as that of Rock — where there was no history of previous abuse: no broken bones, no bruises and no scars.

Dr Geddes knew that when a baby is in a fatal car crash, it is violently shaken by the whiplash effect and suffers traumatic damage to nerves inside the brain.

So she did something no one had done before: she compared the brains of 53 babies and children whose deaths had been attributed to violent shaking with those of youngsters who'd died in car crashes.

Her findings were astonishing: 50 out of the 53 brains showed no 'whiplash damage' or indeed any evidence at all of a serious head injury.

And one of the cases she examined where there was no evidence of injury of any kind was that of Baby Heidi — allegedly viciously shaken to death by Ray Rock.

Dr Geddes concluded there had to be another cause of the so called 'tell-tale signs' of SBS. She and other experts now believe that there are a number of natural or accidental causes of SBS symptoms, including seemingly trivial accidents such as falling off a bed from three feet.

But how could a baby falling such a short distance suffer such terrible injuries? After all, some babies are known to have fallen 20 feet out of an open window and survived. The answer is not the height of the fall but exactly how the baby lands.

If the baby lands on its arms or legs, it can survive with a few broken bones. But if it falls only a few feet and lands on the base of its spine, an enormous jolt can travel up the spine and 'shuck' the brain stem.

The shock can switch off the breathing mechanism But the heart will keep on pumping blood to the brain. It's like pumping water into a blocked radiator and the brain springs leaks in the weakest parts of the system: the eyes and the surface of the brain.

Dr Geddes's findings blew apart the assumption that the previously recognised symptoms of SBS must necessarily equal foul play. In short, she destroyed the SBS theory, but only now are the legal and medical establishments catching up.

Raymond Rock is a big man, over 6ft tall, but in the course of my investigations into his case, people have told me over and over that he is unusually gentle.