Ellen Gray: 'Cases' probes suspicious child deaths

FRONTLINE. 9 tonight, WHYY 12.

WE DIDN'T really need the ratings-grabbing trial of Casey Anthony - the Orlando, Fla., woman accused of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, in 2008 - to tell us that the death of a child, any child, is a messy, emotional business.

We certainly didn't need HLN's Nancy Grace, whose zeal to see Anthony convicted may exceed even the prosecution's.

Messy and emotional is the lifeblood of TV, where the Anthony case seems to be the one daytime drama no one's ready to see canceled. But emotions can wreak havoc with the dispensing of actual justice, as PBS' "Frontline" demonstrates tonight in "The Child Cases," a look at how lax standards for investigating the deaths of children can - and does - sometimes lead to the conviction of innocent people.

"The mind-set is prosecutorial . . .. They get caught up in the anger, the emotion, the despair," says Dr. Jon Thogmartin, a chief medical examiner in Florida who reversed his predecessor's findings in two child-death cases because, he says, the injuries recorded as evidence were in some instances "imagined."

As complicated as determining cause of death in an adult can be - a situation not helped by the fact that many medical examiners aren't board-certified in pathology - it can be harder in children, he tells "Frontline."

"It's gonna take less disease to kill a kid than it does an adult," he says. "And whatever you're looking for is going to be smaller and less."

The result of a joint investigation with NPR and the independent investigative-news organization ProPublica, "The Child Cases" includes experts who argue that a variety of conditions can mimic the symptoms of child abuse, and looks at the changing science behind "shaken baby syndrome," a postmortem diagnosis once routinely used to explain the suspicious deaths of infants that seems to be falling out of favor.

Faced with snapshots and videos of tiny, once-smiling children, we can't be blamed for wanting a tidy explanation for their deaths, and for many people, scientific explanations might not cut it.

That's where Ernie Lopez comes in.

Lopez, an Amarillo, Texas, man who was convicted and sentenced to 60 years for one of the most heinous crimes imaginable - the aggravated sexual assault of a 6-month-old girl he was babysitting - puts a human face on a problem that ProPublica's A.C. Thompson says turned up in more than 20 cases examined in the U.S. and Canada: people prosecuted for killing children, based on what appears to have been faulty medical evidence.

Many of those people were eventually cleared, though not before undergoing years of legal nightmares, up to and including imprisonment. (One woman spent 13 months in jail, accused of killing a child who apparently died of natural causes.)

Lopez hasn't yet been even that lucky.

Already imprisoned for eight years in connection with the death of tiny Isis Vas, the daughter of a local doctor, he's awaiting a decision by a Texas appeals court on a new trial after a judge ruled last year that he'd received ineffective counsel at his first one.

Ineffective probably barely begins to describe a defense that reportedly didn't put up a single medical expert to counter the prosecution's witnesses, whose findings "Frontline's" interviewees counter effectively tonight while suggesting an alternative explanation for Isis' death that seems far more credible.

That Lopez also comes off as a more sympathetic presence than Anthony shouldn't matter - justice, after all, is supposed to be blind - but this being television, it does, of course.

Color me unsurprised: G4's decided to put Ryan Dunn's show back in its lineup.

First, though, the cable channel aimed at gamers will "celebrate [Dunn's] life and career" in a one-hour "Attack of the Show!" special July 19, the network said yesterday.

"Following the special, G4 will pay homage to Dunn's work and respect the wishes of Dunn's family" to resume showing "Proving Ground," the G4 show that the former "Jackass" co-star hosted.

Only one episode had aired before Dunn died last week, along with a passenger, in a car crash in Chester County blamed on his drunken driving and speeding. The eight remaining episodes of "Proving Ground" will begin airing at 8 p.m. July 19.

"Ryan was an incredible talent who will be missed tremendously by his many fans, including G4 viewers," said G4 president Neal Tiles, in a prepared statement. "It was important to all of us at G4 to find a way to celebrate his life and pay tribute to him. With the support of Ryan's family, we've decided to air the remaining episodes of 'G4's Proving Ground' and give his fans the opportunity to continue watching this series that he was so passionate about."

G4 estimates that nearly 600,000 total viewers saw the show's first episode, which was shown more than once. *

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