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Reliability of expert witness casts doubt on conviction in girl’s death
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WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Testimony of a prosecution expert who has been found to have lied under oath in courtrooms around the country could jeopardize the conviction of a D.C. woman imprisoned in the high-profile death of a 2-year-old girl.
The 2000 slaying of toddler Brianna Blackmond exposed the gaping faults in the city’s child welfare agencies because the toddler died three weeks after she had been taken out of foster care and returned to her mother without a full examination.
Brianna’s godmother, Angela O’Brien, was convicted of second-degree murder and sent to prison for 19 years to life after she was found guilty of slamming Brianna’s head into the floor.
But central to O’Brien’s conviction was testimony that may have been fatally flawed.
The prosecution’s injury expert was Saami Shaibani, who claimed that he was a clinical associate professor at Temple University. But judicial panels have found that Shaibani lied about his credentials, and have thrown into question prosecutions relying on his testimony.
Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of a man serving life for allegedly poisoning his wife and drowning her in a toilet.
On Sunday, a juror in the O’Brien case told The Examiner that the godmother probably would not have been convicted without Shaibani’s testimony. Shaibani disputed O’Brien’s claim that Brianna fell down the stairs.
“It’s hard for me to go back, but I believe [Shaibani] played an important role in her conviction,” said juror Charles Cerf, 62, of Northwest Washington. “With no one to lead the jury to the quasi-medical conclusion that the injuries could not have been from a fall from the top flight of the stairs, it would have been unlikely for us to find her guilty.”
Shaibani, who does have a degree in physics from Oxford, not only falsely claimed that he worked at Temple at the time of the trial, but he also said that he gained “real-life” experience working with doctors around the country and studying patients with traumatic injuries, according to court documents. In preparing for the Wisconsin drowning case, Shaibani claimed to have had women place their heads in toilets to see whether they could drown themselves.
“This man is a complete fraud and shouldn’t be allowed in the courtroom,” said O’Brien’s court-appointed attorney, Joanne Slaight.
His testimony in other cases from South Dakota to North Carolina has also been thrown out by judges.
Shaibani did not return messages left at his Lynchburg, Va., home and business.
During the 2001 trial, Slaight said, she repeatedly raised the issue about some of Shaibani’s false credentials, but prosecutors told D.C. Superior Court Judge Lee F. Satterfield they were confident that Shaibani was who he said he was, and the judge wouldn’t allow her to tell the jury about his questionable background.
“We tried to tell that to the judge, and the government stuck its head in the sand,” Slaight said.
Brianna’s death triggered a massive amount of news coverage during 2000 and 2001, most of it focused on the city’s failure to protect the child. The District was forced by Congress to overhaul its child welfare system. The case was part of a Washington Post package that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002.
Satterfield, who led the overhaul of the family court after Brianna’s death, is one of two judges who was nominated earlier this month to become the next chief judge for the D.C. Superior Court. Satterfield could not be reached at his chambers late Friday.
Shaibani was the only witness to testify that it was impossible for Brianna to have fallen down a stairs, Slaight said. In a battle of expert witnesses, Shaibani’s testimony was “crucial” to the prosecution’s case, she said.
Prosecutors last week declined to discuss the case. Federal attorneys argued in court filings that O’Brien would have been found guilty even without Shaibani’s tarnished testimony. O’Brien’s appeal has been awaiting a judgment for nearly three years.
smccabe@dcexaminer.com
