An appeals court has ordered prosecutors and defense attorneys to compare the conviction of a D.C. woman in the death of a 2-year-old girl with a conviction that was overturned in Wisconsin last month because an expert witness lied.

The order comes a week after attorneys for Angela O’Brien notified the D.C. Court of Appeals that the witness who lied about his credentials in the Wisconsin case, Saami Shaibani, was the same man who testified against the District woman.

The order by the three-judge panel was the first decision in the case in more than two years. Both sides have 21 days to respond.

In 2001, O’Brien was found guilty of fatally slamming her goddaughter Brianna Blackmond’s head into the floor. The death of young Brianna triggered widespread changes in D.C.’s child welfare system.

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Shaibani has testified for the prosecution around the nation as an expert on what he called injury mechanism analysis, a combination of physics, trauma medicine and engineering. But courts from North Carolina to South Dakota have determined that he lied about by saying he was a clinical associate professor at Temple University when he was not.

“It’s very important for the D.C. court of appeals to look at how other courts have considered the fraud perpetrated by Saami Shaibani,” said O’Brien attorney Joanne Slaight.

Shaibani testified that it was impossible for Brianna to have fallen down stairs like O’Brien claimed. In a battle of expert witnesses, Shaibani’s testimony was crucial to the prosecution’s case, Slaight said.

A juror told The Examiner last month that the jury would have likely found O’Brien not guilty without Shaibani’s testimony.

Prosecutors have also said that O’Brien would have been convicted anyway.

Slaight raised the issue about some of Shaibani’s false credentials during O’Brien’s murder trial in 2001, but D.C. Superior Court Judge Lee Satterfield refused to let jurors hear evidence questioning his resume, Slaight said.

Satterfield cannot comment because the case remains on appeal. But in denying a new trial, the judge wrote that it was not conclusive that Shaibani lied under oath and that it was unlikely that the jurors would have reached a different verdict without Shaibani’s testimony.

smccabe@dcexaminer.com