Again, in 2012, Guthkelch stated in an interview, "I think we need to go back to the drawing board and make a more thorough assessment of these fatal cases, and I am going to bet ... that we are going to find in every – or at least the large majority of cases, the child had another severe illness of some sort which was missed until too late." Furthermore, in 2015, Guthkelch went so far as to say, "I was against defining this thing as a syndrome in the first instance. To go on and say every time you see it, its a crime... It became an easy way to go into jail. "On the other hand, Teri Covington, who runs the National Center for Child Death Review Policy and Practice, worries that such caution has led to a growing number of cases of child abuse in which the abuser is not punished.In March 2016, Waney Squier, a paediatric neuropathologist who has served as an expert witness in many shaken baby trials, was struck off the medical register for misconduct. Shortly after her conviction, Squier was given the "champion of justice" award by the International Innocence Network for her efforts to free those wrongfully convicted of shaken baby syndrome.Squier denied the allegations and appealed the decision to strike her off the medical register.
Similarly, the Maguire model, suggested in 2011 as a potential statistical model for determining the probability that a childs trauma was caused by abuse, has been questioned. A proposed clinical prediction rule with high sensitivity and low specificity, to rule out Abusive Head Trauma, has been published.In July 2005, the Court of Appeals in the United Kingdom heard four appeals of SBS convictions: one case was dropped, the sentence was reduced for one, and two convictions were upheld. The court found that the classic triad of retinal bleeding, subdural hematoma, and acute encephalopathy are not 100% diagnostic of SBS and that clinical history is also important. In the Courts ruling, they upheld the clinical concept of SBS but dismissed one case and reduced another from murder to manslaughter. In their words: "Whilst a strong pointer to NAHI [non-accidental head injury] on its own we do not think it possible to find that it must automatically and necessarily lead to a diagnosis of NAHI. All the circumstances, including the clinical picture, must be taken into account. "The court did not believe the "unified hypothesis", proposed by British physician J. F. Geddes and colleagues, as an alternative mechanism for the subdural and retinal bleeding found in suspected cases of SBS. The unified hypothesis proposed that the bleeding was not caused by shearing of subdural and retinal veins but rather by cerebral hypoxia, increased intracranial pressure, and increased pressure in the brains blood vessels.