It took three weeks of evidence, 30 witnesses and four hours of deliberation for a jury to reach a verdict that will reverberate far beyond the Dunedin courthouse it was delivered in.
Captured in the season finale of Melanie Reid’s latest award-winning investigative podcast, Diagnosis of a Crime, the recent criminal trial of a professional athlete marked what may be the first time the opinions of New Zealand hospital paediatric doctors were seriously challenged in court by international medical experts.
The evidence heard during the trial, and the result, has drawn attention to a developing global controversy that has been likened to Satanic Panic, a moral hysteria fuelled by pseudo-science that gripped institutions around the world in the 1980s and 1990s and led to dozens of wrongful convictions. (In New Zealand, this played out in the Christchurch Civic Creche case.)
Over the past three years, Reid and her team have been investigating a series of cases involving allegations of non-accidental injury in infants, covered extensively in two podcasts, Fractured and Diagnosis of a Crime, on Newsroom’s investigative podcast arm, Delve.
They obtained the medical files, scans and x-rays used to accuse and convict parents of causing the injuries, then engaged internationally recognised specialists in radiology, orthopaedics, pathology, genetics, obstetrics and neurology from England, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia and the US to review them.
These experts were asked a simple question: do the medical findings support the conclusions reached by the New Zealand doctors?
In all of the cases, the answer was no.
In the first case a mother, Zita, was sent to prison for two years and seven months after she was convicted of injuring her baby following a diagnosis of non-accidental injury from Starship. Overseas experts the Delve investigations unit engaged concluded her daughter’s injuries were likely the result of severely low vitamin D and a prolonged, traumatic birth.
In a second case a young father is currently serving a six-year prison sentence based on a hip fracture and 19 back rib fractures to his one-year-old son. Three independent international specialists have found the hip fracture is consistent with an accident in the shower the father had described, and that there is no evidence of 19 rib fractures.
In a third case a farming couple from Central Otago lost custody of their newborn twins for two years after Starship’s lead paediatrician at the time, Dr Patrick Kelly, told them there were fractures to one of their eight-week-old babies, which became the turning point for the abuse diagnosis. Again, overseas experts found no evidence of those fractures.
In a fourth case, Reid and her team looked into the case of the pro athlete charged with causing multiple rib fractures to his four week old son, described by Starship as likely from “squeezing”. However the jury heard from international experts that the baby’s fractures were likely due to his severely low vitamin D levels and precipitous (very rapid) birth.
In case five, the South Island parents of a baby born with cerebral palsy after a traumatic and poorly managed birth had to sleep in a caravan on their property while their children remained under 24-hour watch inside the house after hospital doctors diagnosed non-accidental rib fractures in their newborn. The baby underwent at least three instances of CPR, but this was dismissed as the cause. The parents are still unsure if a criminal case is pending.
And in a sixth case, a mother lost custody of her twin boys following a diagnosis of non-accidental injury from Starship when they were eight weeks old . They have been in four foster homes over the past two years. The severely traumatic birth is being investigated by the team as a potential medical misadventure case and the cause of the babies’ injuries.
(You can read about each of these more in depth at the end of this article.)
There are striking similarities across these cases:
- They all involve infants (children one year old and younger), most of them very young babies.
- In almost every case, there is a history of traumatic birth.
- The parents are all highly engaged and proactive with medical professionals, taking their infants to numerous visits with health professionals before hospital admission.
- Before taking their infants to hospital, there were no outward signs of anything wrong, such as bruising.
- In every case, the diagnosis of non-accidental injury came after a paediatric review of x-rays and CT scans.
- The parents are all confused and bewildered, saying they have no idea what’s wrong with their infants.
- Severe vitamin D deficiency is a recurring feature in many of the cases.
Another common thread the investigation has identified after reviewing medical files, court transcripts and expert reports was the repeated use of language that appeared to embed assumptions about how injuries occurred.
Across multiple cases, doctors described injuries as being “not from normal handling of a child”, comparable to a “car accident”, or consistent with a baby having been “thrown against a wall” or “squeezed” – emotive descriptions that can influence how a case is understood by police, social workers, lawyers and juries.
And involved in almost all of them is a small group of specialists from Starship’s child protection unit, Te Puaruruhau.
Set up in 2002 to bring together police, Oranga Tamairki and medical staff, it was led by paediatrician Dr Patrick Kelly for 25 years.
Since at least 2010, serious concerns have been raised that Te Puaruruhau had reached conclusions without considering all the evidence, and in many cases families say they’ve been treated like criminals.
(If you take your sick child to hospital and you’re referred to the unit, there is a high chance you will be suspected of abuse – it was explained by a Starship paediatrician in Zita’s court case that approximately a third of their cases fall into an unexplained category, a third are highly concerning or diagnostic of child abuse and a third involve no concern, meaning if you have a child admitted to Starship Hospital with an injury and they are referred to Te Puaruruhau, there is a 66 percent chance your child’s injury could be deemed to be either caused by child abuse or an unknown cause.)
However, the cases investigated by Delve raise the question: If internationally respected medical experts can look at the same scans and medical files and reach fundamentally different conclusions to the New Zealand doctors, what is going on?
Is New Zealand’s child protection system identifying abuse, or has it, in some instances, crossed the line from diagnosing injuries to diagnosing crimes, with the result being children taken from their homes and placed in foster care, and parents being wrongfully accused, and in some cases convicted and imprisoned?
Access to justice
The Delve team’s investigation began after they engaged a group of international specialists to review the case of an Indian immigrant family, featured in the podcast Fractured, who all concluded the medical evidence underpinning the case was flawed.
That finding led the team to a telling observation. In many cases, a number of New Zealand doctors appeared in court, often with little or no challenge to their opinions.
In the criminal trials of the mother featured in Fractured, and the father currently in prison in Auckland, Justin*, neither had a medical expert testify on their behalf.
As Justin’s mother told Reid in an interview, “You’re at the mercy of Starship because they are the so-called experts. The judge in my son’s case said, ‘You either believe the medical experts from Starship with 40 years’ experience, or you don’t’. And the jury were like, well, how do you go against the medical experts from Starship? [My son] didn’t stand a chance. He had no show.”
She said there were no opposing views to the experts from Starship.
“What struck us was the lack of access to justice,” Reid says. “These doctors were appearing in courts around the country and their evidence was often being accepted without any meaningful challenge. We started asking ourselves a simple question: what would happen if that evidence was actually tested in court?”
That test would come with the Dunedin trial of a pro athlete accused of causing rib fractures to his infant son. By the time Delve looked into the case, the father, known as Dan, had been charged and was four months from trial with no medical experts testifying for his defence.
Reid said the only way to determine whether there was a broader problem was to engage independent international specialists to review the same scans, medical records and evidence being relied upon in court.
“By that stage we had already seen multiple cases where overseas experts were reaching very different conclusions. In one case, fractures described as ‘definitely there’ by Starship experts in court, were simply found not to be there at all. We kept coming back to the same question: how can this be?”
Multiple families described a similar experience. Parents said non-accidental injury diagnoses were often made within hours of arriving at hospital, while alternative explanations, including birth trauma and other medical conditions, were not fully explored. When international specialists later reviewed the same evidence, they reached very different conclusions.
The result was a courtroom battle of a kind rarely seen in New Zealand. For three weeks, the opinions of 12 medical witnesses for the Crown – including Starship’s lead radiologist Dr Russell Metcalfe – were challenged by three experts from the US.
The trial exposed what can happen when the medical evidence underpinning allegations of abuse is subjected to the same level of scrutiny as any other evidence before a jury.
Reid says the Dunedin trial raises uncomfortable questions about other cases where families have had no access to independent or alternative medical reviews.
“What does this mean for all the other cases where parents haven’t had access to multiple independent medical experts? Most families are lucky if they can afford one.”
She points to the cost of mounting a defence. International expert reviews are a minimum $10,000 per specialist, placing them beyond the reach of many families already facing legal bills, child protection proceedings and criminal investigations.
“If the Crown can call five or six experts, how are ordinary parents supposed to contend with that?” she said. “What we’ve learned is that if you don’t have credible alternative medical evidence, the court may never hear the other side of the scientific and medical debate, and that, as we have witnessed in our investigations, this can mean a one-way ticket to prison for the accused.”
Reid believes the issue is not simply financial but systemic.
“Too often, lawyers don’t understand how critical that independent evidence is. If the medical evidence goes unchallenged, the outcome can be largely predetermined. That’s why access to independent experts isn’t a luxury in these cases – it’s fundamental to a fair process.”
Investigating these cases also raised another issue: even when parents found specialists in New Zealand who supported them and believed there were potential medical causes for the injuries, they weren’t prepared to speak up about the Starship doctors or go up against them in court.
She points to something one of the international experts, neuropathologist Professor Roland Auer, said in an interview about why such professionals wouldn’t stand up for these families. “They don’t want extra work. They don’t want trouble. Most scientists and doctors have an allergy to court for those reasons. Time, danger, effort, don’t need the money. They’ve got a job and they just don’t like lawyers and journalists.”
Reid says what all of this shows is that the traditional court route doesn’t work if parents can’t get access to experts.
“It appears many lawyers who represent parents in this country are also unaware of what’s happening – even when they use specialists from overseas, they often rely on the same network of doctors, trained within the same system, going to the same conferences and using the same playbook, which treats certain injuries as being highly indicative of abuse.”
This lack of access to justice pushed Reid and her team to seek independent reviews of the cases from outside New Zealand. Those experts have now produced formal reports in five separate cases, almost all on a pro-bono basis.
Reid and her team secured three international experts to give evidence during the Dunedin trial of the pro athlete; facilitated five expert reviews, which are central to the formal application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the Fractured case; secured multiple experts for the legal team representing young imprisoned father Justin in his Court of Appeal proceedings; and are working with international specialists on the other cases.
This approach has attracted criticism from some quarters, with suggestions that journalists should not be engaging experts or testing medical evidence. Reid rejects that view.
“It shouldn’t be our job to help young parents find international experts, but we’ve done it to show that there is a fundamental flaw in the judicial system when doctors effectively diagnose crimes. In New Zealand, a small crew of doctors end up having an enormous influence. Too often there is no one on the other side to test their conclusions.”
Reid said: “The status quo can’t continue. The consequences are simply too profound for families, for children and for public confidence in our medical, policing and judicial systems.”
Flawed science
So how can New Zealand radiologists be diagnosing fractures that overseas radiologists say don’t exist? Why are potential birth injuries and metabolic bone issues being diagnosed as non-accidental injuries within hours of distressed parents turning up to hospital with their infants? And why are independent obstetrical reviews of these cases not being immediately requested by the paediatricians?
According to a growing number of international scientists, lawyers and medical specialists, the answer lies in the theories underpinning these diagnoses.
Described by international scientist Professor Chris Brook, who appears in Season 2 of Diagnosis of a Crime, as “one of the biggest public health and legal disasters of our era”, the foundation of these diagnoses is a belief that certain injuries are ‘highly indicative’ of abuse.
In practice this means when these paediatric doctors see particular injuries, there is little room for alternative explanations.
One of those injuries is unexplained rib fractures in infants.
For decades, studies have reported that unexplained infant rib fractures are strongly associated with abuse. The consequence is that once rib fractures are identified, the diagnostic process can quickly become focused on proving abuse rather than systematically exploring alternative explanations.
Critics like Brook, who has co-authored studies on the subject, argue this creates a problem known as circular reasoning. He says the paediatric doctors and child abuse specialists who believe certain injuries can be indicative of abuse are following flawed science.
“Everything in science has a level of uncertainty attached to it and they completely bulldoze that. So much of their literature is aimed at the courts, not at a scientific community. It’s aimed at showing that their belief system meets the requirements of the court system.
“They have to show that it’s in published literature. So they turn their belief into a publication. So this is the essence of circular reasoning. They take their belief and they make it look like science, and then they publish a paper that has an abstract, a methodology, and a conclusion. But really, the input belief is just coming out the other end through circular reasoning.”
In simple terms, circular reasoning occurs when the conclusion is built into the evidence used to support that conclusion – cases are classified as abuse because they contain certain findings, such as rib fractures, and those same cases are then used to prove that rib fractures are highly predictive of abuse. The diagnosis helps create the data, and the data is then used to validate the diagnosis.
The debate over rib fractures sits within a much larger international dispute surrounding shaken baby syndrome, now more commonly referred to as abusive head trauma (the subject of the Fractured podcast).
First proposed in the 1970s by British neurosurgeon Dr Arthur Norman Guthkelch and later promoted by paediatric radiologist Dr John Caffey, the theory centred on the idea that a combination of brain swelling, bleeding around the brain and retinal haemorrhages – known as ‘the triad’ – could be diagnostic of violent shaking.
However, Guthkelch later warned that birth trauma, accidental injuries and natural disease processes could also produce the same findings, describing the original theory as a hypothesis rather than an established scientific fact.
In 2014, a two-year review commissioned by the Swedish government concluded that key studies underpinning shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma relied on circular reasoning and lacked sufficient scientific reliability.
In the US, the New Jersey Supreme Court recently upheld a ruling preventing prosecutors from presenting certain shaken baby syndrome testimony in upcoming trials, after a lower court likened aspects of the diagnosis to unreliable “junk science”.
And just this month, Florida introduced a new law designed to help prevent the wrongful removal of children from parents when medical conditions such as rickets, vitamin D deficiency or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome can mimic signs of child abuse. The law gives families time to obtain medical evaluations and second opinions before parents can be arrested or children removed.
Investigations by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia and The New York Times in the United States have raised similar concerns about an over-reliance on contested diagnoses, the lack of challenge to a small circle of expert witnesses and the life-altering consequences when they are wrong.
The six cases under review by Reid and her investigations team sit within a growing body of international reporting and litigation challenging the foundations of certain child abuse diagnoses.
Critics say this raises a bigger issue of the well-documented harm caused by removing infants from loving families.
Lady Tureiti Moxon, chairperson at the National Urban Māori Authority and managing director of Waikato health services provider Te Kōhao Health, says this is a systemic issue.
“We are relying on a system that has obviously got it wrong a number of times. This is not an isolated mistake; it is a pattern of systemic failure. The court has treated expert opinion as unquestionable fact, and that trust has been catastrophically misplaced,” said Moxon.
“Families have been torn apart, tamariki separated from their parents, and whānau have lost years of their lives in prison all based on evidence now in serious doubt. Access to justice should not depend on whether a family can afford their own expert. No family’s future should hinge on a single opinion. You cannot build a just system on a foundation of injustice and this must stop.”
Decades of concerns
Concerns about overreach from Starship’s child protection unit, Te Puaruruhau, have been around for more than a decade.
In a case from 2010, an Auckland district court judge criticised Starship doctors for concluding that a father injured his baby daughter without considering all the evidence.
The judge found the father not guilty and reprimanded the medical staff, sparking a high-level meeting between the Crown and Starship management to discuss the “potentially far-reaching” implications of the verdict and how doctors differentiate between accidental and non-accidental head injuries.
That same year, former health and disability commissioner Robyn Stent, described the specialist care and protection unit of Starship hospital, as “out of control” after her family member brought her three-month-old baby to hospital with an unexplained blister-like bump on his head.
Starship doctors were adamant the haematoma was non-accidental and had no medical explanation, and she was suspected of abusing her baby (it was eventually accepted the haematoma was caused during a difficult caesarean birth).
Stent said at the time people needed to be profiled.
“There is no doubt we have excessive numbers of child deaths as a result of abuse,” Stent said. “But that doesn’t mean you treat every person as a criminal.” She felt the unit was being treated like a police station.
“It’s just appalling.”
Other similar local cases have occurred since then, some of which we have already covered.
Dr Patrick Kelly has been a central figure in the creation of New Zealand’s child abuse diagnosis framework. He helped establish, and then for 25 years, led, Te Puaruruhau until late 2023.
He has been a senior lecturer and taught the undergraduate curriculum on child abuse in Auckland University’s medical school’s department of paediatrics, has been the co-author of the Ministry of Health training package for GPs on the recognition of child abuse, and he remains the convener of an annual training course for paediatricians and others specialists on the assessment of suspected physical abuse in children.
The Delve team has repeatedly gone to Kelly and his employer, Health NZ, over the past three years to ask them to identify the fractures international experts have said don’t exist, and whether there is a systemic issue of misdiagnosing or over-diagnosing non-accidental injury in Te Puaruruhau.
They consistently provide the same response, that “it would not be appropriate for Health New Zealand to comment on a specific case in which our clinicians have provided evidence”. And, “We have the utmost confidence in the expertise, impartiality and integrity of our paediatric radiologists and child protection teams who provide expert evidence.”
You can read more about the Delve team’s ongoing attempts to get answers from Health NZ here.
The six cases
Case 1 – Zita: An Indian immigrant couple brought their eight-week-old baby to hospital with seizures. In less than 24 hours Starship doctors diagnosed the baby’s head injuries and fractures as non-accidental. The mother was convicted and sent to prison for two years and seven months and their daughter was put into four different foster homes. On the mother’s release, both parents faced imminent deportation, which would leave their child in NZ under the care of the state. The Delve investigations team engaged four international specialists to review the scans and medical files, and they found the baby’s severely low vitamin D levels and traumatic birth were not adequately considered as the cause of the baby’s injuries.
Since Melanie Reid and her team got involved, with the help of former race relations and human rights commissioner Joris de Bres, they have made a formal submission to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has been accepted for review and paves the way for a potential referral to an appeal court. They also approached Associate Minister of Immigration Chris Penk, who intervened, cancelling their imminent deportation order, and more than six years after being uplifted by the state, their daughter was finally returned to their custody.
Case 2 – Justin: What began as a hospital visit for a hip injury became a non-accidental injury case that ended in a six-year prison sentence. The Auckland father took his one-year-old son to hospital after a near-fall in the shower. Although the infant appeared uninjured at the time, his parents became concerned the following day and sought medical help. Doctors initially missed the injury, diagnosing a torn muscle and sending the family home (their usual doctor was away and they saw a locum). Two days later, out of the blue they received a call from their GP practice saying they needed to bring their son to Starship immediately or Oranga Tamariki would be called. They raced across the Harbour Bridge where further imaging revealed a fractured hip requiring surgery and a spica cast.
During the infant’s admission, doctors concluded the child also had 19 rib fractures and diagnosed non-accidental injury. The father was charged and then convicted of causing grievous bodily harm and is currently more than two years into a six-year prison sentence. Four international specialists have subsequently reviewed the same scans and found the so-called rib fractures don’t exist. Other specialists have concluded the hip fracture is consistent with the father’s description of the shower accident.
Case 3 – The Farmers: A Central Otago farming couple’s lives were turned upside down after one of their eight-week-old twin boys was flown to Starship Hospital with seizures and bleeding on the brain. The baby, who wasn’t born until almost an hour and a half after his twin, experienced breathing difficulties shortly after birth and his parents repeatedly raised concerns about his health in the weeks that followed. Initially, doctors in Dunedin considered whether his condition was linked to a birth injury or a rare brain disorder and the parents believed they were finally getting answers.
But once at Starship, the focus shifted to the healthy twin, who was taken to hospital in Dunedin to see if he could provide any clues as to what was wrong with his twin brother. A full body x-ray was performed and the mother says she was told by Dr Patrick Kelly at Starship that whether they were formally accused of causing the second twin’s head injury all depended on what showed up in the x-ray of the first twin. The turning point came when doctors concluded twin one had fractures to his knees and a possible hip fracture. The parents lost custody of both babies and spent more than two years battling police, Oranga Tamariki and the courts, a fight they say cost them nearly $300,000 and ultimately their farm business. When the Delve team obtained the medical records and imaging and engaged independent international specialists to review the case, those experts concluded there was no evidence of the fractures in the knees or hip of twin one, the very fractures that had become the deciding factor in the diagnosis of non-accidental injury and the removal of the children.
Case 4 – Pro athlete: A professional athlete endured almost two years of police investigations, child protection scrutiny and ultimately a three-week criminal jury trial after being accused of causing multiple rib fractures to his four-week-old baby. The infant had been born following a rapid delivery and was later found to have a severe vitamin D deficiency. When the baby was taken to hospital, doctors concluded the injuries were non-accidental and police launched a criminal investigation. The father and his wife, a nurse, maintained there must be medical explanations that had not been adequately explored.
As part of its investigation, the Delve team engaged international experts in paediatric radiology, orthopaedic surgery and obstetrics to review the medical evidence. Their conclusions differed significantly from those of the New Zealand doctors, with experts challenging the fracture findings and arguing that the baby’s birth history, severe vitamin D deficiency and other possible medical explanations had not been adequately considered. At the pro athlete’s trial, the international experts also told the jury that two of the fractures occurred after the baby’s hospital admission, while he was under 24-hour watch. The case ultimately became the focus of the second season of Diagnosis of a Crime and provided a rare opportunity for the evidence underpinning such allegations to be rigorously tested in court.
Case 5 – Jo*: In a small South Island town, the parents of a baby who has cerebral palsy due to a traumatic, poorly managed birth were placed under intensive child protection supervision after doctors identified rib fractures and diagnosed them as non-accidental.
Not long after his birth, the baby had sustained a femur fracture, resulting from his father tripping and falling onto the infant’s leg. His parents immediately took him to the local hospital, which, because of the baby’s fragile physical state, had him flown to the larger public hospital in Christchurch. Doctors there found the baby’s femur fracture was consistent with the accident described, but when an x-ray also found rib fractures of various ages they concluded these were likely caused by non-accidental injury.
The infant had suffered significant birth trauma and has required multiple rounds of CPR (a known cause of rib fractures in infants), yet Oranga Tamariki relied primarily on the opinion of a Christchurch paediatrician and failed to consult the extensive network of health professionals caring for the child. The family says the state intervention has caused significant harm to their baby, and they are currently still under investigation by police.
Case 6 – Hunter*: A Waikato mother who endured a highly traumatic birth with twin boys. Her waters broke at 34 weeks and the hospital sent her home. At 36 weeks she returned but after labouring for 15 hours she wouldn’t dilate past 5cm and was sent for an emergency c-section. She felt the whole procedure. It was then discovered doctors had left in some of the cervical stitches from a previous procedure so she was unable to birth naturally.
The mother lost 2.3 litres of blood and had emergency surgery. The babies remained in hospital for three weeks. At eight weeks old, the mother brought them to hospital with suspected seizures. They were flown to Starship, where they were told their head injuries – one to the left side of the head, the other to the right side – were non-accidental. The babies were uplifted by Oranga Tamariki and have been in four different non-kin foster homes over the past two years. The mother is allowed a supervised visit with her sons once every three weeks.
Since Reid and her team began their inquiry, more than 20 families have contacted them with similar stories, with more getting in touch every week.
“This isn’t about people who abuse their kids – it’s about people who don’t. And the podcasts have shown, step by step, what can happen to innocent families,” says Reid. “I understand there needs to be a process to assess infant injuries, but as we all learned in the Dunedin trial, suspicion is not evidence.”
*Not their real names
Listen to both seasons of Fractured and both seasons of Diagnosis of a Crime on our podcast channel Delve. Since 2023, Delve has produced more than 130 episodes across four award-winning investigative podcast series. With almost 8 million downloads, Delve sits in the top 1 percent most downloaded podcasts in the world. Diagnosis of a Crime won Best Podcast at the 2026 Media Awards and Best True Crime Podcast at the 2026 NZ Radio and Podcast Awards. Fractured was also a finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast at both the 2025 and 2026 NZ Radio and Podcast Awards.
