The 'demonised' couple who've finally been heard

A development in a child abuse case highlights the near-impossibility of going up against medical professionals in New Zealand

When Joris de Bres called a young mother last week to break the news her case of child abuse was going back to the Court of Appeal, she and her husband were joyous.

Her fight to clear her name is far from over, and the couple still face deportation, but de Bres says it's a breakthrough.

"They've been through a whole period, especially the mother, of being demonised," says de Bres, the former race relations and human rights commissioner.

"From being a concerned parent who's looked after their child and taking them to the hospital because they're worried, to being a child abuser and a demon."

He says events rolled out over just 24 hours when the couple, known as Zita and Ravi, took their eight-week-old baby to Starship Hospital in Auckland, after being referred by their GP.

The baby was hospitalised for two weeks and underwent a series of examinations before she was taken into care. Zita was sent to prison for two and a half years for child abuse and her husband was also convicted for supporting his wife. He wasn't allowed to care for his daughter.

After several years the family is together but the convictions hang over them.

Last week, in a rare ruling, the Criminal Cases Review Commission sent the abuse case back to the Court of Appeal after new medical evidence emerged.

De Bres tells The Detail about his role in the case that has spanned several years, and Newsroom's investigative journalists Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner explain their search for overseas experts whose evidence was crucial to the commission's decision.

"It's not just about being accused. It's about being new immigrants, second language, you've lost your baby, you don't really know the court system," says Reid. "You've now got Oranga Tamariki, they've taken the child.

"You've just got this kind of line up, which just is really impossible for a Kiwi to navigate, let alone a new immigrant Kiwi to navigate. This is a nightmare that you just do not wake up from, year after year after year."

Reid and Sumner took on the case after being contacted by de Bres, but they were already aware of numerous similar cases.

"She had a very traumatic birth with her baby," says Sumner of Zita. "And then at eight weeks old, the baby started having seizures. Up until that point, they'd had Plunket visits, doctor visits, GP, everything. There was no avoidance of any kind of medical care."

At Starship it was found the baby had a raised fontanelle and a full body x-ray showed up a number of fractures.

"Then also what some people term the triad, which is that she had swelling on the brain and a retinal haemorrhage, so bleeding behind the eye and bleeding in the dura, in between the layers of between the brain and the skull."

Within 24 hours, the paediatricians diagnosed this as non-accidental injury or highly suspicious for non-accidental injury. From that point they were under suspicion and Oranga Tamariki took over care of the baby, which was to last more than four years.

In a statement the Criminal Cases Review Commission pointed to reports from four overseas medical experts whose evidence formed part of the submission by Reid and Sumner.

The commission said those experts "challenge aspects of the original medical conclusions, identify diagnostic investigations they say were not undertaken, and raise alternative possible explanations for some of the child's injuries".

Sumner says there was a turning point in their exhaustive efforts to track down and persuade the specialists to look at the case and write reports.

"When we send this information off to these specialists, we don't know what they're going to come back with. They could say, oh, no, that actually does look like non-accidental injury to us.

"But they didn't. All of them came back and said, no, these are signs of metabolic bone issues. You've got a traumatic birth.

"You've got severely low vitamin D. And these are actually, these injuries are more symptomatic of a metabolic bone disorder, having a number of fractures, non-displaced fractures with no symptoms, no outward symptoms, no bruising where the site of the fracture is."

Reid says they had no choice but to go overseas to find specialists.

"The big problem in this country and the big problem with these cases is that no doctors will go up against Starship.

"It's a strong statement to make, but it's true, because every case that we've been involved in, the families have got doctors who back them. They've got orthopaedic surgeons that back them, that believe them, but they will not go up against the doctors at the Starship Hospital or they are not interested in getting involved in a legal case and they are not interested in going to court."

Reid says the Court of Appeal has three options with the case. It could uphold the convictions, it could quash the conviction and order a retrial, or it could quash the conviction and Zita is exonerated.

De Bres has started a petition to Parliament calling for a systemic inquiry into the way doctors can diagnose a crime. He also wants Oranga Tamariki's uplift actions further investigated.

"There are a whole lot of questions around the uplift of children that I think have still not been properly settled. But I think at the heart of it, I would most like to see a good hard look at whether it's right for doctors to diagnose a crime. I don't believe that paediatricians can diagnose child abuse. I just don't."

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