Father should not have got off, says dead baby's doctor

By STEVE HOPKINS

The doctor criticised for his role in the case of the severely brain-damaged Nelson baby says it was wrong to let the man accused of murdering her walk free.

"I think it would have been appropriate for him to be charged with something and found guilty of it, so people can recognise what he did was wrong," Christchurch Hospital paediatric neurologist Paul Shillito told the Herald on Sunday in an exclusive interview yesterday.

"There has got to be an expression that society doesn't condone this. But in saying this, I don't know what that punishment should be. I think he's been punished enough by what has happened."

Dr Shillito, whose explanation of the baby's condition sent the 34-year-old Nelson man into a downward spiral that ended in the child's death, spoke out yesterday after criticism this week of the way he had handled the case.

A complaint, believed to have come from the man's extended family, has been lodged with Health and Disability Commissioner, Ron Paterson. On Thurs-day, a jury acquitted the man, whose name is suppressed, of murdering his five-month-old child in May, although he had admitting killing her to police.

However, despite thinking the man should not have got off, Dr Shillito said he did not think murder was the right charge. A new charge needed to be introduced to cover cases like this, he said.

But Auckland Law lecturer Scott Optican disagreed: "Cases like this are rare and unusual and I don't think the system needs to respond to it in any profound way."

He said forming a diminished responsibility charge for cases like this was not necessary.

The man suffocated his daughter just hours after Dr Shillito told him she had a rare medical condition, called lissencephaly, and that her brain hadn't developed past that of a 13-week-old foetus and would never improve.

During the accused's trial, at the Nelson District Court, the jury heard that the hospital's neurosurgeon, Martin MacFarlane, showed the couple scans of their baby's damaged brain in a nursing station, and that they were kept waiting overnight for an explanation of their baby's condition by Dr Shillito.

Dr Shillito said the investigation would clear himself and the hospital of any wrong doing.

He said he was too busy to see the couple earlier, and that the nursing station was the only place doctors could show the couple scans of their daughter's brain because that was where the computers were. Dr Shillito said it wasn't an ideal spot but it was private and "no one was around".

When Dr Shillito explained the baby's condition, it was done in a private room and he said all precautions were taken to ensure the family could cope, including offering a social worker and calling their house that night. The couple declined to speak with the social worker. They also refused to speak with the Herald on Sunday.

- THE HERALD ON SUNDAY