#478 Maggie Freleng with Tonia Miller

I've spent the last five years of my journalism career interviewing people who say they've been wrongfully convicted, and among the women I've spoken to, one of the most common charges against them is shaking their babies to death. I see these cases so often that I can't include them all on this show. The accusation of shaking a baby

My name is Tania Miller, and I was incarcerated in Michigan Women's Aran Valley Correctional Facility for eighteen years for a crime I didn't commit.

This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today Tanya Miller. Tanya Miller was born May nineteen eighty three and grew up in Fulton, Michigan.

Growing up, we lived in the country and my mother worked at a plastics company at the time, and then later on she started working for manufacturing company for car parts, and my father worked at General Motors.

But we grew up, you.

Know, not very financially secure. We struggled a lot financially, but we were like a really close family, all of the siblings.

Tanya has a huge family.

My father had been married and divorced a couple of times, and so I have siblings you know, from him from prior marriages.

How many of you.

My parents have five together, and then my mother had us sixth one later. But my father has four prior to yeah.

Ten siblings. Okay, and where do you in the lineup of every in the middle?

Yeah?

Wow?

So what was that like?

Maah and my older brother, my mom's oldest were like, we're two peas in a pod.

So we were always together.

So I was a little tomboy running around doing whatever my brother did. I admired him so much, and we just he would take something apart and I'd put it together. He'd want to climb a tree. I want to climb the tree if he broke a bone that year. I broke a bone that year.

It was like we literally followed suit with each other.

What were some of your interests.

I love having my hands in the dirt. I just love I love gardening. I loved anything that had anything to do with nature. So we were always on four wheelers, on horses. We were doing four h raising chickens and turkeys and cornish tens and you know those kinds of things. So anything that had something to do with nature.

Then when she was eleven, Tanya's parents separated.

When Tanya moved in she was twelve, I was six.

This is Whitney Wesner. She goes by wit.

Tanya is considered well, I consider her my best friend and my older sister.

When Tanya's parents split, her mom moved to the family to Battle Creek in the house next door to six year old Wit.

We even had a shared driveway. I mean I literally could jump out my bedroom window and go up their backsteps right into their house. And I just automatically took a liking to her as like I looked up to her. I actually hung out with her more than I did her siblings.

I just so, what was it about Tanya? Because I'm sure some of her siblings were closer in age to you as well.

I was just drawn to her as a person, as like her energy, and I was like, I want to hang out with her. You know, she was the older cool kid to me.

And she kept Wit around even if it annoyed Tanya's older friends or boyfriends.

Why is this ten twelve year old just constantly wround you? You know what I mean? Like tell her to go away and she's like.

No, Why do you think?

Because I think if I was when I was her age, I wanted nothing to do with kids, Like I'd be like, why is this ten year old around me? Why do you think she'll let you around.

I don't know her, and I just there's just this connection there.

Wit says Tanya and her did everything together from baseball.

So she's pitching me and she's kind of probably underestimating the whole ten year old with the vat And she pitched me one and turned to talk to somebody, and I clocked it, and oh, she had the biggest black eye.

Oh my god.

We had to run into my mom's house and put peas on her face like she's like your daughter actually hit the ball.

To soccer.

She was a great soccer player. So she would take me rollerblading, roora skating around the neighborhood. She did. She taught me a lot of things. She taught me a lot of things that she doesn't even know that she taught me. And you know, to this day, she is my best friend and that has never changed.

Tanya, by all accounts family and friends, was great with kids.

It was natural. It was natural for her. I never once saw her lose her patience.

As often happens with big families. Tanya stepped up to help her mom with all the kids.

That was really difficult because then I became like the living babysitter I was the one making sure all the kids, you know, had their dinner, had their baths, had their homework done and stuff. When mom was working, and she had to work a lot to support all of us, so she was hardly there.

Tanya played mom and then she became one.

At fifteen, I got into a relationship with somebody that was significantly older, not significantly he was twenty four and I didn't know it.

He said he was nineteen. So but I ended up.

Pregnant, and so I had a daughter at sixteen.

Wow. Yes, Tanya gave birth to a baby girl named Kayla.

But she had with all her siblings, had already been mothering at that point in her life, so having her own it wasn't like a typical teenager having a baby, Like what do I do?

But Tanya was still just sixteen.

I ended up not completing the high school scene. I went to like a night school, and so I was able to take my daughter with me.

And the relationship with Kayla's dad didn't last.

It was not a very good relationship, and I ended up getting back into a relationship with a boy that I had been with before.

A boy named Alan, and at eighteen, they had her second daughter, Alicia, you were going to school, were you working? How are you guys surviving?

Yeah, we were working.

I was a hostess and he I can't remember if he was a cooker, if he was doing dishes at the time, but he stepped up and really helped, like he get you know, he got jobs here and there when he could the teenagers. You don't always keep a job for long. But it was a struggle.

But as always there was wit. Now in her teens, she was ready to help.

So I would sit with the kids, you know, while she'd take a shower or you know. I was more involved than the child's father. Yeah, like I was there. It's not that she needed somebody else to help her, because Tanya was a great mother.

And she still had plans for herself and her future. She earned herself a scholarship to community college.

I wanted to go to be a pediatrician, ironically, but that unfortunately all fell through.

Alicia was a very sick baby from birth.

They during labor and delivery, they did lose her heartbeat at one point and had to do an internal monitor on her. So then they were very quickly trying to get her born. Wow, And so they were kind of worried about her being low birthway. She was six pounds, you know, she was small, but she wasn't you know, premi or anything like that. Immediately, everything seemed to be okay, But then after a couple of weeks at bringing her home,

Exactly.

My first experience with Alicia that scared me was she would she would you'd be holding her and she would just like gus for air out of nowhere. I would get nervous and just hand her back. I had never seen that in a child. She would space off at the bright lights and not even like blink.

She didn't want to eat very much. She would almost chew on the nipple as if she was teething, but she wasn't teething. Her diapers weren't she wasn't, you know, urinating like she was supposed to. It was just a lot of little things, and then eventually it was she looked like she was staring right through you she would just go limp.

Did you take her to the doctor multiple times? And what did they say?

That I was a paranoid mom and yeah, So when she had quit breathing, they basically told me that she was angry and learn how to.

Hold her breath.

That's what they said.

Yeah, so they didn't take me serious at all. I don't know if it was because I was a young, unwed mother of two children on Medicaid, and so that was why they didn't take me serious, but they put that in my file. So whenever I would call, I wouldn't even get the appointments.

She says. Her family and friends also knew something was wrong.

But we didn't.

We couldn't pinpoint anything.

We didn't know what.

To call it, what it was, what to research, so I had no idea.

October nineteenth, two thousand and one, started off normal for Tanya and her family.

Alan had gone fishing really early in the morning, and so I was up with the baby trying to get her to eat a bottle.

She absolutely refused to.

Eat, so she laid her back down.

Cayla got up a little bit later and had her cereal and was watching her movie and then eventually Alicia decided to wake up, and she was just as happy as could be.

They played until Alicia got fussy, and then called Wit to come and help while she got ready, Can.

You head over in about twenty minutes so that you can watch the girls while I jump in the shower. So I said, of course absolutely.

While she waited for Wit, Tanya tried to feed Alicia again.

So I'm holding her.

I'm feeding her, and she coughs, and formula is like pouring out of her eyeballs, out of her nose, out of her mouth, and so I hold her upright, and her one eye like went to the back, and like it just rolled to the back, and then she went limp, and it was so unexpected.

I had almost.

Dropped her, and so I laid her on the floor.

And I called nine to one one.

Tanya also called Wit.

All I hears frantically, is I Alicia's on the way to the hospital. She stopped breathing.

Alicia was raced to the hospital, transferred to a pediatric unit, and qut on life support. Then doctors ordered act scan that showed mild swelling in Alicia's brain as well as bleeding. An eye examination also found retinal hemorrhaging. By this time, Alan and the whole family had gathered in the hospital waiting room, anxious for any information about what was going on.

When the originally when the doctor walked in and said it, Alan kind of went after him, like the nerve of you, like this is not no, this didn't happen. And then they separated us and they started questioning him and started questioning me. But when they asked me to do like I just did with you and go through the entire day and tell them what happened throughout the day, they kept stopping me and leaving the room talking to whoever and coming back in and saying, well, that couldn't have

Have this, or you know.

It was always it was just like what I was saying was not what they wanted to hear, and so they kept making it seemed like I was changing my story when I'm simply just trying to tell you what happened from the beginning to the end.

It was harrowing and it was about to get worse. Alicia was taken off life support on October twentieth and died at seven twenty seven pm. She was eleven weeks old. Two days later, Tanya was brought to the station for questioning by Detective Tim Hurt of the Battle Creek Police Department, but they didn't get far. Tanya asked for an attorney and was released the next day.

I guess they didn't have enough to even arraign me at the time, so they just let me go.

But Tanya's life was falling apart. The state eventually took away her two year old and placed her in foster care.

It was very difficult being home and looking over and seeing a toddler bed with no toddler in it, you know, a bass in that with no baby in it, and just to know like it's never going to be the same again.

And at eighteen she was being investigated in her newborn baby's death.

It was so traumatic and having no help, not getting any kind of help therapy wise, having no way to really truly grieve, and just knowing every move was being watched, every conversation I was having, you know, anything I'm just all over the newspapers. I didn't want to have a TV. I didn't want to see the news. I just didn't want the trauma of all of it anymore. I seriously had contemplated suicide. Just life was meaningless at that point.

Were you even able to grieve Alicia?

Not like I should have.

No, I would find myself at the cemetery a lot, just you know, laying there with her basically, but to actually grieve. Looking back, No, I never did have that opportunity.

Even though she wanted out of life, Tanya knew she had to stick around.

I couldn't follow through it that I had Kayla, and I truly believed that I was going to be found innocent.

Of that, but she wasn't. Tanya was arrested, charged, and tried for the death of her baby Alicia on April eighth, two thousand and three. Trial prosecutor Daniel Buscher called multiple experts to prove his case that Tanya had shaken Alicia to death. The star was the man who performed the autopsy, doctor Brian Hunter.

His testimony was that she had retinal hemorrhages and bleeding on the outer layers as a brain and swelling of the brain, and those was the classic tryad of symptoms for shaking baby syndrome.

This is Dave Moran.

I am the co director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan Law School.

Dave says, this tryaud of symptoms is the gold standard for shaking baby syndrome. Brain injury, bleeding around the brain, and bleeding around the eyes. That's what every doctor at the time was taught, including pathologist doctor Hunter.

So to him, this was a slam dunk case of shaking baby syndrome.

Wit was thirteen during Tanya's trial, and she remembers every moment of it.

Honestly. To sit there and listen to how they portrayed this person that I've known for so long on a daily basis, it broke my heart.

What were some of those things that they were saying about her that you knew not to be true.

Oh, she's a young mother and she just.

Snapped, got headaches. You're strussing out living at the Dolls house.

You have no money, no job, you're not getting along as your boyfriend.

You take care of your child ninety nine point.

Nine percent the night, and you snapped that particular day, That's when happened, isn't it.

And it's like, no, I never once saw her loser patience with children like that, never once saw her even get frustrated in that type of way. So to hear them portray ray somebody you love and know so deeply on the news and in the papers and in a courtroom where you can't say anything, it was just it was awful. It was awful.

Yeah, what did she look like during all that?

In shock? And Matt was portrayed badly too. Oh look she has no emotion. Oh she's sitting there speechless. She's a teenager who lost her daughters, and you people, you know, you know she's being charged with these horrendous crimes.

Tanya needed a great defense to beat the quote slam dunk case. The prosecution claimed they had.

My mom, bless her heart, you know, went through the yellow pages trying to find an attorney who would agreed to take a murder case. She found Headinger and Headinger out of Kalamazoo. Her and my grandmother had to go through there fork just to get the funds to retain him.

Tanya's family paid Edwin Hedinger for what they thought was going to be the best defense, but the defense actually agreed that it was shaking baby party. It wasn't.

Yes, the original defense at trial did not contest to shaking baby syndrome.

Dave says, in those days, there weren't many people disputing these science behind shaking baby syndrome, at least not locally.

I really don't think that there was anybody in Michigan who was questioning any part of the shaking baby syndrome dogma at that point.

So Tanya's attorney worked with the knowledge and resources he had.

He believed that a crime had been committed, but didn't believe that it was me that did it, So his focus was on somebody else.

Doing it, someone else like Alan.

I didn't want to believe it, and I still to this day don't believe it. But it was just, you know, when they're saying that this is absolutely positively what happened, and I know I didn't do it, my mind is like, you know, maybe he did, but I don't believe he ever would have harmed her.

Especially now that you know.

Yeah, And I mean I knew him back then and I knew that's not something that he would have done.

But at the time that's the only defense she had casting reasonable doubt as to who may have shaken Alicia.

Maybe the baby could have been shaken when she was in the custody of her paternal grandparents the day before, and then the symptoms only showed up the next day.

Tanya also testified in her own defense.

She tried to testify about Alicia's sickliness, her troubles breathing before, but that didn't really lead anywhere because again, that wasn't the defense theory. There was no expert to back that up. Maybe there was something else going on here.

Is there any explanation why that wasn't Was it tried to be presented and then it was barred, or why wasn't any of this previous medical history entered?

Well, I think the defense layer correctly recognized that it would have been treated as a red herring. The prosecution would have criticized him for creating a red herring because you've heard from all the experts that none of what happened before matters. All that matters now is this baby was shaken just before she died, so none of that would have worked.

Tanya felt like there was no winning.

At that point, I kind of felt like I'm going to prison.

During jury deliberations, she remembers her lawyer saying.

If the jury comes out and they refuse to look you in the eye, you're pretty much guaranteed that they're going to find you guilty.

And that's exactly what happened. My heart just.

Dropped watching them walk out of there, and only one of them looked me in the eye. The rest of them just looked at the floor and made their way back to their seats before they handed over their verdict.

I was not actually prepared for them to find her guilty, because I knew she was innocent, so that and I mean, who can prepare you for that?

My niece was in the background, and if you ever pull up the court documents, you will hear her like scream when they read the verdict teeth.

And it was not even a second after that that they were dragging her out, and I'm trying to reach over the banister and grab her hands, and you know, everybody's crying. Everybody's screaming, and we're all trying to grab at her. You know, they wouldn't even let her say anything, you know, they just drug her out like this. Horrendous criminal. They wouldn't even let her say about.

It her family.

So for me, you know, thirteen, seeing them my best friend away and my bigger sister to me like that, and it was heartbreaking.

On April fourteenth, two thousand and three, then twenty year old Tanya Miller was convicted of second screen murder and was later sentenced to almost three decades behind bars. What were your first years in prison?

Like, it's a very it's a huge culture shock to just have everything taken away and just be told what you can have or what you can do. And so they asked you a bunch of questions about, you know, your mental health, about your.

Past and whatnot.

And this man literally looked me in my face and was like, you can't tell me that you're twenty years old with a twenty year sentence and you've never done drugs or alcohol. Like he did not believe that you had never done drugs at aol, never never had an inclination to attempt anything, still don't. So it just blew me away that, like my attorney didn't believe in me. And now I'm sitting here and I'm telling you that I've never done this and you're like, I don't believe you.

What and you had doctors not believing.

You and doctors not believing me.

Yeah, I imagine feeling so small when nobody believes what you're saying. Yeah, But Tanya's family believed her, and for as long as they could, they tried to support her.

My family, you know, they're not financially secure really, so that drive and you know, having to buy like photo tickets or you know, a meal card or whatever to be able to sit comfortably and just chat and you know, eat with them and whatnot.

It was a lot on them.

And my mom had a really hard time leaving me there, and my baby's sister had a really hard time leaving me there, and so my mom kind of felt like it wasn't worth bringing her or coming when it was, it took so long for her to recover afterward.

So they stopped visiting as much.

I'm like, I have so many so if they just come, you know, once a month, I'll have somebody come, you know, every every month for a year. And it just didn't work out that way at all. So the longer you do, the less you'll see them, the less you'll hear from them. The less a lands of the phone, and that is one hundred percent the truth.

That as always there was Wit writing and calling and checking in.

I feared for her life in prison, you know, all the time, because of what they say she did and what people can do to people in prison at her children, even though she didn't so like. I constantly feared for her.

But Tanya says she kept out of trouble by keeping busy.

I worked the entire time, and I worked as much as they would let me, and I took as many classes as I could, whatever I could get into. I even applied for like AA and NA, just to be a part of something.

And between work and classes, Tanya's life was passing her by. No twenty first birthday celebration, no college commencement ceremony.

So many missed Christmases, birthdays, holidays. Life's not fair. Life's not fair.

And Tanya was missing out on her daughter, Kayla's life as well. At first, Kayla staved with family, and Wit tried to remain a constant in Kayla's life too.

I went out there every weekend. I bought we had matching pajamas. That was my little buddy, blues Clues. I took off his pictures as many pictures as I could every weekend that I went. I went out there every weekend, and I made this giant photo album for her and just added through it throughout the years of like the letters she would send me or the drawing she would send me. I just tried to keep her in the loop with the other child until I couldn't anymore.

Eventually, Kayla was adopted and denied contact with Tanya and her loved ones, and the years kept passing by until one day, out of the blue, a man reached out to Tanya by the name of Jeremy Perry.

He was just a layman on the street. He had no interest in the whole system or anything. He was

I'm thinking it was about twenty fifteen when we first reviewed the case. We by that point had litigated several other shaking baby syndrome cases. We had our first case in twenty ten out of Julie Bomber, and we had taken on several other cases.

Dave says that in the decade since Tanya had been convicted, there had been a sea change in shake and baby syndrome science.

What we've learned about shake baby syndrome really as twofold is, first of all, it may not exist at all because of the biomechanical difficulties.

Dave says, it's virtually impossible to shake a baby hard enough to cause the triad of symptoms without breaking its neck.

If you could shake a baby hard enough to cause these particular symptoms, you would almost certainly fracture the neck and that would be the cause of death. And there was no neck injury to Alicia.

And then there was Alicia's medical history.

One of the important things is is there a prior history and have there been prior instances of the baby not being well which can lead us and especially of course our experts to see are any of the alternative causes for the symptoms present, and we had all of that in spades.

Here.

We had medical records showing that Alicia had had a series of collapses before our student attorneys went out and interviewed the people who had seen Alicia have these problems.

And there was a smoking gun that came from the prosecution's own expert in.

One line on page seven of the autopsy report, which was the very last page of the report. The forensic pathologist who did the autopsy on Alicia after she died, and he actually noted that Alicia had a cute bronchial pneumonia pneumonia.

The slides from Alicia's lungs during autopsy showed a cute bronchial pneumonia. Tanya had been right all along. Alicia was really sick. In so many of these cases, women are just not believed. Is this a pattern, you see? And how is the pneumonia not caught? It's just kind of mind blowing.

It is it is. It's amazing that you could have slides. I mean, it's so obvious that there's something terribly terribly wrong, but it's this dogma that it still exists today.

A dogma that leads doctors to almost instinctively diagnosed shaken baby syndrome, ignoring the pleading mothers in front of them.

This was somebody who is doing her level best to try and get the appropriate help for her infant and was getting blown off. Shaking baby syndrome results in lots and lots of wrongful conviction of women, probably more than anything else, because women are usually the primary caregivers for young infants.

Dave hired four of the leading experts in shaking baby syndrome to look at Tanya's case.

They all came to very similar, overlapping conclusions about what had actually happened to Alicia. Doctor Francis Green, who is one of the world's leading experts in pediatric lung pathology, who looked at the slides and he said, those slides are inconsistent with life because Alicia had a case of acute pneumonia that was so serious that she could not have survived it. So we filed the case.

In twenty eighteen, they were granted a hearing and up against the experts and the facts, the judge ruled in favor of Tanya and granted her a new trial.

It was really no contest between the prosecution's one expert from two thousand and three coming back and our experts, and so the prosecution knew they could not win a retrial, and so in early twenty twenty one, Tanya was released, and that was a glorious day.

Tanya remembers leaving the prison and the people inside she had grown up with.

And so then when I was leaving, there all banging on the windows and you know, waving their goodbyes and everything. Eighteen years, eighteen years, Yeah, it becomes a family unit in there.

But now Tanya was free to be with her family on the outside.

So I took some time just to really get to know all of my siblings' children, how my nieces and nephews, because they were all married and divorce and having kids and everything while I was gone. You know, I lost my father, I lost my grandparents. I have one surviving grandmother right now, and so it was I took a lot of time just kind of focusing on family.

I'm surprised I didn't break her bones from houganers so.

Hard, and that family includes wit.

Wait, is this real? Like she's really out, Like Okay, I'm immediately going to Michigan. I spent the night there with her. You know, we had a bonfire and hung out, and we'd never been able to hang out as adults.

And remember the photo album Whit made while Tanya was in prison.

She gave it to her, pictures of when we were kids together. I had all her letters she wrote me from jail in it, even her newspaper clip things. I clipped them all out as a kid.

Wit still admires and looks up to Tanya after all these years.

You see her and she's always laughing. And you know, she's not sitting over there like with a nasty look on her face or you know what I mean. She's happy. She's living her life that she deserved to live. And I tell her, live your life than she is.

I've kind of done a few things I probably never would have done.

What jumping out of a plane. Oh my gosh, she went skydiving. I went skydiving. Yeah, how was that? It was incredible? To be honest, yeah it was.

I can't even describe the free inness that you feel just doing that.

But there's still one part about her life that's on hold, her relationship with her first born Kayla, now twenty three years old. Tanya's reached out a couple of times but has been shut out.

Trying to put myself in her shoes and just give her that time, in that space and hope that eventually she'll understand that I loved her all of these years, and I didn't do this to her little sister, and I would have been in her life if I had the opportunity, and you know, just that her family really truly does love her. Everybody wants to get to know her. Everybody wants a part of her life. They were all kind of tol that they couldn't be a part of

We just wish her well.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, at least thirty shaken baby syndrome convictions have been overturned in the last three decades. Prosecutors continue to charge parents and caretakers with this crime. Thank you for listening to wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in the episode description to see how