>> tonight, two stories in this special edition of frontline... >> 9-1-1. >> first... >> she's not breathing. >> ...a sudden death... >> she was limp, she was blue around the lips. >> they had a dead baby. somebody was going to get convicted. >> frontline correspondent ac thompson of propublica, together with npr, investigates "the child cases." >> just because there were bruises doesn't mean that the child was ever hit. >> and raises serious questions about the state of pediatric forensics. >> there are people out there that have been wrongly convicted.

>> and in our second story tonight... >> you're going to get a free education. >> ...are some for-profit colleges exploiting a generous new gi bill? >> there's so much money at stake that they have hired substantial numbers of recruiters to go after these vets. >> these people are putting their lives on the line. they shouldn't be treated like this. >> these two stories on this special edition of frontline. >> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. and by the corporation for public broadcasting. major funding is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. and by reva & david logan. committed to investigative journalism as the guardian of the public interest. additional funding is provided by the park foundation. dedicated to heightening public

awareness of critical issues. and by the frontline journalism fund, supporting investigative reporting and enterprise journalism. additional funding for this program and for frontline's expanded broadcast season is provided by the bill and melinda gates foundation. >> thompson: i'm heading to amarillo, texas, to investigate a case that began 11 years ago. it was a saturday morning, and a mechanic named ernie lopez was babysitting the children of a local doctor at his home. the youngest was six-month-old isis vas.

>> i fed the kids breakfast. i had them on the kitchen table, and i had isis in her swing. she had her bottle but she wasn't eating it. so i got her out of the swing, and i went to go put her in the crib. and i went to the kitchen. i left her in the crib, and when i went back in there, i noticed that isis-- she was limp. she was just there, and her lips were blue. >> is she breathing right now? >> okay, i need you to keep doing cpr. >> thompson: ernie lopez' mother, rosa lopez, lived across the street. >> we started hearing sirens. that sticks in my mind, you know, that that was the

beginning of the nightmare-- the sirens, the fire trucks, and then later on, the ambulance. ( sirens wailing ) >> i hit her on her thigh, on her leg, trying to get her attention. and i shook her a little bit. i jiggled her a little bit. i put my ear to her chest, and i heard her heart, just beating, just racing. >> thompson: ernie's brother eddie was called in. >> my mom came over, talked to me, and told me, "hey, could you go up to the hospital?" and i said, okay, so i drove on to the hospital. >> thompson: but at the hospital, doctors and nurses were alarmed. they found bruising and vaginal bleeding. and the last person alone with the child was ernie lopez. >> so ernie was calling me from the hospital. he called me one or two times, telling me that they were asking him lots of questions. >> i said, "ernie, what's going on." he goes, "bro, they're trying to accuse me of killing the baby and raping the baby." i was, like, "what?" >> he told me that he was trying to tell them, you know, that the baby had been sick for days. and they didn't want to hear that. they wanted to know just what

was going on within the last 30 minutes or so.i >> detective moore would come in and ask me, you know, different questions, and then he said he wanted a statement from me. and i was so upset, i was crying. >> eddie called me and he told me that they had arrested ernie. >> they handcuffed him and put him in the police car. and we're, like, "where is the jail at?" because we've have never been in trouble. >> thompson: isis died the next day. medical examiner joni mcclain would perform the autopsy. to mcclain, the evidence pointed to sexual assault and murder. she found bruising on isis' head and body, hemorrhaging in the brain, and a laceration at the entrance to the vagina. in her final report, she called it homicide by multiple blunt force injuries. ernie lopez was charged with aggravated sexual assault.

and, after a short trial, he was found guilty. before sentencing, medical examiner joni mcclain testified that the baby died from this violent assault. lopez was sentenced to 60 years in prison. >> you know, sometimes, it just hits me: "man, i'm in prison." i never thought i would be in prison, never in a hundrediok years. >> thompson: for the past year and a half, frontline, propublica and npr have been investigating medical examiners and the field of forensic pathology. we found a broken system in which the most basic principles of science and investigation are often ignored, with no national standards of any kind. >> it amazes me that such an

important aspect of our government as medical legal death investigation doesn't have to have accreditation. i mean, everything else is accredited-- hospitals are accredited, barbers are accredited. >> thompson: we were told that some of the most difficult cases to investigate are those involving young children. here, sudden deaths are often assumed to be murder, and the accused. we decided to take a closer look. dr. jon thogmartin is chief medical examiner for st. petersburg, florida. tell me about the challenges that child autopsies pose. >> well, they're hard because of the emotional content that comes with them, the anger and despair that you'll experience on your own and others. they'll come in with a lot of expectations, and so you'll hav4 to shield yourself from that. you have to objectify the kid and just find out what happened to them. >> thompson: but finding out what happens in child cases is especially complicated..÷b

>> it's going to take less disease than it does to kill an adult, and whatever you're looking for is going to be smaller and less. >> thompson: thogmartin has seen this firs0u22]' when he became chief medical examiner, he reversed two child death cases handled by his predecessor. >> i told them that there's... basically, the injuries that are described here aren't here. hemorrhages on the eyes. >> thompson: they imagined injuries that weren't there? >> they imagined injuries that weren't there. the mindset is prosecutorial-- homicide until proven otherwise. they get caught up in the anger, the emotion, the despair, and you can't do that. >> thompson: the problem thogmartin was talking about actually blew up into a national scandal a few years ago in canada. a rash of wrongful convictions led to a high-profile inquiry and a new set of standards. but in the u.s., few are talking about these solutions. let me know if these are nationally required. >> okay. >> thompson: are you required, in child death cases, to be a board-certified forensic

pathologist in the u.s.? >> no. >> thompson: are you required to have any peer review of child death cases? >> no. >> thompson: are you required to review the medical records in child death cases before or after doing your autopsy? >> no. >> thompson: are you required to consult with specialists in the field on difficult child death cases? >> no >> thompson: after combing through court records, frontline, propublica and npr found nearly two dozen cases in the u.s. and canada in which people were prosecuted for killing children based on questionable autopsies and testimony. all of them were eventually cleared of wrongdoing. we found one of these cases just a day's drive from ernie lopez in el paso. >> hurry up and get my own place, and get a car and everything... >> thompson: monea tyson spent

nearly two years in lockdown in the county jail before being acquitted of the murder of her two-year-old son, jayceon. >> that last thing i seen was my son not breathing, you know, and i seen his face turning pale and everything. >> thompson: the case was based largely on the findings of the medical examin. >> it was kind of hard to comprehend that someone would charge you with something like that. i knew me and i knew what i didn't do, and it was hard to go through that. >> thompson: the autopsy on tyson's infant son was performed by dr. paul shrode. he found the case a homicide based on blunt force trauma to the head. but that's not what the forensic pathologist for the defense found. >> looking at the kind of force you need to create that kind of injury to the brain-- there was no skull fracture, there was no other injury to the brain in any other location. so it seemed to her that the injury described as blunt force trauma really didn't exist. >> thompson: in the end, the

defense expert argued jayceon died of an infection. she also testified that some of the bruises dr. shrode saw asam signs of abuse were birthmarks. the defense attorneys made a point of dr. shrode's lack of board certification, and >> he had falsified his resume in the first place. we had also discovered that he was involved in another capital case where a man was apparently on death row, due in large part to dr. shrode's testimony and his findings at another autopsy, which were apparently debunked, unfounded. >> thompson: dr. shrode declined our repeated requests for an interview. >> anybody who's doing an autopsy on a kid that's not board certified in the field, they should be blown out of the water. i don't know how they make it when they're not. anyone who's not consulting the specialists, not getting the medical records, i don't see how they make it on a day-to-day basis. i don't see how they're not run

out of town on a rail. >> thompson: dr. shrode's background came under review by the county commissioners. they fired him just months before monea tyson's trial, but did not specify why. >> only kfox cameras were rolling as monea tyson heard the words "not guilty." >> at the end of this trial, the jurors asked to see monea tyson. in all the years that i've been doing this, i've never heard of that before. the jurors hugged her, they cried with her, they asked her when she was going to see her kids again. >> thompson: another problem in the child cases that we uncovered-- there is little agreement among medical experts on what causes children to die unexpectedly. pediatric science has undergone a revolution in recent years. one diagnosis, in particular,!-/ has come under fire-- shaken baby syndrome. take this case from decatur, georgia.

i came here to meet melonie ware. ♪ ware was a daycare provider convicted of shaking a nine-month-old baby to death. she was sentenced to life in prison, but in 2009, at a retrial, the medical examiner's findings were called into question, and she was acquitted. >> all my life, i've loved children, just playing with children, being on their level. that's what i liked to do. >> thompson: it all began when ware, a certified childcare provider, was watching jaden paige at her home daycare center. the baby became unresponsive. she was taken in for questioning and arrested that night(xiír >> i was being taken away from my family, my husband, my kids, my parents. and there wasn't anything that i could do to stop it. >> thompson: the medical examiner, gerald gowitt, found

three nearly-identical half-inch bruises beneath baby jaden's scalp. he argued at trial that melonie shook the baby violently, hitting the baby's head three times, causing the bleeding and swelling that added up to(w classic shaken baby syndrome. >> i was just in shock, because i never thought that they would actually come back and say that i did that i couldn't believe it. >> in baby cases, they approach a problem differently. if the caregiver says she did not injure this child, and we have no way to prove this child's death, then the caregiver must be the murderer. it's opposite with all legal theory. >> thompson: attorney tony axam ware's retrial. >> because we're more sensitive to the death of children, we have to say... it doesn't go unexplained. we say there must have been some violence involved.

>> thompson: documents we found in the files of the medical examiner, gerald gowitt, raised questions about his independence from law enforcement. before doing the autopsy, dr. gowitt met with two prosecutors and four different detectives, all members of the county child abuse task force. >> they're supposed to be an unbiased entity of dekalb county. they are supposed to be totally unbiased. i don't think they should have met at all. >> thompson: we tried repeatedly w sakpeith dr. gowitt about the ware case, but he declined our requests. with his wife in prison, reggie ware didn't give up. >> i sold this house right here about six months later ... >> thompson: one by one, he began selling houses he'd acquired over years as part of his real estate business. it would cost him more than $700,000 to challenge his wife's conviction. >> this house right here was melonie's grandmother's house. they kind of got upset when i sold it. >> thompson: and reggie spent countless hours studying the

case. >> i did, like, a crash course in college, i guess, of trying to learn about medical science, the new science that was coming out. then, i starteie