LITTLE ROCK — The capital-murder trial of a Little Rock man over the death of a toddler ended with a hung jury Thursday after defense experts testified that authorities relied on outdated and obsolete medical theory to accuse him of killing his girlfriend's son.
Alex Martin Blueford testified Thursday that he'd repeatedly lied to investigators about how the boy was hurt, even briefly blaming the boy's mother for the head injury. But his guilty conscience prompted him to tell police he'd accidentally struck 20-month-old Matthew McFadden Jr. Defense attorneys said Blueford, 27, was at worst guilty of negligence, but not deliberate murder.
"Nowhere does it [the law] say if Alex Blueford lied you should convict him," attorney Sharon Kiel told jurors, calling Blueford's deceptions "terrible."
"He's scared but that doesn't make him a murderer. It doesn't matter how many times he lied. Alex has accepted responsibility for this."
During his 57 minutes of testimony, Blueford said he'd inadvertently elbowed the toddler in the head while baby-sitting, knocking him into a table. He said he reacted when the boy nicknamed "Fat Man" surprised him from behind. Hesaid he put the boy in bed, but didn't realize for some time that he was hurt badly.
"He wasn't crying. His eyes were open. I didn't think he was hurt," Blueford said.
Blueford didn't disclose he'd hit Matthew until after his arrest on the capital-murder charge seven months later, explaining that he feared what convicts would do to him if he was sent to prison for killing a child. He told police and doctors at the time that he'd thought the boy was asleep before realizing Matthew was unconscious and not breathing and calling for help. The boy died two days later.
Prosecutors said Blueford's lies hampered doctors' efforts to treat the boy. They also said his version of events couldn't account for the severity of the boy's injuries, which authorities compared with those that would be incurred from a car crash or fall from a building.
Deputy prosecutor Will Jones said Matthew was most likely injured by Blueford slamming him head-first into a bed. He urged jurors to reject the testimony of the defense experts, deriding them as "hired guns" whose opinions were derived strictly from medical records. The state's witnesses were more qualified to say what killed Matthew, Jones said, with their testimony coming from their firsthand experiences examining the boy, backed by years of medical experience.
The eight women and four men on the jury deliberated 4 1 /2 hours without reaching the required unanimous verdict, but told Special Circuit Judge Lance Hanshaw that they favored rejecting murder charges against Blueford. The jury foreman reported they were deadlocked after three hours, favoring a manslaughter conviction by a 9-to-3 margin. Hanshaw then urged the jurors to continue deliberations after they indicated they hadn't considered the lowest charge available to them, negligent homicide, a misdemeanor.
Prosecutors are seeking a life sentence and capital-murder conviction for Blueford overthe boy's November 2007 death. Manslaughter for a defendant with Blueford's criminal record carries a maximum 30 years in prison. But the negligent-homicide count - with a maximum sentence of a year in jail - that Kiel said Blueford was guilty of would have been comparable to an acquittal since Blueford's 14 months in jail qualified him for immediate release on the misdemeanor.
The defense acknowledged that Blueford's blow to the boy's head seriously injured the boy, but turned the proceedings into a critique of the abilities and procedures of the ambulance crew who rushed the stricken boy to Arkansas Children's Hospital, the doctors who treated him there and the practices of the state medical examiner's office.
Dr. Robert Bux, a pathologist who serves as a medical examiner for 21 counties in Colorado and has worked for the United Nations, assessed the autopsy as lackluster and incomplete.
"The autopsy in this case doesn't [show what happened to the boy] because the right things weren't done," he testified. "This could be a fall, it could be jumping on the bed, it could be an elbow."
The state's pathologist didn't account for efforts to preserve the boy's organs, Bux said, and didn't consider whether bleeding in the boy's head and eyes caused by a blow to the head could have been worsened from possible errors by the ambulance crew inserting a breathing tube.
John Galaznik, an Alabama doctor who studies blunt-force trauma on infants, said doctors were relying on outdated medical theories if they relied on eye injuries known as retinal hemorrhages to make their diagnosis that Matthew had been abused. Doctors would also be mistaken, he testified, if they'd refused to consider that the toddler could have been fatally wounded by being knocked onto a table. Those injuries are "rare, but possible," he said, testifying a fall from as little as 3 feet could account for Matthew's injuries.
Prosecutors had Dr. Charles Kokes, the state's chief medical examiner, in court to rebut the defense claims of a bungled autopsy. Kokes, who had signed off on the findings of the examination, testified defense experts hadn't properly reviewed the forensic medicalevidence from his office.
The three-day trial began last week, but was recessed until Wednesday after the first day when the judge got sick.
Arkansas, Pages 11, 13 on 08/22/2009