When a woman is convicted, the rules change.

When the state cannot point to a perpetrator, a victim, or a piece of forensic evidence, what remains is a question about the defendant herself. Did she sound like the kind of woman this might have happened to? Did she cry the right way? Did she love her children enough?

This is not a question evidence can answer. It is a credibility contest, decided on the basis of how the woman in the chair compares to a juror's idea of what a mother, a wife, a caregiver is supposed to look like.

"How do you say, 'No, I was really a great mother?' It becomes a very difficult task to disprove the negative." Jessica S. Henry · Montclair State University, quoted in The Appeal

When the only evidence is medical, the case is often decided by expert testimony. For decades, a leading example has been testimony about shaken baby syndrome, now often called abusive head trauma. Convictions resting on that diagnosis alone have been challenged in court, and some have been overturned.

Of the 40 people exonerated in shaken baby cases listed by the National Registry of Exonerations, 15 are women.

26% of exonerated women were convicted of a crime against a child.

It follows a pattern. Women in the United States are still the primary caregivers, and when something goes wrong in a home — when a baby dies, when a partner is hurt, when a child makes a false allegation — the woman in the room is the first suspect.

Most criminal cases in the United States end in a guilty plea, not a trial. A woman charged in a child's death may face a possible life sentence if she goes to trial and loses. The state may offer her a lesser charge and fewer years if she pleads.

Innocent women take that offer. They take it to get home to their other children sooner, or because their lawyer tells them the jury will not believe them. A guilty plea then makes every later step harder, because she told a judge, under oath, that she did it. Her petition must explain why.

Some women are convicted because of a man in their life. A mother is charged for failing to protect a child from a partner who hurt the child. A woman is charged as an accomplice to a crime her partner committed, sometimes while he was abusing her too.

Other women defended themselves and were not believed. The National Registry of Exonerations counts a conviction for a death caused by legitimate self-defense as a case where no crime occurred.

Some states now have laws written for these women. New York and Illinois have laws that let some survivors of abuse ask to be resentenced. See the other doors →

In the 1980s and 1990s, day-care workers and teachers across the country were prosecuted for child sex abuse that never happened. The cases were built on statements from young children who had been questioned again and again by adults who expected to hear about abuse.

The Registry lists 26 women exonerated in these cases. They make up 8% of all exonerated women, compared with 1% of exonerated men.