Justice for Baby Gunner #4: A Guilty Plea
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Bliss as a 21-year-old. Although Bliss was 21 at the when the incident in question occurred, Bliss was a 23-year-old at the time of sentencing.
Noah Benjamin Bliss has been sentenced to 8-10 years in prison after pleading guilty to second degree murder for fatally "shaking" his newborn son at WakeMed in 2023.
The Harnett County man was arrested by the WakeMed Campus Police after his prematurely born infant son Gunner Bliss suffered a fatal brain bleed while in his care just three days after being released from the ICU. According to the child's mother (now deceased,) Baby Gunner had "no external injuries or broken bones," but she was nonetheless told by nurses that he had been "shaken" by his father.
The lack of supporting physical evidence, the presence of risk factors associated with a spontaneous brain bleed, and the history of comparable "Shaken Baby Syndrome" cases in the courts is what inspired me to follow this case over the past 14 months:
Sentence
In pleading down to second degree murder, Bliss obtained the dismissal of both the first degree murder and intentional child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury charges which he was facing.
With a sentence of 94-125 months, and taking into account the 429 days already served in jail without bond, Bliss could be out as soon as August 2031, just over six-and-a-half years.
The sentence of 94 months minimum is at the bottom of the mitigated sentencing range for a B2 felony, taking into account the mitigating factor that "the defendant has accepted responsibility for the defendant's criminal conduct," and his criminal record (five misdemeanors).
Plea Deals
Plea deals form the basis of our modern justice system, with a commonly reported figure of 90-95% of criminal cases being resolved in this fashion.
In most plea deals, like in the Bliss case, the defendant admits guilt in exchange for some consideration from the prosecution: often dropped charges, or more favorable sentencing conditions.
The difference between the sentencing resulting from a plea deal versus a trial is referred to as the "trial penalty" or "plea discount," i.e. how much the defendant risks by following through with their constitutionally guaranteed trial.
There is, however, extreme variance in the size of this "trial penalty" between cases.
In my own experience facing four federal misdemeanors in relation to covering the Capitol Riot on January 6th, 2021 as an independent journalist, the plea deal I was offered was a recommendation for a 12-month probationary sentence; and that's exactly the sentence I received after being found guilty at trial.
The plea deal in this case is on the opposite end of the spectrum: if found guilty of first degree murder at trial, the judge would have no choice but to sentence Bliss to life in prison without the possibility of parole. As a 23-year-old, life without parole would be approximately ten times the remaining period of incarceration that Bliss will serve after his guilty plea.
The larger the "trial penalty," the greater the pressure for an innocent person to falsely admit guilt in order to avoid the uncertain outcome of a trial.
This is perhaps exacerbated in a Shaken Baby Syndrome case, where a successful defense often involves costly expert testimony to refute the medical professionals brought to the stand by the prosecution, especially when a defendant (like Bliss) is represented by a court-appointed public defender.
A parallel case?
I will end this article (and perhaps the series) by briefly highlighting another Shaken Baby Syndrome case.
In 1999, 17-year-old Brandy Briggs's 2-month-old son was unconscious and not breathing when she brought him to the hospital. After her son passed away days later, she was charged with fatally "shaking" him.
Shortly before trial, Briggs accepted a plea deal to a lesser charge. Although her family was able to hire a defense attorney, they could not afford an expert to refute the medical examiner's testimony that the death was a homicide.
Although Briggs later maintained that her attorneys told her she would get probation as a result of the plea deal, Briggs was sentenced by the Texas court to 17 years in prison.
Briggs appealed, but didn't make progress until 2004 when a new medical examiner reviewed the case and discovered that the evidence was not consistent with the theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome, as well as the fact that the hospital had mistakenly inserted a breathing tube into the baby's stomach instead of his airways, leading him to change the cause of death from homicide.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals eventually vacated her conviction five years after the plea deal, finding that she had received ineffective assistance of counsel. The state decided not to retry the case, and the charges were dropped the following year.
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Terrible cases. The possibility that parents may be accused of harming their own children because diseases are poorly understood is very frightening