Tonight on Frontline

When a child dies suddenly, or under suspicious circumstances, abuse is often suspected. But what if the medical examiners in these cases are getting it wrong?

In tonight's FRONTLINE, The Child Cases, a joint investigation with ProPublica and NPR, we uncover nearly two dozen child death cases in which people were jailed on medical evidence -- involving abuse, assault, and "shaken baby syndrome" -- that was later found unreliable, or flat-out wrong.

When a child dies, one prominent medical examiner tells us, it's often "homicide until proven otherwise." Medical examiners "get caught up in the anger, the emotion, the despair," he adds. "And you can't do that." New research also reveals a number of diseases and disorders that create symptoms in children -- bleeding and bruising -- which actually mimic the symptoms of child abuse.