Daniel Johnson was 24 when he was sentenced to life in prison. His crime, according to prosecutors and the physicians who examined the body of his infant son, was shaking his baby too hard, causing brain damage, and eventually the child’s death.
“After the sentencing, Johnson tried to approach his wife and family who filled half the front row — but bailiffs interposed themselves and escorted him from the courtroom, as Johnson’s wife Kim sank to the floor in tears,” Casper Star-Tribune reporters Bill Luckett and Jason Marsden wrote at the time.
For the next 28 years — from his sentencing on July 24, 1996 to his death on July 8, 2024 at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Facility in Torrington — Johnson denied that he caused his infant son Thomas’ death. His brother Paul Johnson and groups including the Defender Aid Clinic at the University of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center agreed with him, fighting for his early release up until he died.
Those efforts to prove his innocence and secure his release became all the more pressing when Daniel was diagnosed with ALS — the debilitating neurological condition also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease — and he struggled to move, eat and even talk in the end.
Daniel had complained of symptoms for years, but medical staff were slow to act, according to Paul. He and others desperately wanted to see Daniel finish out his days in relative comfort at home with family.
Fighting to clear his name
Paul and Daniel grew up in Casper. Paul remembers always following his big brother around when they were young, and that Daniel was smart and encouraging, even from behind bars.
“He was a loving and caring guy. He did anything for me,” he said. “He was really proud of me because I quit drinking and I straightened up.”
Even after death, Paul wants to clear his brother’s name. To this day, he said, he believes Daniel was innocent.
“We feel like they had to blame somebody, so they blamed him,” he said.
Advocates argue that, given scientific advances, such blame would be unlikely to fall on Johnson today.
“Had the exact same facts regarding Thomas’ birth and death occurred today rather than in 1996, it is unlikely that Mr. Johnson would have been tried and convicted for murdering his son,” according to a petition to commute his sentence, prepared by the UW Defender Aid Clinic and the Salt Lake-based Innocence Center and filed just 12 days before Daniel died.
According to court records, newspaper coverage and testimony, Daniel and his wife acknowledged he would shake Thomas while holding his neck and bottom, or bounce the baby on a knee to soothe him.
Those fighting for his freedom cited new research — used in similar innocence claims in other parts of the country — that suggests such actions wouldn’t have been enough to cause the level of internal damage found around Thomas’ brain. Instead, the petition pointed to the infant’s difficult birth and a few other possible medical conditions as more plausible explanations for the boy’s death — many of which were not brought up during the trial.
Daniel was sentenced under a new law at the time that remains on the books today, allowing for first-degree murder convictions in the abuse-involved death of a child even in the absence of “premeditated malice.” Adults convicted of first-degree murder in Wyoming face death or life in prison.
When Johnson was sentenced, the Casper Star-Tribune quoted prosecutor Michael Blonigen as saying this was the second conviction to use the expanded definition of first-degree murder, and the first in which someone was sentenced to life in prison for a shaken baby syndrome death.
Blonigen — who was involved with some, but not all of the case — stands by the conviction, saying that the new claims haven’t undergone the scrutiny associated with the trial process.
He remembers Johnson using a doll to demonstrate during interrogation how he’d bounced Thomas on a knee. Advocates say the scenario was problematic given his grief so shortly after the death and the non-equivalent circumstances. But Blonigen remembered the reenactment involved incredibly rapid jostling — about 90 bounces in 30 seconds — with no neck support. He also recalled that Johnson had told investigators that after one round of bouncing, the baby had passed out and vomited.
“To shake a child till it passes it out and vomits … you see the child’s reaction, you go do it again?” he said. “That seems to me the heart of recklessness.”
Blonigen supports the work of those advocating for innocent prisoners, he said. In this case, though, he feels prosecutors got it right.
Scientific consensus holds that abusive head trauma — the more accurate, technical term for shaken baby syndrome — is real and diagnosable, according to Suzanne Haney, a child abuse pediatrician at Omaha-based Children’s Nebraska and a pediatrics professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
While some shaken baby cases may have been mishandled leading to wrongful convictions, Haney cautions that head trauma poses a real and lethal threat to infants. While Haney is concerned by the surge in “denialism” that external abuse can cause mainly internal trauma, she understands that questioning the science behind shaken-baby convictions is part of the legal process.
“Our legal system is set up to be a conflict. That’s the way it works,” she said. “I think that’s where a lot of this is coming from, is the legal system is looking for the other side.”
In Johnson’s case, some tests that could have pointed to alternative explanations went unperformed. Pathologist and professor Dr. Jane Turner said in Johnson’s commutation petition that group B streptococcus, for example, can cause sepsis and death, but it wasn’t tested for.
The child could have also had a blood clotting disorder, Turner postulated in the petition, which can be caused by sepsis. That wasn’t ruled out in this case, either, the filing states.
Two physicians — one hired by the prosecutors and another requested by the defense — testified at Johnson’s trial that they independently diagnosed death by abuse. Johnson’s public defender didn’t cross-examine either of them.
“I was actually quite surprised at that,” Blonigen told WyoFile about the lack of cross-examination. “I was surprised at how fast the trial moved. I really was.”
Johnson’s attorney didn’t outright deny abuse in her argument, but instead said it was an accident caused by ignorance.
Haney recommends that in cases involving abusive head trauma going forward, there should be either a child abuse pediatrician, general pediatrician or at least a trauma surgeon with pediatric experience who understands the latest medical literature.
From 2008 through 2018, only 3% of abusive head trauma/shaken baby syndrome convictions appealed in the U.S. were overturned, according to research published in 2021. Of those 49 overturned cases, 20 were overturned because of medical evidence, researchers found. The other 1,382 cases were upheld.
“After being overturned on appeal, upon retrial, 42% of defendants either re-plead guilty to or were convicted again of the same offense,” the researchers wrote.
Health care behind bars
Long after his conviction in 1995, and his failed appeal to the Wyoming Supreme Court in 2003, Daniel started having health issues, Paul said.
As early as 2013, Daniel described symptoms like numbness and falling over to his brother — correspondence Paul still has. But the prison staff, he claims, did little to find the cause or produce remedies.
At that time, the prison contracted with Corizon Health, which changed its name to YesCare amid a slew of lawsuits and a long history of complaints, including in Wyoming.
Wyoming attorney Douglas Bailey, who has sued WDOC multiple times for clients who allege inadequate medical care, told WyoFile in March that he was still getting inquiries weekly about subpar medical care in prison, including outright denials of health care.
Shortly thereafter, WDOC contracted with a new health care provider in May called NaphCare.
In 2020, Daniel’s condition took a turn for the worse, including shaking, muscle cramps and intense headaches “that would make him sick for days at a time,” his commutation petition stated. Still, it took until April 2023 for him to get a formal diagnosis.
If Daniel had been diagnosed sooner, Paul felt, he might still be around today. Or perhaps it would’ve bought time to get him out of prison at the end, so he could die at home, Paul said.
As time progressed, Daniel was moved into the prison hospice unit. Eventually, he needed help with most daily activities. Even speaking became a struggle, Paul said. In his request for commutation, advocates argue Daniel was dying faster under the prison’s care than he would elsewhere.
“His medication is routinely dispensed at intervals and amounts that directly contravene his doctors’ recommendations, his requests for supportive devices to ease the strain on his body, such as a neck pillow to hold his head up off his chest, take up to two months to be acted upon and are often outright rejected, the number of people available to help him has shrunk considerably due to inmate transfers and policy changes limiting who can provide assistance,” the commutation petition states.
Efforts to secure Daniel a medical parole were denied on Feb. 23. When asked to specify the reason for denying parole, Wyoming Board of Parole Executive Director Margaret White cited state statute 7-13-424, implying Daniel did not meet the statutory requirements for release.
Paul is now considering legal action of his own concerning his brother’s medical treatment.
When asked about Daniel’s claims of medical neglect, Wyoming Department of Corrections spokesperson Stephanie Kiger wrote in an email, “The WDOC will not disclose protected medical information. Medical releases of inmates can only be authorized by the Wyoming Board of Parole.”
Regardless, Paul said he’ll continue to try to prove his brother’s innocence.
“He told me he wasn’t afraid to die,” Paul said. “But he just wants, he wanted me to try my best to get his name cleared.”
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