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Bulletin: "Aisling Brady McCarthy: Aftermath (5): Defence lawyer Melinda Thompson explains where her faith in Aisling Brady McCarthy came from: "“What I was provided with,” she said, “just didn’t seem to add up. The theory was that throughout the course of that day, sometime before the parents came home, my client shook the child with the force of a motor vehicle collision causing severe brain injuries and then smashed her down on a changing table, causing the thoracic vertebrae to break. That just struck me as something that was impossible.” Lost in the volatile emotion of the moment was the fact that McCarthy had been caring for Rehma Sabir for several months before her death. For several weeks prior to her death, the parents had been traveling abroad with a sickly child to England, India and Saudi Arabia.Rehma Sabir’s chronic health issues got lost in those first incendiary police reports, and the questionable medical analysis of Dr. Alice Newton of Children’s Hospital. When the child was rushed to Children’s Hospital, her nanny kept a vigil at Rehma’s bedside beside her parents, even rushing back to their Cambridge apartment to get them a change of clothes. “Everybody was misled.” (Boston Herald)'

Next: Bulletin: Research; "Reliability of scientific research comes under scrutiny" - with reference to inability to replicate a large percentage of studies - and refererence to "outright fakery and fraud."..."In 2012, for example, questions were raised in some 34,000 criminal drug cases when forensic chemist Annie Dookhan at the Department of Public Health in Massachusetts was found to have falsified records by failing to perform required tests, mixing up samples, and forging signatures. As of this year, more than 300 people have been released from prison because of tainted convictions, a report by The New York Times said. Some of the most worrying scientific failures are the errors and falsifications that occur at crime laboratories, where wrong results can deprive someone of their freedom, or even their life.""Science Recorder."
Previous: Bulletin: Aisling Brady McCarthy: (Aftermath 4); "I only followed experts, says DA who took Aisling to court."...Evoke. "Meanwhile, Louise Woodward’s lawyer elaine Sharp told the Mail: ‘It’s been 17 years since the Woodward case and in 17 years I have done about 500 of these cases. In the course of that what I have learned is that there is a culture in prosecutor’s offices that is really shameful. ‘They don’t bother to put the time in and pay their dues to learn the medicine and to learn the science. ‘If I have to learn it to defend somebody why don’t they learn in order to bring a prosecution by an individual. They should know when they are being led down the garden path by some experts who are agenda-driven, these experts who want to espouse a particular ideology of shaken baby syndrome. ‘Middlesex county DA’s office has a culture of using junk since in child abuse cases.’ She added: ‘I think there is a way of going after the county for failing to train the prosecutor in the fundamental rights of crimi- nal defendants to have probable cause when using a medical expert. Here’s what is happening, the medical examiners are giving the prosecutor the theory of causation and saying, “This is what happened.” ‘The DA is allowing he medical examiner to usurp the prosecutor’s charging discretion. That’s unconstitutional. The prosecutor has charging discretion.’(Irish Daily Times. Reporter Catherine Fagan);
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Countdown to Wrongful Conviction Day:  Friday, October 2,  2105; 26 days. For information:  

"Yesterday, I asked her (defence lawyer Melinda Thompson) where her faith in McCarthy came from. “What I was provided with,” she said, “just didn’t seem to add up. The theory was that throughout the course of that day, sometime before the parents came home, my client shook the child with the force of a motor vehicle collision causing severe brain injuries and then smashed her down on a changing table, causing the thoracic vertebrae to break. That just struck me as something that was impossible.” Lost in the volatile emotion of the moment was the fact that McCarthy had been caring for Rehma Sabir for several months before her death. For several weeks prior to her death, the parents had been traveling abroad with a sickly child to England, India and Saudi Arabia.Rehma Sabir’s chronic health issues got lost in those first incendiary police reports, and the questionable medical analysis of Dr. Alice Newton of Children’s Hospital. When the child was rushed to Children’s Hospital, her nanny kept a vigil at Rehma’s bedside beside her parents, even rushing back to their Cambridge apartment to get them a change of clothes. “Everybody was misled,” Thompson said yesterday, after Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan conceded that she had no case. “This isn’t a whodunit and we got the wrong person,” said Thompson, a former Middlesex prosecutor. “This is about a person being charged with a crime that didn’t occur. And if they had done a thorough investigation they would have discovered that before charging.”
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/peter_gelzinis/2015/08/nanny_lawyer_da_s_case_just_didn_t_seem_to_add_up

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