Countdown to Wrongful Conviction Day: Friday, October 2, 2105; 27 days. For information: http://www.aidwyc.org/wcd-2015/
"The
District Attorney who led the prosecution against Aisling Brady
McCarthy has denied to the Irish Daily Mail that she is to blame for the
nanny’s ordeal.
Ms Brady McCarthy hit out during the week about her ‘scandalous’
treatment by police and prosecutors while she faced charges for an
alleged murder that, it emerged, never happened. First-degree murder charges were sensationally dropped when the
medical examiner changed her evidence and said in was unlikely that the
year-old baby Ms Brady McCarthy was caring for had died of shaken baby
syndrome. But Middlesex District attorney Marian Ryan defended her own actions
in the case. She told the Mail it was her job to follow the evidence,
and said her office had relied on the medical examiner’s statements.
However, a lawyer who specialises in defending clients in
shaken baby syndrome cases, has hit out at the ‘shameful’ culture in the
district attorney’s office. Elaine Sharp, the Massachusetts lawyer who represented British au
pair Louise Woodward in her 1997 trial over the death of eight-month-old
Matthew eappen, said: ‘They don’t bother to put the time in and pay
their dues to learn the med- icine and to learn the science.’.........But responding to claims from Ms Brady McCarthy and her defence team
that her life had been ruined by the over-zealous approach of
prosecutors, Ms Ryan told the Mail: ‘A medical examiner goes to the
family and tells them their child suffered a number of injuries. The
death is ruled as a homicide. The medical examiner is telling us we
have a dead one-year-old on our hands. We have to investigate.’ She added: ‘Our job is to follow the evidence. When this baby was
found dead, we were told it was a homicide. The medical examiner then
reviewed the evidence.’ When asked if she was effectively blaming the medical examiner, Ms
Ryan said: ‘We are always in the position of relying on our experts in
the work we do.’ She added that the medical evidence came back and said:
‘I think I might have been wrong’ and they acted accordingly.........Before the turnaround, Ms Brady McCarthy’s defence team had submitted
reports from a range of specialists challenging the conclusion that
Rehma’s death was a homicide, prompting the medical examiner’s office
in April to launch a thorough review of the case. Ms Ryan denied the change was due to sustained pressure from the defence team. She said: ‘I don’t know that that matters. We provided experts too.
She broadened her approach. We can’t know what she looked at.’ In an interview with a US newspaper after her release Ms Brady
McCarthy said: ‘What the Middlesex prosecutors did to me was scandalous.
They should be ashamed. The police, they just decided right away I had
killed the child. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I loved her
and cared for her, ten hours a day, five days a week.’ In her review of the earlier evidence, medical examiner Katherine
Lindstrom said that ‘enough evidence has been presented to raise the
possibility that the bleeding could have been related to an accidental
injury in a child with a bleeding risk or possibly could even have been a
result of an undefined natural disease’. 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 criminal
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.’
http://www.evoke.ie/news/aisling-brady-mccarthy-case-da-shares-information
