Doctors debunk au pair defence’s injury plea

David Chadwick said he and his colleagues in San Diego analyzed the cases of 95 children and consider the defense’s “prior injury” theory to be incorrect.

They concluded That the chances Matthew was hurt weeks before the infant was taken to children’s hospital, as the defense contends, are “something like 100 to 1,” Chadwick told The Boston Globe.

Defence attorneys painted that scenario to explain the baby’s death. He was not killed, they said by being violently shaken and slammed into a hard object by the teen-age Woodward.

Woodward was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder, though a judge reduced that verdict to manslaughter and released her last week after sentencing her to the 279 days she already had spent in prison.

The medical community is split on the question of whether Matthew could have sustained such a prior injury, although most doctors agree with the prosecution’s claim that the injury occurred the same day the baby was taken to the hospital February 4, a day he was at home with Woodward and his two-year-old brother.

He died five days later.Of the 95 injuries studied by Chadwick and his colleagues, 94 died soon after being knocked unconscious. The 95th died of complications from surgery.Meanwhile, Deborah Eappen, whose baby son died in the care of Woodward, told Time magazine that she was herself a `victim,’ after a judge decided to free the au pair.

“How did Louise become the hero and I become the victim?” Eappen said in an interview in the latest issue of Time.

Judge Hiller Zobel freed the 19-year old au pair last Monday, after reducing her jury conviction from second degree murder to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Matthew. A jury had determined the Woodward should spend the rest of her life in prison on the murder conviction, but Zobel reduced the sentence to the 279 days she had already served in prison.