Right from the beginning I wrote that there was something rotten about the murder case against the Boston Irish nanny Aisling Brady McCarthy, who is accused of killing one-year old baby Rehma Sabir in Janaury 2013.
That seems to have been proven now with the judge's call for a review of the case after nine defense medical experts all testified that it was not a homicide.
Judge Maureen Hogan has also asked that bail be granted by the immigration services given that McCarthy is undocumented. She has been held without bail for 29 months.
The evidence must have been very striking given that the judge canceled the start of the trial set for May 6.
The medical examiner, it turns out, found the very same verdict in a previous baby death case only to be overruled.
Will it happen this time?
I really believe so.
In fact it stinks to high heavens of prosecutorial misconduct.
Little Rehma Sabir suffered horrific injuries and died a few days after she was in the care of the nanny who was charged amid much media fanfare.
Folks who know McCarthy have always said they would be shocked beyond belief if the charges held up in court.
A friend I know visits her frequently. He says without a shadow of doubt he believes she is innocent and has said so from day one. He is not a man to get such judgments wrong.
What we may have here is a runaway prosecutor who grabbed cheap and sensational headlines when the case first broke.
Former Middlesex County prosecutor Gerry Leone framed the case for the media starring Aisling Brady McCarthy as the illegal Irish nanny from hell. He’s now long gone from the case having got his headlines.
Now it turns out that much of that reporting and innuendo was false.
The tragic child had certainly been abused, but it appears the worst injuries happened weeks before the January 2013 death and at a time when the baby’s mother had traveled with the child to her native Pakistan and Aisling Brady McCarthy was thousands of miles away.
That was the testimony given by the medical experts for the prosecution, not the defense. They found compression fractures of the spine occurred weeks before the death, at a time when the nanny was nowhere near the child.
It took the defense months to get that evidence from the prosecutors, who had already incurred the judge’s ire with their slow response to defense requests to share evidence.
Why would they be foot-dragging? Could it be they realize this case is just one vast, overblown, overhyped accusation against an innocent woman?
Aisling Brady McCarthy is an undocumented, very vulnerable woman who has proclaimed her innocence and who has found massive community support in Boston.
All along that community has defended her loyally and warned that the true story has not yet come out.
The Boston Herald reported last year that Rehma Sabir’s parents, who haven’t been charged with anything, have “retained the services of Elliot Weinstein, a defense lawyer of some note, whose list of clients includes Neil Entwistle, now doing life for the murders of his wife and infant daughter.”
How interesting.
Watch this space.
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