Peter Gelzinis, a top columnist writing for the Boston Herald, has compared the case of Irish nanny Aisling Brady McCarthy to a scene from a Kafka novel.
And he has questioned why new evidence that the baby, Rehma Sabi, was injured weeks before her death when the nanny was not around has not led to a separate criminal investigation.
The evidence was supplied by the prosecution’s own medical experts who stated that several back fractures were weeks old and inflicted at a time when the baby was in Pakistan and the nanny was in Boston.
Gelzinis quotes the nanny's lawyer, Melinda Thompson, as saying:
“Had there been a thorough investigation after finding these injuries had been three to four weeks old,” Thompson said, “maybe other people would have been questioned, maybe the grand jury would never have indicted my client. And she wouldn’t be sitting in jail for over a year.”
McCarthy, who has spent more than a year in a Massachusetts jail awaiting trial, is accused of having “violently assaulted” one-year-old Rehma Sabir on January 14, 2013 and thereby causing the infant’s death.
Peter Gelzinis says the County Cavan native will probably be shuttled back and forth from jail to court in an endless series of hearings, a surreal and nightmarish bureaucratic ordeal reminiscent of Kafka.
On Friday, McCarthy appeared in Middlesex Superior Court with her lawyer Melinda Thompson for a bail hearing.
Thompson and Middlesex prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than an hour “wrangling over the state’s inability to get retinal slides and other medical exhibits to McCarthy’s lawyers, so their experts can evaluate them,” wrote Gelzinis.
“When Judge S. Jane Haggerty finally turned to the issue of bail, Melinda Thompson argued that according to the state’s own medical experts, bone fractures to Rhema Sabir’s thoracic vertebrae occurred at least three to four weeks prior to when the state first claimed the nanny inflicted them, last January.
“She had to be traveling in Pakistan with her mother at the time.
"‘Someone else did that to this child,’ Thompson told the judge."
Gelzinis also criticized the slow reaction of the presiding judge.
“The judge listened, then told everyone to come back in one week … for yet another hearing.”
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