Word: eappen
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Dates: during 1997-1997
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Eleven days after a Cambridge, Mass., jury found British au pair Louise Woodward guilty of second-degree murder in the death of eight-month-old Matthew Eappen last February, Judge Hiller Zobel turned the verdict on its head. In a rare and controversial act of judicial veto, he reduced her conviction to involuntary manslaughter and deemed that the 279 days she had served in prison would suffice as a sentence. Woodward was free. The decision elated her supporters--among them the entire village of Elton, England, her hometown--and devastated Matthew's parents, Deborah and Sunil Eappen. On Friday, Deborah...
...Eappen: Right now I am very stunned. I can't even process what happened in the last two weeks, in the last nine months. Right now my biggest concern is getting through the day, focusing on Brendan [her other child] and Sunil [her husband]. We haven't been living at home for 2 1/2 weeks; we have been going from place to place, living out of a car, scrambling for clothes. It is hard to know what's important. I feel I'm the judge's victim. Louise took away Matthew, and the judge took away justice. What...
...Louise took away Matthew, and the judge took away justice," Mrs. Eappen insisted. But Silverglate points to a deeper phenomenon: "In this country for the last decade or so," he says, "the child protection community has become a child abuse cult...
CAMBRIDGE: As the deadline for defense and prosecution appeals approaches, another war of words has broken out in the au pair case. In exclusive interviews with TIME, aggrieved mother Deborah Eappen says that in letting her go with time served, Judge Hiller Zobel showed "a total lack of understanding of child abuse" ? while defense attorney Harvey Silverglate insists the Woodward case is part of a pattern of child abuse "witch hunts" in Massachusetts...
...Citing a number of other Massachusetts cases "where abuse obviously didn't take place," the attorney and former state ACLU head suggests child care experts are using "complete hokum parading as scientific testimony" to win over well-meaning juries. That's unlikely to wash with Mrs. Eappen, however. She maintains that Louise shook her baby to death ? and was responsible for his broken arm. "It makes me wonder what else she did to him that didn't leave a mark," she said...