Word: eappens
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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...
...Eappen: The judge was not sequestered. He was reading papers; he's on the Internet. There is some ego thing going on there--you have to wonder what his underlying biases are. He showed a total lack of understanding of child abuse...
...Eappen: I don't think anyone knew the Deborah Eappen they were talking about. People didn't care to find out what I was like; they didn't know who I really was. People are projecting their own guilt and fears onto me. Who can you feel safe to leave your kids with? You cannot trust the people you trust--the day-care attendants, the teachers, the summer-camp minders. It is a reaction that protects them from the fear of something happening to their own kids. We felt it was the best thing to have someone in our house...
...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...