Lawyers for Irish nanny held in US launch scathing defence

Aisling Brady McCarthy’s lawyers have a filed a scathing objection to testimony implicating the Cavan nanny in the death of a baby girl in Boston at the beginning of 2013.

Rehma Sabir was diagnosed as having being the victim of abusive head trauma when she was brought to Boston Children’s Hospital, having been in the care of Ms McCarthy, who has been held in custody in Boston since the incident occurred in January 2013.

Her legal team claimed in a motion filed late Wednesday that Alice Newton, the specialist who carried out the tests, spent no time looking at alternative diagnoses and that the medical director of the child protection programme at Boston Children’s Hospital diagnosed Shaken Baby Syndrome “too quickly”.

They also claimed that “an avalanche of science” had exposed shaken-baby diagnoses as unreliable.

“At best, SBS is a highly controversial, unproven hypothesis unfit to serve as the basis for a murder prosecution,” the motion went onto assert. “At worst, SBS is junk science, a tragic hoax caused by overzealousness within the child protection community.”

Crucially, the defence team has once again reiterated their belief that long-term abuse of the one-year-old led to the child’s tragic end.

According to medical records, Rehma was diagnosed with malnutrition five weeks before her death and “by all accounts bruised very easily”, they wrote.

“When she died, her body had no bruises, grip marks, crush injuries, or acute broken bones,” they added. “Yet the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts] alleges that medical science proves that she died because the last person with the child, Ms McCarthy, violently shook her or caused her abusive head trauma. Not so.”

The District Attorney prosecuting the case has already conceded that vertebral fractures discovered in an autopsy were mostly likely three to four weeks old at a time when they were visiting family in Pakistan.

The trial is scheduled for October.