Louise Woodward

The presiding judge was Hiller B. Zobel. The prosecution, led by Assistant District Attorney Gerard Leone, along with Assistant District Attorney Martha Coakley, presented eight physicians involved in Matthew's care, including a neurosurgeon, an ophthalmologist, a radiologist, two pathologists, and an expert in child abuse, who testified to their belief that his injuries had occurred as a result of violent shaking and from his head impacting with a hard surface. The defense challenged this, among other things, on the grounds that there were no neck injuries to him—injuries that they claimed would have been expected if he had been violently shaken. The prosecution had also claimed initially that his impact injuries were the equivalent of having been thrown from a two-story building, but they equivocated over this claim as the trial progressed. The defense presented expert medical testimony that his injury may have occurred three weeks before the date of death, implying that his parents, Sunil and Deborah Eappen, both of whom were doctors, might be implicated in negligence or abuse of the child. He had old wrist injuries that may have been incurred before Woodward even arrived at the house. She, however, claimed under cross-examination that she never noticed any slight bumps, marks, or any unusual behavior by him at any time prior to the night he was taken to the hospital.

Patrick Barnes, a pediatric radiologist at Stanford University, was a key prosecution witness in the trial, but in 2011, said he would not give the same testimony today. He said there had been a revolution in the understanding of head injuries in the past decade, partly due to advances in MRI brain scanning technology: "We started realizing there were a number of medical conditions that can affect a baby's brain and look like the findings that we used to attribute to shaken baby syndrome or child abuse", such as infections and in utero strokes.

In 2007, Woodward was named the "most notorious criminal convicted in Massachusetts" by Boston law magazine Exhibit A.

Woodward studied law at London South Bank University, where she graduated with a 2:2 (Hons) degree in July 2002. In 2004, she began a training contract (the two-year training at an accredited firm that aspiring solicitors must serve) with the law firm Ainley North Halliwell, in Oldham, Greater Manchester. However, she dropped out of her training contract the following year in order to pursue a career as a ballroom and Latin dance teacher in Chester. As of 2015 she is married and has a young daughter.

Woodward's sentence was reduced to time served (279 days) and she was freed. Assistant District Attorney Gerald Leone then appealed the judge's decision to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Woodward's lawyers also asked the court to throw out her manslaughter conviction. The court affirmed the guilty verdict by a 7–0 vote. However, in a 4–3 split decision, the court rejected the prosecution's appeal against the reduction of the conviction to involuntary manslaughter, and the sentence, on June 16, 1998. Woodward then returned to the United Kingdom.

The Louise Woodward case concerned Louise Woodward, a 19-year-old British au pair convicted in 1997 of the involuntary manslaughter of eight-month-old Matthew Eappen while he was in her care in his home in Newton, Massachusetts, in the United States.

Five days after being admitted to Children's Hospital in Boston, Matthew Eappen fell into a coma and died on February 9, 1997, from a fractured skull and subdural hematoma. He was also found to have a fractured wrist, an unnoticed and unexplained injury from a month earlier. Dr. Lois E.H. Smith, an ophthalmologist at the hospital, observed retinal hemorrhages judged characteristic of shaken-baby syndrome.

On October 30, 1997, after 26 hours of deliberations, the jury found her guilty of second-degree murder. The following day, Judge Zobel sentenced her to life in prison with a minimum of 15 years to be served.

Before the trial on May 7, 1997, Woodward decided to undergo a polygraph examination conducted by Dr. David C. Raskin, a polygraph examiner hired by her own lawyers. During the course of the examination, she was asked questions about whether she caused injury to Matthew while he was in her care on February 4, 1997. She denied having caused any injuries to him, and Dr. Raskin concluded that her answers to these questions were truthful to a confidence level of 95 percent. Dr. Raskin's results were evaluated by Dr. Charles Honts, another polygrapher hired by her defense lawyers, who also claimed that she had answered truthfully when responding to relevant questions about whether she had injured him.