BRITISH au pair Louise Woodward should have been cleared of killing the baby in her care, her lawyer said in Oxford.

Barry Scheck, who led Louise's defence team in the United States, said: "Anyone who saw the evidence will be confident in my opinion that she is not guilty."

Mr Scheck was giving a lecture at Jesus College when news broke yesterday that 20-year-old Woodward was free to return home.

A court in Massachusetts upheld her conviction for manslaughter by a 4-3 majority but rejected prosecution pleas for a retrial. The judges refused to reinstate the original murder verdict, which was later reduced to manslaughter by trial judge Hiller Zobel.

Mr Scheck told a hastily arranged press conference at the Oxford Union last night that he believed Woodward could have been proved innocent - but that would have meant exhuming baby Matthew Eappen's body for further analysis of his skull fracture.

He said: "It is something I have thought about long and hard. But what would be accomplished by a retrial? People will have seen this trial and they would have made up their own minds.

"I realised the most likely result would be that they would affirm Judge Zobel's decision. I have to be practical in these things and I am confident that we did that.

"I just hope people will now let her get on with her life. There are no more legal avenues.

"I hope for my client's sake that she is able to return to her home in the UK as soon as possible and go on and live her life. This has been a tragic case right from the beginning. This sad chapter is now over."

Mr Scheck, who sat beside Woodward throughout her trial, added:said his reaction when he heard the court's decision was one of relief.

"In a case where the life of a young woman is on the line, if that verdict does not go her way in the final analysis, it would be terrible to walk the streets and sleep at night.

"Thank God for Judge Zobel. What he did took courage."

Asked how Woodward would be feeling, he said: "I know it is going to mean everything. I speak to her every other night and this has been a lonely, tortured period in this young woman's life.

"The waiting was unbearable - not as unbearable as being in jail, but it was difficult.

"While she was awaiting this verdict, everything she did was subject to wall-to-wall publicity and tabloid scrutiny. I hope that now she will be left alone."

Mr Scheck, who also represented OJ Simpson in his marathon trail for murder, later spoke to students in the Oxford Union debating chamber.

He said: "You are speaking to someone who is weary of these kind of cases."

Woodward will stay in America until judges formally lift her detention order, possibly tomorrow. Meanwhile, Matthew's family began legal moves to stop her selling her story.

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