'Termite' Scheck is nanny's best hope

He saved O J Simpson, but can he save Louise? David Usborne reports

For Dr Joseph Madsen, a respected children's neurosurgeon at the Boston Children's Hospital, it was the moment he had surely been dreading. Here he was, a witness for the prosecution in the trial of Louise Woodward, the British nanny accused of first degree murder, and he was about to get "Schecked".

The term entered the legal lexicon two years ago, when a boyish defence lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, took an unexpected starring role in defending - and finally saving from jail - the former football star O J Simpson. His name was Barry Scheck. His special talent was bamboozling police witnesses by making mincemeat of the medical and forensic evidence being offered by the state.

In the Middlesex County Court in Boston last week, Dr Madsen mostly helped to support the prosecution's case that Ms Woodward on 4 February killed Matthew Eappen, the eight-month-old baby in her care, by violently shaking him and slamming his head against a hard surface. The "Scheck" attack, however, had to do with assertions that a key piece of evidence, a blood clot from the child's brain, had been mislaid.

"Are you saying that what fell on the floor ... this currant jelly, solidified clot you described ... could not have, in whatever form it was in, [you] could not have taken it and put it in a bottle and labelled it and sent it to pathology? You're not saying that, are you? You could have done that?" Bull's eye.

"Yes," a humbled Dr Madsen replied, "we could have done that."

Others in the legal community call Mr Scheck the "termite" for his ability, slowly but surely, to eat away at the medical evidence in a case until the prosecution platform collapses. If at times you are tempted to believe that this lawyer knows more than the medical witness on the stand, you could be forgiven.

"Barry is known for his extraordinary preparation, which is being reflected in his dismantling of the prosecution's medical experts," one local Boston lawyer observed on Friday. "It would not surprise me if he's put in 150 to 200 hours just to prepare for the experts."

One possible danger for Ms Woodward may be that so much medical minutiae is numbing some members of the jury. There may, however, be another, potentially more serious peril - the personal history, especially from the O J case, that Mr Scheck brings with him to this trial.

"Everyone in this jury knows who Scheck is and they are going to remember his part in getting O J off. Some of them may not like that," a former prosecutor observed. "Scheck comes with a lot of baggage."

At first sight, Mr Scheck's decision to get involved in the O J case seemed surprising. His reputation has otherwise been entirely formed by his commitment to defending the underdog. After graduating from law school in 1974, he first concentrated on exposing abuses in federal grand juries and then worked for three years doing legal aid work for the poor in the Bronx.

Since 1978, he has been attached to the Yeshiva University in Greenwich Village, New York, where he and a colleague, Peter Neufeld, founded the Innocence Project. Its main purpose has been to promote the use of DNA as admissible evidence and use DNA testing to free people wrongly convicted for crimes including rape and murder. The project has contributed to the release of more than 20 men.

Scheck's likely fee of $300,000 (pounds 185,000) or more has reportedly been covered by EF Au Pair, the nanny agency that placed Ms Woodward with the Eappen family last year. While working on the Woodward case Mr Scheck has also agreed to assist in a lawsuit filed against the New York police department by the Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, who was allegedly tortured and sodomised with a wooden handle by officers in August.

For Mr Scheck, however, the O J case was about exposing the sometimes poor work done by the police in collecting vital forensic and medical evidence. While the prosecution in the Simpson case had ample material for DNA testing, Mr Scheck showed it to have been compromised by the sloppy collection methods.

It has only amused Mr Scheck that since the O J trial he has become a favourite on the police community lecture circuit. "I have found myself in the unusual position of giving talks to sex-crime and homicide detectives," he recently told Newsweek.

Over the remainder of this trial, the defence will try to demonstrate that Matthew was suffering from a previous, undetected, brain ailment that meant that whatever happened on 4 February when he was alone with Ms Woodward was not what killed him. That may or may not work. In the meantime Mr Scheck can be relied on to attempt to repeat what he did in Los Angeles.

If he succeeds, Ms Woodward will escape life in prison without the possibility of parole. And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will be able to consider itself "Schecked".