Disapproval is growing in the US over the guilty verdict returned on the British au pair, Louise Woodward. As she spent her first weekend of what could be a life sentence in Framingham women's prison, near Boston, there have been many calls for legal action to overturn the controversial verdict.
In Massachusetts, where Woodward, from Elton, near Chester, was sentenced to life in the Middlesex Superior Court, people are voicing disbelief at the sentence. The MSNBC radio network took 26,000 calls on the verdict - of which 75 per cent disagreed with it.
A Boston radio station said callers were 50 to one in disagreement with the guilty finding. The Boston Globe said it had taken hundreds of calls, the vast majority condemning the verdict.
A member of the jury who found Woodward guilty yesterday said: "Nobody thought Louise intended to kill the baby." Ms Jodie Garber said the jury wanted to return a verdict of manslaughter.
Ms Garber, who is in her 40s and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the Mail on Sunday that nobody on the 12-person panel was happy about the finding "we felt compelled to reach".
One of the four alternate jurors said at the weekend that he could not believe the verdict. Mr Richard Bramante said: "I couldn't believe they had listened to the same trial I was listening to."
Another alternate juror, Mr Robert Mangold, said: "The four alternate jurors were in accordance with one another that we had definite reasonable doubt."
However, a woman member of the jury who would not be named told the Boston Herald the defence case that the baby had suffered an old injury "didn't make sense". She said: "I thought it wasn't supported by the evidence, otherwise I wouldn't have voted the way I did."
Meanwhile, a leading British pathologist, Dr Iain West, said that, from reports of the trial he had read, he believed that Matthew Eappen was probably suffering from a long-standing injury. Dr West said: "I can draw a firm conclusion based on Leestma's evidence - which is factual, new blood vessels seen under the microscope are a fact - that this child had an injury which was at least two weeks old."
Judge Hiller Zobel - who will hear the appeal against her conviction tomorrow - said in an article he wrote after the Simpson trial in 1995 that the jury system was "asking the ignorant to use the incomprehensible to decide the unknowable".
The Guardian adds: One unexpected ingredient of a retrial would be a home video shot by Matthew Eappen's mother, Deborah. Currently under seal, the tape shows her asking her two-year-old son Brendan, Matthew's elder brother, whether he saw Louise hit the baby. Brendan does not answer his mother's question.
The defence did not present the tape in evidence because they feared a backlash from the jury if they appeared to be implicating the Eappen family in Matthew's death. But a new tenet of the defence's strategy may be to focus on who else might have caused the baby's injuries by accident.