- CPS had felt there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute Lesley Dunford
- In 2009 East Sussex coroner Alan Craze demanded the case was revisited
- Lucy Dunford was found with bruises on neck and shoulder in 2004
- Jury convict her mother of inflicting fatal injuries on the three-year-old
- Three post mortems ruled youngster had died from asphyxia caused by the forced blockage of her airways
By Leon Watson and Chris Parsons
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Lesley Dunford was onvicted of the manslaughter of her three-year-old daughter after an inquest into the 2004 death was dramatically halted by a coroner
A 'remorseless' mother jailed for killing her three-year-old daughter had laughed and joked as the young girl lay dying in hospital, it emerged today.
Lesley Dunford, 33, was yesterday convicted of the manslaughter of her young daughter Lucy in 2004, eight years after a coroner dramatically halted the youngster's inquest.
Dunford, jailed for seven years yesterday, suffocated Lucy just six months after her seven-month-old son Harvey died in an apparent cot death, a court heard.
But it emerged today that Dunford laughed and joked with her youngest daughter just minutes after medics said they were losing the battle save Lucy.
The mother also telephoned a vicar and her husband before calling for an ambulance for her stricken daughter, according to The Sun.
Dunford's daughter Lucy was found with cuts and bruises on her neck and shoulders at the family home in Camber, East Sussex, in February 2004.
The three-year-old was rushed to Conquest Hospital in Hastings but could not be saved.
After conflicting post mortem reports, Dunford was arrested two days after Lucy's death, but a lack of evidence saw prosecutors drop the case.
She was rearrested when a coroner dramatically halted the youngster's inquest and forced police to reopen the investigation.
A judge told Dunford she had gone from 'carer to killer' when she inflicted fatal injuries on her young daughter in 2004.
A jury at Lewes Crown Court convicted Dunford of manslaughter but cleared her of murder.
Sentencing yesterday Judge Richard Brown said: 'The jury have convicted you of manslaughter of your three-year-old daughter Lucy.
'It may well be you are the only one who knows exactly what happened on that dreadful day in 04 which took you from carer to killer.
'Since then you have done your level best to lie your way out of any responsibility.
'This indicates you have little or no remorse for what you did.'
An original post mortem found that Lucy may have died from a sudden onset of a bacterial infection which led to her choking on her own vomit.
Dunford's house in Camber, East Sussex, where her daughter Lucy was found dead in her bed
However, during a second examination this was disputed and the idea put forward that suspicious bruising on the tot's upper body may mean her airways had been compressed forcefully.
At the time Dunford claimed her daughter had been 'perfectly fine' earlier in the day but that she had been tired so she had put her to bed - she later told paramedics she thought her daughter had had a 'fit'.
After she had found her daughter Dunfold refused to ring the emergency services until she had spoken to her husband - whom she told 'it's happened again' in reference to Lucy's younger brother Harley who had been found dead in his cot six months previously.
Describing how Dunford later joked about her daughter in hospital, nurse Caroline Simpson, who was in a waiting room with the mother, said: 'The girl put a paper cup of water to her mouth but it spilled down her front.
'The mum said, "She's always doing that". She appeared to find it quite hilarious.'
Paramedics at Conquest Hospital in Hastings noticed two marks on her neck which had started to bruise and requested the attendance of police at the hospital.
Dunford was arrested in February 2004 and interviewed by police then and again in May.
Her case was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service who decided there was not enough evidence to charge Dunford with the murder of Lucy.
'This was a difficult and complex case that involved evidence from a number of medical experts.'
Simon Ringrose, CPS
But during her inquest in 2009 East Sussex coroner Alan Craze demanded the case was revisited.
The inquest threw up new information which had been given by medical experts in 2005 during a Family Court hearing into Lucy's death.
This information had not been passed on to the CPS. Dunford was then rearrested and charged in July 2011.
Prosecutor Sally Howes QC said during the trial that the inquest had 'excluded the likelihood' of a serious infection and found that injuries to the airways were consistent with an 'application of force'.
On July 12, 2011, Dunford was therefore rearrested and Ms Howes said she told officers: 'I have been waiting for this to happen.'
Dunford, 33, was arrested in February 2004 and interview by police then and again in May
During his sentencing Judge Brown told the court he took into account Dunford's 'childlike manner' and the 'long delay' in bringing the trial to court.
However he said courts have a duty to 'protect little people like Lucy from violence'.
Speaking afterwards, Detective Chief Inspector Nick Sloan, of the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team, said: 'There was a thorough police investigation at the time but the forensic evidence then did not support a prosecution.
'The death of Lucy was immediately treated as suspicious by Sussex Police. Her mother was arrested and interviewed and there was a thorough investigation.
'However, based on the information available at the time, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decision was that there was insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.
'The CPS decision turned largely on reports from two pathologists, which were conflicting.'
Simon Ringrose, of the CPS, said: 'This was a difficult and complex case that involved evidence from a number of medical experts.
'The reinvestigation into the circumstances of Lucy Dunford's death included obtaining further medical evidence.
'This evidence effectively ruled out a natural cause of death and was consistent with Lucy having been suffocated.
'The only person who could have done this was her mother, Lesley Dunford.'
After the sentencing Wayne Dunford declined to comment.
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
Wimbledon 2012: Should Nalbandian Be Allowed to Play? Current Poll 78/22 Yes - Bleacherreport.com
David Nalbandian's disqualification for injuring a linesman at the pre-Wimbledon event at Queen's Club certainly grabbed the biggest headlines over the weekend.
The Argentinian is to be the subject of a New Scotland Yard assault enquiry, has been fined $12,560 for "unsportsmanlike behaviour," docked his $57,350 prize money and forfeited any of the ATP ranking points he would have earned from the event, via ESPN.
But is this enough punishment for his vicious, though unintentional assault, and should Nalbandian be allowed to play at Wimbledon?
Imagine Wayne Rooney or Cristiano Ronaldo running into the advertising board at Euro 2012, kicking down the sign and somehow causing a nearby official or spectator to receive an inch-long gash in their leg.
Would their "crime" result in actions similar to those described against Nalbandian?
Of course.
Nalbandian has said he's sorry to the victim of his crime, linesman Andrew McDougall, but is it enough?
Yes, I know he didn't mean it—but what did he mean? Surely players can't go round lashing out just because they lose their serve.
Is it the "pressure of the tour" as Nalbandian alluded to during his post-match press conference?
What pressure? Nalbandian has earned over $11 million from the ATP tour. I wonder what sort of "pressure" he feels subjected to.
Nalbandian, of course, isn't the first player to be defaulted from an ATP event. Gentleman Tim Henman was disqualified from the doubles at Wimbledon 1995 after accidentally hitting a ball at a ball girl.
Jeff Tarango saved the umpire the trouble of disqualifying him the same year at Wimbledon; picking up his bags and walking off court in objection to partisan crowd support. Tarango's wife even slapped the umpire's face as he left the court.
Personally, I'm surprised the All-England Club haven't already told him he's unwelcome at SW19.
What do you think?
Source: bleacherreport.com
Police start 185m relay run at Lewes - Lewes Today
SUSSEX Police Chief Constable Martin Richards this morning (Thursday June 21) ran the first leg of a 185 mile relay run around the county’s police stations.
The run is taking place until Saturday to raise funds for The Chaseley Trust in Eastbourne whose main home, Chaseley, is currently home to Sergeant Wendy Dowman.
Sergeant Dowman was injured in a collision on the A267 at Hellingly on September 5 2010.
As a result of the injuries she sustained in the collision Wendy appears to remain in a low awareness state, is wheelchair bound, therefore requiring full support with meeting all her physical and social needs.
The Chief Constable was joined on the first leg of the relay by Deputy Chief Constable Giles York.
Officers and staff from across Sussex Police are each running a leg of the route which goes between 15 police stations in Sussex.
Tomorrow evening (Friday) Assistant Chief Constable Olivia Pinkney will run a leg of the route.
The relay event has been organised by Sergeant Carrie Kwasniewski of Mid Sussex District Neighbourhood Policing Team.
She said: “I have known Sergeant Wendy Dowman for almost my whole career. She is a very good friend and colleague.
“I went to visit Wendy just before Christmas and she is so well looked after at Chaseley that myself and colleagues decided we had to do something to support the charity.”
Chief Constable Martin Richards said: “I am looking forward to running the first leg of the relay to support The Chaseley Trust and the fantastic work the charity does.
“Chaseley has become a home for Sergeant Dowman and now we would like to do something to assist them with continuing to care for her and others who require nursing care.
“I would like to commend Sergeant Carrie Kwasniewski for her dedication in organising this event.”
Sue Wyatt, Chief Executive from Chaseley Trust said: “It is wonderful that this event is taking place with so many officers participating to raise funds and awareness throughout Sussex for our charity.
“This will greatly benefit the people who use our services and we are enormously grateful to Sergeant Carrie Kwasniewski for taking the initiative to organise this amazing relay.”
The Chaseley Trust was initially set up in 1946 to look after servicemen and ex-servicemen at its main home, Chaseley.
The Trust also has a second innovative nursing home comprising of detached and semi-detached bungalows.
Nowadays, Chaseley cares for adults from the age of 18 with all types of disability, from spinal injury, acquired brain injury and stroke, to multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease and a wide range of other neurological conditions.
Covering a wide age range, Chaseley Home and Bungalows have a ‘family’ feel where everyone feels valued and their input welcomed.
Anyone who would like to sponsor the runners is asked to visit: https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/carriekwasniewski1
During the relay the runners will be supported by a team who will be collecting money along the route.
Follow Chaseley Trust Facebook or their website http://www.chaseley.org.uk/
Today the relay is due to take place at Lewes, Newhaven, Brighton, Worthing, Bognor and Chichester.
Tomorrow it will go to Chichester, Horsham, Crawley, Gatwick and Haywards Heath and on Saturday Battle, Hastings, Eastbourne and to Chaseley.
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Print this pageSource: www.sussexexpress.co.uk
Here comes the rain: why we secretly love it when it's wet - The Guardian
Of all the symptoms of the decline of British civilisation, none is more poignant than the building of a retractable roof over Wimbledon's centre court in 2009. The idea was to keep the rain off and the tennis on. What a mistake. Tennis? Nobody goes to Wimbledon to watch tennis. They go there to feel the rain trickling down their backs, diluting Pimms, dampening sandwiches and halting sport's glum spectacle.
It is rain that we really love. We just don't dare to admit it. We complain about it blighting our summer because we are sublimating our passion. We are besotted, besoaked, beside ourselves with a love that dare not speak its name. Think about it. We keep devising situations to encounter the rain, to talk about it, get ourselves wet in it, to affect disdain for it. What we couldn't stand about the hosepipe ban was not so much water companies' ineptitude in calculating average rainfall in this rain-soaked dime of an island, but the terror that there might actually have been a shortage of what we love perhaps more than anything else in the world. Thankfully, the rain came back – as it always does.
When it rained on the Queen's Thames parade, the world saw Britain as a nation carrying on regardless of the weather with the indomitable spirit apparently natural to us rain-soaked, sexually repressed, grey-souled freaks. None of the drenched spectators could have been happier to be there. The Queen's perma-grimace belied her true feelings. Even Prince Phillip only checked into hospital with a bladder infection after he had stood for four hours in the rain (the prospect of Madness gigging on your roof would make any sane person check into the nearest hospital). We are not indomitable, really: we just like things other peoples don't. Mizzle slanting from a fag ash-coloured sky, for instance. Welcome to your sodden summer: you know you love it.
In Barry White's superbly sexy Walking in the Rain (With the One I Love), every other loser is running for shelter except for Glodean James (unbeatable lead singer of Love Unlimited). She walks through the rain to better feel her passion for the disarmingly libidinous walrus of love. The British are like that, but with this pervy twist: we walk in the rain not to feel passion for some mere human, but for the rain itself. If rain were a human being, it would get a restraining order.
Remember Cliff Richard at Wimbledon 1996, the day it never stopped raining? The covers were over centre court, any prospect of play pleasingly remote. And yet few trudged back to Southfields tube. Instead, they stayed to celebrate the two greats of British culture: rain appreciation and ironic distance. Cliff's choice of opening a cappella number for the centre court crowds was inspired: Summer Holiday. What bravura, what impromptu wit! It also provided a moment of self-flattering solidarity for people who will not let the weather dampen their spirits (as if rain could), expressing themselves with the doughty hubris that got the nation through the war and probably other stuff.
The historic function of summer sports in Britain is to facilitate rain appreciation in maddening, obsessive detail. Cricket is the most extreme example. There has never been a cricket game in this country in which rain has failed to stop play (I exaggerate, but only slightly). Why would a game be invented that depends for its existence on it not raining and yet be played in a country where it is always going to rain? Why would Worcester's beautiful cricket ground be situated near the flood-prone River Severn if not to make us fall in love anew with rain's power? Only in Britain would the beautifully byzantine Duckworth-Lewis method be invented. This involves deploying a mathematical formula to help decide rain-interrupted one-day cricket matches. Why did Duckworth and Lewis invent it? Not to help decide the result of a cricket match. Nobody, not even Geoff Boycott, cares about such inane guff. It was to help us think about rain and how much we love it while affecting otherwise.
Ladies' Day at Aintree races, and a fine example of Britain's practical approach to bad weather. Photograph: McPix Ltd/Rex Features Or consider Glastonbury. Nobody really stands groin-deep in mud in a Somerset field to hear U2 or Coldplay. That would be the very definition of madness. No, Glastonbury and other summer festivals were invented to get us up close and personal with rain and its leading non-urban consequence, mud. True, at most British festivals there's a risk of trenchfoot, but the path of true love never did run smooth. Glastonbury has been cancelled this year which means it probably won't rain: our all-wise God only makes it rain in Somerset at festival time. He knows what we like.
And yet we pretend that we hate the rain. If we really did, we would move to the desert. But we don't because if we did, something inside us would die. There is no song title more spiritually harrowing to British sensibilities than It Never Rains in Southern California. Then why do so many Brits wind up in rain-lite LA? Because they've forgotten about Albert Hammond's song but remain seduced by the film of The Big Sleep. In that vision of southern California, former desert has been enchanted by rain. Humphrey Bogart repeatedly turns up his shamus's trenchcoat collar against another satisfyingly intense Hollywood downpour, or drives night-time streets slicked sensually wet and streaked with reflected tail lights – the whole seductive mise en scène of film noir that you can get for free tonight in Peterborough.
How lucky we are – to love something that is in such plentiful supply, falling from month to month from grey skies. "London is always grey," complained an Indian woman next to me as we descended into Heathrow last week. No: London is always greys. So many greys: opalescent, dove, lead, battleship, cadet, charcoal, glaucous, that greyish mauve called Mountbatten pink, medium grey, dark medium grey, Gainsborough grey, and more besides. There they are in the clouds waiting for us to name them and love them as they deserve. Is the reason Fifty Shades of Grey is so popular because its title speaks to the rainy yearnings in our erotically melancholy sensibilities? It was wrong of Kate Bush to make an album called 50 Words for Snow when there is a greater need to celebrate the rain, to name its varieties. Mizzle, drizzle, cats and dogs. What is the difference between luttering down, siling down and plothering down? We need to know, and the woman who wrote Cloudbusting (that hymn to British eccentricity and spiritual need for rain) is the one to help us.
"Let it rain," sings Melanie Fiona on Tinchy Stryder's song of the same name. "Drip drop coming/ Everybody give way/ Can't stop forming/ May as well embrace," she sings. But that's not quite right: it's not a question of us resigning ourselves to embracing rain because it is ubiquitous; rather, it's rain's ubiquity that makes us fortunate. But still: "Let it rain," Melanie Fiona sings. Too right.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
7 years is pathetic. Lawyer plea bargaining. She should have got LIFE along with her Lawyer. - Pete, Pontefract, 21/6/2012 11:36 There sentence is nothing to do with the lawyer, The Judge alone decides what the appropriate sentence is having heard the prosecution narrative and the mitigatory cirucmstances from the defence. Every person is entitled to a fair trial, which includes a defence. If you were ever accused of something you did not (or did) do then I am sure you would want to take advantage of a defence solicitor.
- Gemma, Glasgow, 21/6/2012 13:45
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