Sheriff Grady Judd

Eight years ago, the fourteen year old Florida schoolgirl Cassidy Goodson was pregnant, but didn’t look it. Not only did she conceal her pregnancy but somehow she concealed the birth. The baby boy weighed nine and a half pounds, nearly a tenth of her body weight. What happened next was horrific; having delivered the baby by herself in the toilet, she strangled him and stuffed his body in a shoe box.

American justice is very different from British justice. For one thing, it is much more open; often the police release huge tranches of material about alleged offenders and victims. It is not unusual for photographs of dead bodies, even autopsy photographs to show up relatively shortly on-line, obviously to the distress of the friends and families of victims. That could never happen in the UK where with rare exceptions such files are closed for anything up to a hundred years.