To some, this is how things might look at first blush in Malia, Crete - a sun-soaked corner of the Greek island that is full of Brits enjoying their holidays. Among them was a young couple intent on working their way through the summer while soaking up the sun. What if that couple had been drinking - a lot. And then things turn ugly. Luke Walker, jealous at Chelsea, originally from West Yorkshire, beats her up so badly she dies of ruptured internal organs. He's got scratches on his skin and the clear conclusion is that her injuries can only be consistent with him beating her up.

A Greek police spokeswoman in Athens said: "This was not due to illness. It was the result of physical violence." She said the couple were living together in rented rooms in the coastal holiday resort of Malia and added: "It is said that they often quarrelled."

Some will quickly jump to, "Lock him up and throw away the key".

Some early news reports of the death here in the UK looked pretty damning, with Walker being accused of "avoiding the cameras" as he was escorted under police guard into the courthouse.

Mr Walker has now been charged with murder.

But if we stop and rewind the tape of him being brought to court we see Luke Walker, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and looking shattered. The police car he is in pulls up and Walker emerges handcuffed from the back seat. The officer who escorts Walker seems professionally embarrassed by the presence of the cameras outside the magistrates' court. The policeman grabs Walker by the back of the right arm, gathers pace and heaves him past the reporters and cameraman, physically manhandling him up the stairs and into the courthouse.
It is the policeman who appears more eager to avoid the cameras than Walker.

If Luke Walker is innocent then he's just lost the love of his life and, worse, been accused of her murder.

As it happens, I know two of Walker's relatives, Carl and Rona Swain. Carl is the brother of Angela Gay who was falsely convicted of salt-poisoning the little boy, Christian, who she adopted with her husband, Ian Gay.

In that case, the doctors worked out the level of salt in the dying boy and concluded that he must have been poisoned with salt. The main intellectual framework for this deduction was 'Non-accidental salt poisoning' - a theory provided by Professor Roy Meadow back in 1993.

That paper failed to distinguish between the symptoms you might see in salt-poisoning and the symptoms you might see in natural disease. It failed to give proper weight to the possibility of brain-related chemical imbalances causing too much salt in the blood, not malign intention.
Christian had a failure in his thirst mechanism inside his brain, which meant that he was not poisoned with salt at all, and Angela and Ian Gay went to prison because the expert opinion was just plain wrong.

The Swains tell me that Luke Walker loved Chelsea to bits and that they were true sweethearts, that he could not have killed her. I have no idea about that and because they are his family I have to ask - you would say that, wouldn't you?

But before the lynch-mob surrounds Mr Walker and decides that a man in handcuffs must have done something wrong - it is perhaps fair to point out the following: Luke Walker has never done anything truly horrible in his life. Also worth noting is that Chelsea had gone out on a girl's night without Walker and at one point tripped over a girlfriend's leg, falling heavily, so that her tummy landed on her own clenched fist - an accident that seven witnesses remember happening on 6 May.

She fell ill five days later and died on the 17 May. Such an innocent explanation as to how Chelsea received the injuries that police say killed her - especially the timing - seems odd.

But odd accidents can kill.

Natasha Richardson was a beautiful actress who went skiing, banged her head, recovered, talked, joked - a lucid interval - and then she died. The doctors call what happened to Natasha TADD, Talk And Deteriorate and Die - in plain English that you may receive a potentially fatal injury, but there is a time lapse before you pass on.

As it happens, I know her aunt, Vanessa Redgrave, a bit - we both bang on about Chechnya, with good reason - and the loss of this beautiful and generous woman was a great tragedy. But if there is any good, ever, to come out of someone's death, it might just be to prevent future injustice.

So, before the crowds begin to circle in Crete and decide that Luke Walker is guilty, it is worth pausing to remember that experts can and do sometimes get it wrong, that wonderful people can die by accident, and that a man is innocent until proven guilty.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, was running the country while the prime minister was on holiday when I caught up with him for our story into Britain's banks one year on from a massive £86bn taxpayer-financed bail out.

Oozing power from every pore, he was in Nottingham to launch yet another government scheme to help hard-up firms.

The government has given about half a billion pounds to firms, which sounds a lot until you compare it to the £86bn they have given the banks. The particular scheme he was launching in the land of Robin Hood is worth £75m.

So my question to the First Secretary pretty much wrote itself: "It's only £75m quid. And the government is giving billions to the banks. Some people might say you're robbing from the poor taxpayer and giving to the rich bankers. Lord Mandelson, are you the new Sheriff of Nottingham?'

Off he went, each phrase expertly articulated.

To my mind he wasn't answering the question, so I had another go - 75 million (for small businesses) plays billions (for the banks)? A beautifully coiffed eyebrow lofted skywards. The Prince's features framed a question mark: "If I can just ask, where are you from?" came the question.

From BBC Panorama, I replied.

Up shot the other eyebrow: "BBC Panorama, I could have guessed." Long sigh. "I don't think that the cynicism that you seem to be bringing to this subject is worthy of the task in hand and it's a big task and it's a big challenge."

I interrupted him to ask why my question was cynical.

Lord Mandelson popped me on the naughty step. He announced that he would take my questions last.

While the camera was looking the other way, his chief press officer, a soft-spoken Irishman called Peter Power, told me that I could have one more go, but that I couldn't interrupt with any more cynicism.

I did a bit of philosophy in between my degree in drinking at LSE. Diogenes The Cynic is my favourite philosopher. He once told the ruler of the Known World, Alexander The Great, to "get out of my light." Two and a bit thousand years on, nothing very much has changed.

When it was finally my turn, I asked Lord M about bankers' bonuses. He said, lengthily, that the bankers had taken excessive bonuses in the past. Aha! I thought and pounced: "But you're the Business Secretary, why can't you stop the banks having bonuses?"

He placed his hand on my back and said, softly: "Thanks."

I did not give up: "But you are the Business Secretary. Why can't you stop the banks having the bonuses?"

There was no reply.

I tried one last time. "No last word on bankers' bonuses?"

Silent, enigmatic, he disappeared into his black space cruiser and was gone.

You can watch some of our brief encounter here.

Humans need sunshine to make Vitamin D to make bones.

If you're pregnant, white and you cloak your skin with sun-block in New Zealand, you may end up giving your baby rickets - an age-old disease which leads to weak and easily fractured bones. And those symptoms are seen as a serious danger sign for possible child abuse.

Equally, if you're pregnant, Thai and live in dark-for-half-the-year Sweden, you are in danger of not getting enough sun - and that also means your babies could end up with rickets.

The problem is that rickets and child abuse share some of the same symptoms - so which is it?

That's not an academic question for Erik Eriksson from Sweden, who faces four years in prison because he has been held to have violently shaken his 16-day-old daughter, Linnea.

His Thai partner, Nancy, stands by him. There is no other evidence that he is a child abuser.

Lock him up and throw away the key - you might be tempted to say.

Erik is in dire trouble because his daughter had multiple fractures and bleeds over the brain. And, many experts say, they must have been caused by someone. But that is not a fact.

It's a deduction based on a controversial theory called Shaken Baby Syndrome - see my previous blogs on the Keran Henderson case. Keran is serving a sentence for manslaughter but she denies shaking the child in her care.

And many people who know her believe her.

In Erik's case, there is another explanation for his daughter's condition, one for which there is evidence, in New Zealand, the United States and many other countries, and that places a big question mark against the 'certainty' of Erik's guilt.

The other theory argues that Linnea's fractures were caused by congenital rickets because her mother, Nancy, is originally from Thailand and the combination of the dark pigmentation of her skin and the weak sunshine in the far north of Europe caused Vitamin D deficiency and that caused weak bone growth in the womb and that caused Linnea's fractures.

But what about the bleeds over the brain? Well, there is evidence that they can happen naturally in child birth and it is very hard to date them precisely. So, not abuse, necessarily..

Dr Kathy Keller and Professor Patrick Barnes at Stanford University have written a paper - 'Rickets vs. abuse: a national and international epidemic' - that sets out the evidence that Vitamin D deficiency is getting worse in the United States and it gets worse in winter.

Black, white and everybody in between are suffering from more cases - while the Vitamin D in food and milk is lower than it has been for a generation.

From this study, it looks like lack of sunshine in northern climes and worries about skin cancer, particularly in white people, have caused a new and silent problem: childhood rickets.

In New Zealand, Annie Judkins and Carl Eagleton, got worried when they found ten cases of childhood rickets in three years in one GP's practice in Wellington.

They tested 90 pregnant mums for rickets and found that almost nine out of 10 were Vitamin D deficient - and some two thirds had a serious deficiency.

The mums were from a wide spectrum: African, Maori, European, Middle Eastern, and Polynesian.

Shaken Baby Syndrome has powerful defenders in the child protection community, who argue that it is valid science and that perpetrators have confessed to it.

However, it is also the case that no-one independent has ever witnessed a shaking leading to the symptoms - bleeds over the surface of the brain and in the eyes and brain damage - alleged to be found in the syndrome and no-one has ever filmed it.

Erik faces the legal hurdle that his defence relies on new science - rickets plus child birth - and judges like old precedents - SBS.

This is a problem that one of his defence experts, Dr Waney Squier, is familiar with.

The Oxford neuro-pathologist helped clear Suzanne Holdsworth of the false finding of child murder of Kyle Fisher - see my previous blog. (The Independent Police Complaints Commission are now investigating the integrity of the first Cleveland Police investigation into Holdsworth's conviction.)

Dr Squier, a sceptic on Shaken Baby Syndrome, argues that Baby Linnea had just been born - and that if you combine congenital rickets with a difficult birth, then bleeds in the eye and over the surface of the brain are natural events, not child abuse.

The Swedish judges have thus far dismissed the evidence from around the world that suggests that Erik might never have harmed his little girl at all. The matter now goes to final appeal.

The problem is that if Eric is innocent but goes to prison because of questionable science, then it is likely that many more children in Sweden and elsewhere, including Britain, will suffer from rickets - a wholly preventable disease - while the food and milk manufacturers are under no pressure to boost the level of Vitamin D.

You would have missed - not noticed - Natalia Estemirova on a bus.

She was very quiet, dark-haired, willowy, with an academic air. You could imagine her being an Anglo-Saxon scholar, perhaps, spending her days bent over old parchments about Beowulf and the like. And about that, you would be dead wrong. She was probably the bravest woman I have ever met.

Brave, because she was following in the footsteps of Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in the lift in her Moscow apartment in 2006 on the birthday of the then-President, now Prime Minister, of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Brave, because Natalia - half-Russian, half-Chechen - used to be Anna's translator in Chechnya and after Anna had been killed she knew exactly the risks she was running.

Brave, because Natalia lived in Chechnya, and the local boss there is Ramzan Kadyrov, who critics say is a psychotic warlord. They say he feeds the tigers at his very own private zoo with members of the opposition, that he tortures and rapes and kills at will, with impunity.

Mr Kadyrov, who I'd love to meet one day, denies all that but has been reported to have said: "I've already killed who I should have killed. And I will kill all of those standing behind them, as long as I myself am not killed or jailed. I will be killing as long as I live," which is very nicely put. If only he were my MP.

Mr Kadyrov has specifically denied allegations from the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and others that he was personally responsible for Natalia's murder, saying, "I don't kill women".

Natalia had been working for Memorial, on cataloguing allegations of killing, torture and abuse in Chechnya, many blamed on the Kaydrovites, an armed gang led by you-know-who.

Memorial said that at 8.30 in the morning she was forcefully taken from her home in Chechnya into a car. She was heard to shout out to passers-by that she was being kidnapped. Her body was found in woodland near Nazran, the main city in neighbouring Ingushetia, about nine hours later. She had bullet wounds to the head and chest.

Why move the body from one autonomous region to the next one along? When I last went to Chechnya in 2000, not entirely with the local authorities' permission, there were seven checkpoints between Ingushetia and Chechnya.

With killings and terror still high, I would be astonished if there were not several armed military police checkpoints on that road today.

It was as if whoever killed Natalia was making the simple point that the killers had nothing to do with Chechnya because the body was dumped in Ingushetia, forgetting the slightly more complicated point that whoever did the killing has the power to cross that border at will with a either a corpse or a kidnap victim in the boot.

I met Natalia once in 2007, when I was chairing the very first Anna Politkovskaya Award for the Reach All Women in War campaign at the Frontline Club in London. She was graceful, honoured by the award and somehow - and I struggle to find the right words - shy, abashed at all the fuss that put her at the centre of all this attention.

She was also absolutely firm that she must be exact, accurate in how she did her job. I sensed that what saved her from being overcome, paralysed by fear was her concentration on detail: what time did the men come, what did they look like, precisely, what did he/she hear, see, smell.

The more accurate her cataloguing of hopelessness, the more difficult it would be to deny the detail of the allegations. It was probably that accuracy, that insistence on getting it right that made her such an enemy of whomsoever wanted her out of the way.

Documenting human rights abuses sounds like a very boring and worthy thing to do. But what it actually means is sitting down with someone whose heart is bursting with fear to talk about a loved one.

And the witness can be desperately conflicted. By telling the story the witness may end up dead him or herself. By telling the story he or she may worsen the lot of the loved one - who may be tortured more, or even killed.

So the witness has to put an awful lot of trust into the documenter - and that was Natalia's great strength, and that great strength is the thing that got her killed.

"There is no shred of doubt that she was targeted due to her professional activity," said Tanya Lokshina, of Human Rights Watch in Moscow. Amnesty International's boss, Irene Khan, described Natalia as 'a courageous and inspiring woman,' adding: 'Human rights violations in Russia, and especially in the North Caucasus, can no longer be ignored. And those who stand up for human rights need protection.'

Mariana Katzarova, of Reach All Women In War, put it more simply in an email to me: "They killed Natalia Estemirova today...it is sickening. We lost our Natalia.'

May she rest in peace.

The writer Beatrix Campbell wrote in The Guardian:

The parents were championed by award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney. It was this case that encouraged the family courts to open up and let us see the judge's thinking. When the judgments were made public in the Webster case, Norfolk county council waited for the rush. No one had come knocking, they said, when I asked for them. I asked Sweeney what he thought - had he read them? No he hadn't, he said.

That is wrong.

I read the judgments.

My producers and editors read them.

I reported on the key elements of the judgments.

And I read them out, on air.

In 2006, with BBC colleagues, I had gone to court to get the facts of this case into the public eye. The BBC was the primary applicant in the case and I was the reporter driving the story. As a result the law forbidding the media from reporting Family Court cases was changed. True, I didn't bother to ask Norfolk's press office for a copy later because I was in court when Mr Justice Munby handed down his judgment in November 2006, which I read, immediately.

The judge said:

where the parents allege they are the victims of miscarriage of justice, it is more than usually important that the truth, the whole truth should out. If as the parents allege they have lost three children, and stand the risk of losing a fourth due to the deficiencies in the system, then there is a pressing need for the true facts to be exposed.

For BBC1's Real Story With Fiona Bruce broadcast in November, 2006, we reconstructed Judge Munby giving his ruling. In all, I made five BBC documentaries on the Websters, concluding with a Panorama, called 'Missing Children', in July 2007.

In that programme I reported Munby's judgement and the earlier judgment, in 2004, in which the judge said:

I conclude that these injuries are non-accidental injuries. I conclude that the only possible perpetrators of child B's injuries are the two parents and I exclude anyone else as being a possible perpetrator of these injuries.

Implicit in Campbell's comments is the suggestion that we ignored evidence that pointed to the parents' guilt. I also reported that Child A - their little girl in the bureaucratic jargon - had very poor teeth and Child B - their boy - was described an 'intensely anxious' and I reported that both children, according to Norfolk, had suffered from emotional neglect.

The Websters gave answers to all the allegations against them.

It is true that Beatrix Campbell did telephone me to ask for my version of events - but not in 2009. I recall the conversation because I was in Russia, about to ask a professor of physics about polonium poisoning, in late 2006. Campbell writes that I said: 'I take my line from the parents'. An alarming answer. It would be, if she was right about about how I do my job.

If Beatrix Campbell, a paid up member of the columnist party, had been in court, as I and other reporters were, she would have heard this statement from the family's health visitor:

the team leader told me that the medical opinion was overwhelming and that I should agree with her, that I should not let my emotions get in the way. I was very upset but felt I had to do what my superior said. I was very unhappy. I had given my professional opinion that neither parent would deliberately harm their children.

In each programme I challenged the Websters about the evidence against them: principally, that their son had unexplained fractures. It turns out that the scientific evidence in favour of their innocence is strong. Their little boy, Child B, was allergic to cow's milk and so he was on vitamin-boosted soya milk. A different GP advised them to take their little boy off the vitamin-boosted soya and use unfortified soya instead. The Websters questioned the advice but did what they were told by their GP. Child B developed scurvy and weak bones which led to fractures - but none of the doctors in the original case in 2004 realised this. As a result the 'unexplained fractures' were held to be abuse and all three children were taken from them, forever. Three experts at the Appeal Court in 2007 agreed that scurvy was the most likely diagnosis.

Norfolk said it would no longer seek to prove that Child B was deliberately hurt by either parent - the very evidence that had led to their children being taken away and adopted.
In our Panorama I asked Dr David Bender, a molecular biologist and nutrionist at University College, London, what he thought of the GP's advice. He replied: 'very sad, to put it mildly.'

We were in Liechtenstein, a tiny monarchy, squeezed between Switzerland and Austria, high up in the Alps. There is of course, no suggestion, that the royal had stolen my trousers or anything like that.

It's all to do with national sovereignty, the theft of electronic disks and the little matter of billions of dollars stashed in places the world's tax men can't find.

The point is that Little Rich Liechtenstein is a tax haven, and there's a bloke who is not very keen on tax havens. His name is Barack Obama, and so tax havens the world over - and they include Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and the Caymans.

The charge against tax havens is that they don't just help rich cheats avoid tax while the rest of us pay more, but they can also be used by organised crime, dictators and terrorists.

Last year Heinrich Kieber, who had previously worked at the LGT trust, part of the royal banking group in Liechtenstein, became a global whistle-blower.

Kieber, whose past is a bit murky, copied the files of the royal bank trust containing the secrets of the super-rich, did a runner and flogged his disks to German intelligence, the BND, for five million Euros.

Last Valentine's Day, the German authorities arrested the boss of the German Post Office, Klaus Zumwinkel. Just last week he was convicted of evading tax, sentenced to two years, suspended, and ordered to pay back four million Euros plus one million in fines.

Now hundreds of other tax cheats around the world, some in Britain, too, are now worrying that they might be next...

The Liechtenstein royals, who from their schloss in Vaduz pretty much run the banking group, the tax haven and the state, were not amused. Last spring Liechtenstein put Kieber's name on an Interpol watch-list. Then the mob - or somebody pretending to be the mob, it's not quite clear, and you can't phone them up to check: 'Hello, is that the Mafia?' - put out a ten million dollar hit on Kieber, who went into hiding.

But the game of tax haven secrets tit-for-tat wasn't over.

A pre-recorded taped interview of Kieber then turned up in Washington DC and was played to the United States Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations. He told the Senate that his files showed evidence not just of tax evasion on a massive scale but money salted away by corrupt officials and dictators.

Given all this hoo-hah, it seemed right to hurry along to Liechtenstein.

Imagine my disappointment on discovering that Liechtenstein was, in fact, the most boring place on earth. I'm used to boredom - I work for the BBC, for heaven's sake - but Liechtenstein was as dull as ditchwater, no duller. They bank behind closed doors. They create fuzzy trusts behind close doors. They make false teeth. And then they go to bed. The person who most looked like a ruthless killer was Howard, and he was the BBC producer.

The next morning we heard that there was a banking seminar at the university on openness. This being Liechtenstein, the openness meeting was closed, at least to us.

But imagine the almost erotic charge when we heard that a royal prince had turned up, His Serene Highness Prince Nikolaus von Liechtenstein.

His serenity turned out to be a tall cove, with lots of teeth, and they didn't look false to me.

He had a posse of princely PR people with him, and, if it came to a fight, we were outnumbered. On the other hand, I had Howard the ruthless killer on my side.

I asked His Highness: 'Kieber's lawyer says that the Liechtenstein royal family by aiding and abetting tax evasion are effectively crooks. So the question is: are you a crook, sir?'

By way of answer the prince socked my jaw with a left hook, then picked up a chair and smashed it over my head. I swayed slowly like a felled tree, and then crashed to the ground. Meanwhile, Howard had silently garrotted all the PR men...

Oh, all right, I made all that up.

To my question: 'are you a crook, sir?' the prince replied that America and Liechtenstein had different laws, and that Liechtenstein had a sovereign right to run its affairs as it thought fit.

Perhaps the prince didn't quite address the American issue that tax haven micro-states should not be allowed to undercut the tax-raising powers of the great democracies, but, fair do's, a good answer.

But, some might add, how very boring, how very Liechtenstein.

Journalism's job is to kick the powerful in the backside when they get things wrong - and they do, all too often - and see what happens next. If you doubt whether that precise definition is in the BBC Producer Guidelines, then you might have a point. (It is, in fact, written in a secret code on page 94 but if I told you how to crack it, I'd have to kill you).

This blog is dedicated to the victims of power gone mad, bad or just plain wrong. This summer for Panorama I met people in all three categories while spending five weeks travelling in China just before the Olympics. I duly noted the country's amazing economic growth, but came face-to-face with the authoritarianism of the powers-that-be in the Chinese Communist Party. I will never forget the day we went to see a school knocked flat by the earthquake in Sichuan while all the other big buildings around had stood intact. Our official minder told grieving parents, effectively, to shut their mouths lest they say anything critical about China. There's a clip on You Tube, so you can judge for yourselves.

Later on in 2008 working on a Panorama about tax havens, to be screened sometime in the New Year when the editor can be tempted to give it a slot, I met Jack Blum, a rare bird who happens to be a lawyer based in Washington DC and believes in ethical behaviour. Jack and I chewed the fat about how the super-rich like to park their money out of the taxman's reach but we also reflected on how some of the world's powerful states will cope with the 'crunchion'. (Don't bother look it up. I've just made it up because I couldn't be bothered typing out 'credit crunch generated recession'). 

Jack believes that the United States and Britain will take a big hit, but that both countries have democratic institutions strong enough to cope with the crunchion. Can the not-so-very democratic regimes in China and Russia - however alluring the topless shots of strong man Vladimir Putin fishing and shooting may be - withstand the storms to come? Wise man Jack shook his head, and fears trouble for those who march in step in Beijing and Moscow. We shall see.

Closer to home, injustice still creates great pain for pernicious and unnecessary reasons. Last  spring I did a Panorama which questioned the safety of the conviction against Keran Henderson now in jail for manslaughter for killing little Maeve Sheppard, a child she was baby-minding. Keran, hitherto a pillar of the community in Buckinghamshire, denies she harmed the child. The only evidence against Keran was 'shaken baby syndrome' - a massively controversial scientific doctrine which some sceptical doctors and most bio-mechanics say doesn't make sense. Britain's child protection establishment, however, believes that Shaken Baby Syndrome is valid.

Keran is still in prison, but her appeal will be heard sometime in the New Year.

Meanwhile, don't tell the Panorama editor but I did a bit of moonlighting the other day for Newsnight, reporting on the long agony of Suzanne Holdsworth. She spent three years inside for murder for a crime that didn't happen. There are grave questions about the thoroughness and fairness of the investigation by Cleveland Police, but they've announced that they won't be apologising to Suzanne.  Her partner, Lee Spencer, is not impressed by a police investigation that failed to take statements from two surgeons who were going to operate on the brain of the boy she was wrongly accused of murdering. 

Suzanne Holdsworth is the eighth person wrongly convicted of murder or manslaughter I have helped clear the name of  or free since joining the BBC in 2001, starting with Sally Clark, Angela Cannings, Donna Anthony, Lorraine Harris, Ray Rock, Angela and Ian Gay. 

But I'm afraid there are plenty more people inside who shouldn't be.

Meanwhile, fans of Scientology's number one parishioner, Tom Cruise, will be interested to see how he plays anti-Hitler hero Claus Von Stauffenberg in the upcoming film Valkyrie. If you can't work out what I think about that, you shouldn't be reading this blog.