 However, various parties to the case blamed each other for the prosecution's failure to secure a conviction, on the assumption that Adams should have been convicted.The apparent fairness of the trial is often discussed in terms of this supposed failure, rather than in terms of the generally prejudicial pretrial press coverage and the prosecution introducing probably inadmissible evidence in the committal hearings.Although Devlin thought that Lawrence's concerns that Adams would not receive a fair trial were overstated, another legal writer has questioned whether the legal system of 1957 would have been capable of giving Adams a fair trial, if the lost nurses' notebooks had not come into the hands of the defence.