Police who questioned her about the rape said she was in a "very distressed state".Shortly after she left hospital to be with her family, the pensioner was found dead. A post-mortem examination was due to be carried out last night.Police set up an incident room at Louth police station and are hunting her attacker, who is said to be aged between 30 and 40. Police launched a murder inquiry last night after a 73-year-was raped as she walked through her home village and died hours later. Lincolnshire detectives said the woman's body was discovered by her daughter after she was released from hospital following her ordeal. She had been dragged along a footpath and sexually assaulted after being accosted as she was walking near her home in Tetney just before 9am yesterday. But it will not dampen the pressure by organisations such as Victim Support and, latterly, Labour for courts to be empowered to ban suspected sex attackers and stalkers from cross-examining their alleged victims.Janet Anderson, the shadow minister for women, has urged Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, to bring in such a reform.. For all these reasons, I believe the many critical comments which have been levelled against me in the media this week are unjustified."The judge's attempt to set the record straight raises the issue of the difficulty of representing the configuration of witnesses in a court artist's drawing. I directly controlled the cross-examination, which lasted about 30 minutes."In a reference to his summing up, the judge said: "I would like to remind the media that as a judge I must operate within the existing law.

Security officers were positioned between them."I ordered him to remain seated so he would appear less intimidating to the witness."I permitted the witness to answer the defendant's questions by directing her replies to the jury so that she did not have to look at him during cross- examination. Judge Campbell's upbraiding of the media appeared to be equally directed to complaints from legal commentators and victims' organisations that he should not have allowed Chambers to leave the dock. It has been argued that this is advantageous to the defendant because it can raise his status in the eyes of the jury and intimidate witnesses.The judge said the layout of the courtroom made it impractical for Chambers to cross- examine from the dock."I therefore arranged for him to sit on the opposite side of the courtroom to the witness box, about 25ft from the witness. At all times I was acutely aware of the potential distress that might be caused to this witness and I took steps to ensure that such distress was minimalised."The strongly worded rebuttal follows a similar complaint by Judge Alastair McCallum in July after he was condemned for saying a police officer should have had a "sound ticking off" for indecently assaulting female colleagues. Activating the hitherto rarely used right to issue a statement through the Lord Chancellor's Department, Judge Campbell said he wished to correct "errors of both fact and misrepresentation" in the coverage of the trial of Dennis Chambers, who chose to represent himself and cross-examined his alleged victim, Margaret Bent, in person before being acquitted by a jury. The judge said that "written reports, and an artist's impression in Tuesday's edition of the Times, indicated that the defendant was permitted to cross- examine the principal witness from `within inches'."This is incorrect. As the Pope becomes more ill they will no doubt intensify as thoughts focus on his successor Then perhaps we might have a real crisis to write about.. The sensitivity of the judiciary came to the fore for the second time in weeks yesterday when Judge Quentin Campbell, who presided in the latest "stalking" trial, attacked media reporting of his handling of the case.

It may make more disgruntled the large numbers of married ex-priests who are at present denied real status by Rome.These will be the tectonic plates in this classic conservative versus liberal struggle. It will feed the debates on the role of women in the church and the desirability of married priests. The church's position here can only become more untenable.All this has implications for ecclesiology. In recent years it has nuanced the position, but its essence remains. It is on this principle that the papal ban on contraception rests - a ban which lay Catholic society has rejected as it has embraced secular notions that love is about more than reproduction. They will surface increasingly in two areas - sexual and ecclesiastical.On the sexual front we can expect increasingly stubborn dissent on the nature of sexuality, largely led by the growing sense that developing thought on gay and lesbian sexuality will slowly alter theological thinking on what it means to be in a loving relationship and what the implications of this are for Christian notions of love.The church is already under siege for its old notion, ensconced in Catholic natural law, that sex is only about human reproduction.