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Sally Clark's first two sons
died sudden, unexplained deaths before they were 12 weeks old - and,
according to one expert witness at her trial for their murder, the
odds against that happening naturally were 73 million to one. That
statistic has turned out to be flawed - as flawed as much of the
medical evidence brought against her. Bob Woffinden argues
her case
STEVE CLARK
is a very angry man. 'The more I find out about how criminal justice
works in practice,' the 39-year-old solicitor told me, 'the more
appalled I am. My faith in the system has been completely shattered.
If all this can happen to a responsible and reputable couple like
us, people who are reasonably intelligent, who have a bit of money
and some supportive contacts, what on earth would it be like for
those people who haven't got those advantages?'
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Accused: Sally
Clark | 'Us'
means him and his wife, Sally,
a corporate lawyer, who, at Chester Crown Court on 9 November 1999,
was found guilty by majority verdicts of the murders
in 1996 of her son Christopher, aged 11 weeks, and in 1998 of
eight-week-old Harry, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Her appeal
was turned down on 2 October last year. Now 36, she is currently in
Bullwood Hall prison, near Southend in Essex.
But what Steve Clark has found almost as painful as his family's
tragedy has been its treatment by the media. The case, he points
out, turned on complex medical evidence and statistics that, after
the trial, were shown to be spurious - in particular, one
prosecution witness made headlines by claiming that the likelihood
of two such deaths occurring in one family was 73 million to one; it
involved a couple who, in their own eyes, were hardworking, decent
young professionals, making their way up in the world from very
ordinary backgrounds. But in the aftermath of the conviction Steve
and his wife were portrayed as enjoying a 'champagne lifestyle' in a luxurious cottage in the stockbroker
belt of Cheshire.
But despite such affluence Sally Clark's life was, it was
written, a mess: she was a selfish, alcoholic, grasping, depressive,
career-obsessed woman who liked pretty clothes, and who first abused
and then murdered her children because they ruined her figure and
stood in the way of her lucrative future. According to which paper
you read, for instance, on the day she murdered Harry she had twice
popped out in the morning to her local branch of Victoria Wine to
buy, in total, seven, eight - or was it nine? - bottles of wine.
These lurid character portraits are, Steve Clark insists, as
inaccurate as the verdicts returned in that Chester courtroom. His
wife had, he admits, a drink problem, but the press had neglected to
report the most salient points: that she drank most heavily in her
grief in the aftermath of each child's death and that there was no
evidence that her drinking had contributed to the death of either
child - which was why the judge had refused to admit evidence of it
at the trial.
Nor, in the pursuit of sensation, did the press point out what
Steve Clark constantly emphasises: that the prosecution's medical
evidence was hopelessly flawed and discredited, even by their own
witnesses. 'We're all in this for the long term,' he says. 'Not just
for Sally's sake, but for the sake of our surviving child and, for
what it's worth, in the interests of justice. The central thing is
that Sally is innocent. She didn't murder our children: she loved
them.'
Sally Clark describes her childhood as 'quite idyllic'. she was
born in Devizes, Wiltshire, in August 1964, the only child of a
hairdresser, Jean, who died of cancer in 1989, and a senior
policeman, Frank Lockyer. When Frank retired in 1985, he had been
Divisional Commander of South Wiltshire for the previous 16 years
and had been decorated with the Queen's Police Medal in 1984. Mr
Lockyer, who is now 71, both loves and admires his daughter: 'She
wasn't naturally brilliant', he told me, 'but she was a very
hard-working girl. She carried the cross at school that all
policeman's daughters, and particularly senior policeman's
daughters, carry: that they're expected to be a little bit better
than everybody else in their behaviour, same as the parson's
daughter.'
Sally Clark attended South Wiltshire Grammar School for Girls in
Salisbury before going up to Southampton University in 1982 to read
Geography. After graduating with a 2:1, she joined Lloyds Bank as a
graduate trainee and moved to London. Two years later she was
recruited by Citibank, where she worked with corporate clients. And
it was there, in 1988, that she met Steve Clark, a lawyer
specialising in financial work - Steve, whose father had been a Tory
county councillor, had been the only pupil in his year at his
comprehensive school in Derbyshire to win a place at Cambridge.
The couple married in 1990, and lived in a flat in north London.
Sally Clark decided to become a lawyer - with both banking and legal
qualifications, she reasoned, she would be able to specialise in
venture capital work - and was finally articled in 1994. In 1993,
though, wanting a large enough house in which to be able to start a
family, they decided to move out of London. Both got jobs with
leading Manchester law firms: Steve with Addleshaw Booth, where he
was quickly made a partner; his wife as an assistant solicitor with
Halliwell Landau.
They had made a conscious decision to work for different firms
but Sally Clark's department's boss was headhunted by Addleshaw
Booth and took his team with him. Thus, the couple found themselves
working for the same company, albeit in different departments. Their
transition north was completed in September 1995, when they moved
into Hope Cottage, a comfortable, detached house in Wilmslow,
Cheshire. Their first son, Christopher, was born at St Mary's,
Manchester, on 22 September 1996. Apparently healthy, he was voted
'best-looking baby' in Sally's postnatal class. Pam Grieve, her
health visitor, said Sally was an excellent mother.
When Christopher was ten weeks old, the Clarks went to London to
show him to friends. They arrived at the Strand Palace Hotel on
Tuesday 3 December. At about 11 o'clock the next morning, Sally and
a friend, Liz Cox, went shopping for a new dress to wear at the
christening, which was planned for 5 January; Steve stayed behind,
working and looking after the baby.
About half an hour after she had gone, Steve noticed that
Christopher was struggling to breathe and had a nosebleed from both
nostrils. He became alarmed, rang the switchboard, and two staff
with first-aid qualifications came to his room. By the time they
arrived, though, Steve had cleaned up the blood. The hotel staff
gave him the number of a local GP; when Steve rang, the doctor told
him he could bring Christopher in if he was still concerned,
although it sounded as though there was no need as the baby seemed
to have recovered.
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Determined to fight: Stephen
Clark | When
his wife returned with Liz Cox at about 1pm, Steve told them what
had happened; all seemed well, so they took no further action. The
next week Sally Clark mentioned the incident to her GP; he did not
appear to find it troubling. (The entire episode became a matter of
contention. Initially, the prosecution claimed that no nosebleed had
taken place. Police could find no evidence that Steve had either
called first-aiders or phoned a doctor; the defence, however,
discovered from the hotel's telephone records that a four-minute
conversation had taken place with a GP at 11.42am - roughly the time
Steve had said he called. Reluctantly, the prosecution accepted that
a nosebleed had taken place.)
On 13 December Steve went to his department's Christmas dinner.
His wife was at home alone with Christopher. After feeding him at
7.30pm, she put him down in the couple's bedroom. At about 9.15pm,
she went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. When she returned, she
saw that Christopher - who was, she says in his Moses basket - had
turned grey. She phoned 999 at 9.35pm, and an ambulance arrived
within two minutes.
Sally Clark, though, was all but hysterical, and unable to let
the crew in; the front door was deadlocked and she couldn't find the
keys. Peter McVeigh, a neighbour to whom the Clarks had given a
spare set of keys, heard the commotion and let the crew in. Despite
attempts at resuscitation, it was too late. Christopher was taken to
Macclesfield Hospital at 10.03pm. Further attempts were made to
intubate him, but he was pronounced dead at 10.40pm.
A post-mortem was conducted on 16 December by Dr Alan Williams,
the local Home Office pathologist; photographs were taken by the
police. Williams's report referred to 'a small split and slight
bruising into the frenulum [inner lip]' and some bruising on the
legs, injuries he decided were consistent with resuscitation
attempts by hospital staff - as did Dr Jane Cowan, the hospital's
consultant paediatrician, who had first seen Christopher. After
examining the lungs, Dr Williams certified that the child had died
of a lower respiratory tract infection. Some cultures and organ
samples were taken and kept. Christopher was cremated.
Sally Clark had been distraught over her son's death -
suspiciously so, according to the prosecution; as distraught as
might be expected, according to Dr Cowan. The Clarks decided that
the best way to overcome their grief was to have another child.
Harry was born on 29 November 1997, three weeks premature, but
seemingly entirely healthy. Steve, a keen sportsman, had suffered an
injury playing badminton and had his right leg in plaster, so the
Clarks hired Lesley Kerrigan, 28, a registered nanny, to work
full-time for them as a home-help during the early weeks of the
baby's life. 'There was always a nice atmosphere at the house,'
Kerrigan recalled. 'It wasn't like work really.'
The Clarks participated in the CONI (Care of the Next Infant)
scheme, a programme of support routinely offered to parents who have
lost one child through cot death (or Sudden Infant Death syndrome).
Like all children in the scheme, Harry had a full medical
examination at 12 days, conducted at Macclesfield Hospital by Dr Ian
Spillman, a consultant paediatrician.
The parents were given resuscitation training, growth charts to
record the baby's progress, and a thermometer to ensure the correct
ambient temperature in the bedroom. They were also given an apnoea
alarm to monitor respiration; this would sound if the baby stopped
breathing. (Harry's alarm seems to have been faulty; Sally Clark
says it often sounded, even when there was no apparent problem with
the child.) Regular support was provided by a health visitor,
Elizabeth McDougall, who paid weekly visits to the home.
In her statement to police McDougall said she found Harry to be
well and making steady progress, and described Sally Clark as
'coping well with breast-feeding [and] happy and delighted with her
new baby'. On 6 January Harry was again seen by Dr Spillman, who
detected a heart murmur and referred him to Dr Kevin Walsh, a
consultant paediatric cardiologist at Alder Hay Hospital, who
diagnosed it as a benign abnormality.
On the morning of 26 January 1998 Sally Clark took Harry out in
his pushchair to the local shops.
At about 2pm she rang the health centre and told Elizabeth
McDougall the apnoea monitor had repeatedly sounded; at about 3.45pm
McDougall arrived with a new one. Later, Sally took the baby to
Wilmslow Health Centre, where he was vaccinated against diphtheria,
pertussis, tetanus and polio; Sally was herself given a post-natal
check-up by Dr Kathleen Case. In her statement the doctor said there
were 'no problems' and described Sally as 'cheerful'.
Steve arrived home from work at about 8pm. (The time of his
return became an issue at the trial.) Nearly 90 minutes later, he
was in the kitchen, preparing a feed for the child, when his wife
screamed from their upstairs bedroom. Harry was slumped forward in
his bouncy chair and had turned blue. An ambulance arrived nine
minutes after Sally Clark's 9.27pm emergency call, and found Steve
desperately attempting resuscitation, following advice being given
down the telephone line by the emergency services. Harry, though,
did not respond; he was taken to Macclesfield Hospital and was
pronounced dead at 10.41pm. That the two children were taken ill and
died at almost exactly the same time was something the prosecution
made much of.
In view of this second death, Dr Jane Cowan told police it was
essential that the post-mortem be conducted by a specialist
paediatric pathologist. So did the Clarks. However, it was again
carried out by the general pathologist, Dr Alan Williams, in the
presence of police. (Though the inquiry held after the case of
Beverley Allitt - who, in 1993, was convicted of four murders and
three attempted murders of young children at Grantham Hospital -
recommended that post-mortems on infants should be carried out only
by paediatric pathologists, this recommendation has never been
implemented. Quite simply, there are not enough trained paediatric
pathologists in the country.)
Dr Williams found tears in the brain, 'severe injuries' to the
spine, one dislocated rib and what he described as a 'possible old
fracture' of another. In his report he concluded that 'the spinal
injuries and lesions in the brain and eyes are those that would be
expected from non-accidental injury' and that Harry had been 'shaken
on several occasions over several days'.
When police arrived at Hope Cottage on 23 February 1998, Sally
Clark assumed that they had come to give her information about the
cause of Harry's death and began making them cups of tea. Instead,
they had come to arrest her and Steve on suspicion of murder. Taken
in for questioning at Wilmslow police station, both were naive
enough - and shocked enough - to waive their rights to a solicitor.
(Although both were solicitors themselves, neither had any expertise
in criminal law.)
The answers Sally Clark gave during these interviews (two
40-minute sessions that morning, and a 40-minute session in the
afternoon) provided the police (and, in due course, the media) with
material that was used against her - material that the Clarks are
adamant was wilfully misinterpreted. For example, Sally told police
she had been 'a wee bit apprehensive' about a business trip to
Glasgow Steve had planned for 27 January, the day after Harry's
death. The prosecution used this remark to claim that she was unable
to cope with the possibility of her husband's absence and had
therefore murdered Harry to prevent his departure; in fact, she was
worried that 'because of the jabs' Harry had had on the afternoon of
26 January, he might suffer an adverse reaction.
Sally Clark also spoke to the police about her drinking. She had,
she told them, become depressed after the move to Hope Cottage,
where she felt isolated. As she explained, 'London was the farthest
north I'd ever been. I got very low and cried an awful lot during
that period.' She began drinking to alleviate her loneliness -
according to her, 'two or three gin and tonics on a Saturday
afternoon'. In 1996 she had, she said, a couple of 'binges' during
the early stages of her pregnancy with Christopher.
The following year she became more emotionally unsteady - 'It was
when I became pregnant with Harry that I actually began to grieve
more for Christopher' - and her drinking frequently got out of
control. Indeed, in April 1997, four months after Christopher's
death and two months into her next pregnancy, she sought psychiatric
help at Cheadle Royal Hospital. But she was not, she told the
police, drinking by the end of the pregnancy, nor in the weeks prior
to Harry's death - bar a couple of Christmas Day drinks; she had
checked with the midwife that this would have no deleterious effect
on her breast-feeding.
This, though, was peripheral; Dr Williams's post-mortem report
spoke of 'non-accidental injury', and on 27 February Dr Williams
took slides of Harry's eyes to Michael Green, emeritus professor of
forensic pathology at Sheffield University. Williams believed he had
detected retinal haemorrhages in both eyes; Green confirmed this
finding. Together with the tears in the brain and the spinal
injuries, these haemorrhages were the crucial evidence that the baby
had been shaken to death.
Green and Williams then re-examined the preserved tissues of the
first child, Christopher. They found that there was both extensive
fresh bleeding and old bleeding in the lungs. This, taken together
with the damage to the frenulum, led them to the new conclusion that
Christopher had been smothered, and these findings were passed to
the police. On 2 July 1998 Sally Clark was charged with the murders
of both children. (The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to
proceed against Steve Clark who had, after all, not been present
when Christopher died.) On 29 November, while the case against her
was in preparation, Sally Clark gave birth to a third son, who
cannot be named for legal reasons.
At the committal hearing at Macclesfield Magistrates Court on 24
May 1999 a difference of opinion between Dr Williams and Professor
Green, both of whom were appearing for the Crown, emerged. Although
Williams maintained there had been fresh blood in Christopher's
lungs, Professor Green now disagreed, saying 'the lungs showed no
evidence of recent significant haemorrhage'. If this was the case,
then smothering was an unlikely explanation of Christopher's death.
However, the damage to the prosecution case was repaired by
another expert witness, Sir Roy Meadow, emeritus professor of
paediatrics and child health at St James' University Hospital,
Leeds. He said he knew of other proven cases of smothering in which
there had been no fresh blood in the lungs: he agreed to provide the
defence with his research data on these cases. He also said the
chances of two deaths like Christopher's and Harry's occurring
naturally in a family were one in a million - he was later to
produce the even more damning statistic of 73 million to one. The
magistrate concluded that there was a case to answer in respect of
both children; Sally Clark was committed to face trial on Monday 11
October 1999.
On Friday 8 October - just three days before the trial - the
defence team finally managed to obtain the vitally important slides
that Professor Green said showed retinal haemorrhages of Harry's
eyes. At Moorfields Eye Hospital in London Professor Philip Luthert,
consultant histo-pathologist at the Institute of Ophthalmology - who
had been called in by the defence as an expert witness - and
Professor Green examined the slides. They could find no retinal
haemorrhages; Green rang the Crown's QC, Robin Spencer, and told him
this.
It was the Crown's case that Harry had been shaken to death. The
so-called 'classic triangle' of injuries in baby-shaking cases is
damage to the spine, tearing in the brain and retinal haemorrhages.
By this stage, another prosecution expert, Dr Christine Smith,
consultant neuropathologist at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in
Sheffield, had examined the slides and said that there was no
evidence either of tears in the brain or of damage to the spinal
cord. With the elimination of the retinal haemorrhages, the crucial
evidence had evaporated; shaking was not the cause of Harry's death.
Professor Luthert expected - 'naively', as he has put it to one
journalist - that the charge would be dropped.
But Robin Spencer opened his case on the basis that Harry had
been either shaken or smothered. By the end of the trial he was
asserting that Harry and Christopher had both been smothered, and
that both had also been the victims of assaults prior to death. He
may have been encouraged by some new evidence from Sir Roy Meadow,
who had effectively once again ridden to the prosecution's rescue.
The week before the case was due to start, Meadow had made a fresh
statement to police. In this he said that on the basis of a new,
then-unpublished government report - the Confidential Enquiry into
Stillbirths and Deaths in Infancy (CESDI) - to which he was writing
the preface, the risk of these two deaths having occurred by chance
was one in 73 million.
For long periods in the Chester courtroom, the case consisted of
erudite discussion of intra-alveolar haemorrhages,
haemosiderin-laden macro- phages and other such abstruse medical
arcana. Amid this morass of expert testimony, Meadow's one in 73
million statistic seemed luminously clear, and the figure was cited
in every national newspaper. Meadow further told the court that, put
another way, this meant that a British family would suffer by chance
an unexplained double child-death 'about once every hundred years'.
This was certainly substantially simpler to take in than the
arguments about death by smothering. The over riding problem with
trying to ascertain death by smothering is that both the presence
and the absence of a variety of physical signs can be consistent
with smothering. Indeed, Professor Meadow has maintained - in, for
example, Unnatural Sudden Infant Death (Archives of Disease in
Childhood, 1999) - that one of the characteristic features of deaths
caused by smothering is that 'the corpse appears normal'. Certainly,
in Harry's case, no signs of smothering were discerned either by
medical staff or at post-mortem.
Another difficulty arose from the fact that all medical evidence
in both cases was based on the post-mortems carried out by Dr
Williams, and the tissue samples and slides he had prepared.
Considerable doubt was cast upon his findings from both sides. Both
prosecution and defence experts told the jury that some of his key
findings at Harry's post-mortem - for example, the tears in the
brain, the subdural haemorrhage in the spine and the retinal
haemorrhages - had never existed. Defence witness Jem Berry,
professor of paediatric pathology at the University of Bristol,
asked the court: 'How can the prosecution rely on Williams's
findings when every time we try to confirm them it proves
impossible? I have never before been involved in a case where so
many of the original findings either failed to exist or crumbled to
dust upon critical examination.'
The prosecution's new position - that Harry had been smothered -
was hardly helped by Williams's evidence at committal that there was
no pathological evidence that Harry had been smothered. At trial,
however, Williams said he had noted scleral haemorrhages on the
backs of Harry's eyes, something he had seen in cases of smothering
since Harry's death. There was no reference to scleral haemorrhages
in his post-mortem report. Nor, it was agreed in the Court of
Appeal, was there yet anything in the world's medical literature to
associate such a finding with smothering.
Williams's post-mortem, on which the prosecution was basing its
assertion that Harry had suffered earlier episodes of abuse, also
referred to one 'possible' fractured and one dislocated rib.
However, other expert witnesses commented on the absence of damage
to the surrounding tissue - something that would have been expected
if previous abuse had taken place.
For the prosecution, Dr Jean Keeling, consultant paediatric
pathologist at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, said
she 'could not exclude the possibility' that the rib damage was
caused by the dissection of the body during post-mortem. There had,
too, been no visible sign of injury to either child during his
lifetime. No one, including Lesley Kerrigan, the Clarks' home-help,
ever witnessed Sally Clark harming or ill-treating her children. No
one who saw her with them suggested that she was anything other than
an ordinary, caring, devoted mother.
When taken to hospital, both children were seen by the medical
and nursing staff, the ambulancemen and also police officers. None
saw any marks or bruising on the children. The photographs of the
supposed bruises on Christopher's body were of very poor quality.
Nor, as is normal practice in paediatric pathology, had Dr Williams
cut into the bruises in order to obtain histological confirmation
that they actually were bruises. The tear to the inner lip could
have resulted from the use of a laryngoscope during frantic attempts
to resuscitate the child at hospital; in fact, that was precisely
the explanation originally given to police by Dr Cowan, the hospital
paediatrician.
There was, however, the question of the fresh blood in
Christopher's lungs - not referred to in Williams's original
post-mortem but now of immense importance. On this matter, Professor
Green changed his opinion once again. He now said that there had
indeed been fresh bloodstaining, and explained he had given
erroneous evidence to the contrary in the magistrates' court because
he 'hadn't had time to look at the file properly'.
The defence experts maintained that smothering was merely one of
several theoretical possibilities for this finding. Among these, of
course, was the nosebleed suffered by Christopher in 1996. The
prosecution had disputed it ever occurred. In fact, it was even
suggested that Steve Clark had fabricated it in order to explain
away the old haemorrhaging in the lungs - although the invention, in
1996, of an incident that would help to explain a pathological
finding made two years later would have demonstrated a rare
prescience. While the prosecution finally accepted there had been a
nosebleed, it was hypothesised that it was indicative of a previous
attempt by Sally Clark to smother her child. There was no evidence
to support such an assertion.
In fact, the nosebleed may have been extremely important. There
were altogether nine scientific experts for the prosecution and
defence, and of those nine, only three advanced possible causes of
death. For the defence, Tim David, professor of child health and
paediatrics at the University of Manchester, held that Christopher
was very ill before he died. He said that the nosebleed had actually
been very significant and, together with abnormal readings from
Christopher's blood tests (which showed unusually high levels of
sodium and glucose), indicated that he may have died of a rare lung
illness, idiopathic pulmonary haemosiderosis. Only Dr Williams and
Professor Meadow stated unequivocally that the children had died
unnatural deaths. The others, including Professor Green, said the
deaths should be termed 'unascertained'.
With the medical evidence in such disarray, the prosecution -
and, later, the Court of Appeal - put great weight on more
circumstantial evidence. In her police interviews, for instance,
Sally Clark was asked to describe precisely how she saw Harry when
she raised the alarm; according to the prosecution, it would have
been physically impossible for the child to have been 'slumped' in
the position she supposedly demonstrated. But, although there was a
transcript of what Sally Clark said during questioning, there was no
adequate pictorial record taken of the child's position as she
demonstrated it, and she denied that the description offered by the
prosecution accurately represented her demonstration.
An important part of the prosecution case revolved around the
similarities in the two deaths. Robin Spencer argued that both
children were found by Sally Clark, in the same room, in the same
bouncy chair, at approximately the same time of day, a time when,
statistically, babies are less likely to die natural deaths. (Most
sudden, natural deaths of infants occur between midnight and 11am.)
Both were about the same age. On each occasion, she was alone with
the child. On the first, her husband was away; in Harry's case, he
was about to go on a business trip; the implication was that she was
so fragile that she murdered the children to ensure Steve's
presence. The defence countered that these alleged coincidences were
either meaningless or simply wrong - Christopher, for instance, was
in his Moses basket.
As important, it turned out, was exactly when Steve returned on
the day of Harry's death. After their police interviews, Steve and
Sally Clark realised they had given different times for Steve's
arrival home. She had said about 7.30pm; he'd put it at 5.30. No
matter, the issue could be resolved; with his leg in plaster, Steve
had been using taxis to take him to and from work. The receptionist
at his office confirmed in writing that she had ordered his taxi
home that day at 4.45pm. That appeared to clinch the matter, and he
and Sally both gave evidence at trial that he had arrived home at
about 5.30.
Only during the latter stages of the trial did they discover that
this was wrong; the defence team reinvestigated and realised that
the receptionist had made a mistake: Steve had arrived home much
later than he originally thought. The prosecution argued that he had
given dishonest evidence in order to reduce the amount of time that
Sally Clark had been alone with Harry. Indeed, the Court of Appeal
subsequently described this point as of 'the greatest significance'.
It was, though, the defence that had clarified the matter and, in
doing so, confirmed what Sally Clark had said in her original police
interview.
Yet however muddled areas of the case appeared to be, there was
that one towering piece of evidence: Professor Meadow's one in 73
million statistic. Summing up, the judge, Mr Justice Harrison,
explained to the jury that the figure came from a forthcoming 'very
thorough research study, [a] government-funded report'. Although he
did explain that 'we do not convict people in these courts on
statistics', he also emphasised that the statistics appeared
'compelling', and so this 'may be part of the evidence to which you
attach some significance'. He reiterated Meadow's remark that 'there
is a chance of two SIDS in the same family happening once every
hundred years'. To the jury, it must have seemed as if innocence was
a statistical impossibility. Sally Clark was convicted by majority
verdicts on each count of murder.
Alas, professor meadow's statements appear not to be as
rock-solid as they seemed. He never did provide the research data on
the absence of blood in the lungs in other proven cases of
smothering that he had promised the defence; after some delay, he
explained that his secretary had mistakenly shredded it. Nor did his
famous statistic survive informed criticism outside the courtroom.
It was, statisticians said, flawed; according to Professor Philip
Dawid, it 'had no basis at all'; and those whose research had been
used for the CESDI report declared themselves unhappy with the way
Meadow had used their work. When the report was finally published,
it stated that a family suffering one unexplained death was at
greater risk of a second, and that there had been five double
'unascertained' child-deaths in Britain in the previous three years.
When the case went to appeal, however, Lord Justice Henry, Mrs
Justice Bracewell and Mr Justice Richards were not swayed by the
fresh defence evidence. Giving their verdict on 2
October 2000, they accepted that Meadow's one in 73
million statistic was wrong but called it 'a sideshow'; they upheld
the convictions, describing the remaining evidence as
'overwhelming'. Sally Clark will remain in prison for a very long
time.
Meanwhile, on 7 February this year The Daily Telegraph reported
that the prosecution of a dentist and anaesthetist for the
manslaughter of a five-year-old girl who had died in the dentist's
chair had collapsed. It emerged that the pathologist who had
conducted the original post-mortem had made a mistake. The
pathologist was Dr Alan Williams.
1
May 2001: [UK News] Solicitor tackles system from the inside 3
October 2000: [UK News] Husband to fight on as solicitor loses
appeal over baby murders 18
July 2000: [UK News] Mother convicted of baby murders 'on false
evidence' 31
December 1999: [UK News] 'Statistical error' in child murder
trial 10
November 1999: [UK News] Solicitor guilty of killing babies 10
November 1999: [UK News] Mother's happy life was
sham 27
October 1999: [UK News] Solicitor could not have killed our sons,
says Solicitor could not have killed our sons, says
26
October 1999: [UK News] I did not kill my babies, says weeping
solicitor 13
October 1999: [UK News] Lawyer 'murdered her
babies'
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