Not since the quashing of convictions in three successive Irish terrorist trials over a decade ago has the criminal justice system been so destabilised. The latest legal tsunami also involves three separate trials, this time of mothers accused of killing their children. The Irish appeals succeeded after defence lawyers were able to demonstrate that police evidence had been deliberately bent. The three successive convictions of suspect parental serial killers were quashed on the grounds of conflicting evidence by expert medical witnesses.
The court of appeals yesterday released the full reasons for its unanimous decision last month in quashing the life sentence of Angela Canning, who had been found guilty of smothering two of her babies. The three judges - including deputy chief justice Lord Justice James - rightly called for a halt to the prosecution of any further parents for the murder of their children where there was disagreement between experts on the cause of death and no additional cogent evidence.
The ruling prompted Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, to order a review of all 258 convictions over the past 10 years where a parent has been found guilty of murder, manslaughter or infanticide. Top priority is being given to the 54 cases where a parent is still serving a prison sentence. The great majority of these cases are not expected to involve sudden infant death syndrome (Sids), but much more straightforward child abuse: shaking, beating and starving. A thorough review is promised, with a referral to the Criminal Cases Review Commission or the court of appeal where appropriate. At the same time, the crown prosecution service has been ordered to review 15 ongoing investigations into infant deaths.
Meanwhile, Lord Goldsmith is examining a further 250 criminal cases involving Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy (MSP) - under which parents are believed to injure their own children to draw attention to themselves - to see if more mothers have been wrongly convicted. Finally, the office of the children's minister has been looking at an estimated 5,000 children taken into care over the past 15 years on suspicion that their mothers were suffering from MSP.
At the heart of the current upheaval is Prof Sir Roy Meadow, former president of the Royal College of Paediatricians, who was a key witness in all three trials and who is the author of the MSP theory. The appeal judges in the case of Sally Clarke, the solicitor convicted of killing two of her children, concluded that Prof Meadow's evidence was "manifestly wrong" and "grossly misleading". He had claimed the chance of two children dying a cot death was 73m to one, which was shown to be totally wrong. Prof Meadow, who is not a statistician, was even more controversial in his evidence in the trial of Trupti Patel, the pharmacist convicted of killing three babies, with his crude rule that one cot death is tragedy, two suspicious and three murder. As others have noted, this belongs more to the history of soundbites than paediatric science. The retired paediatrician is now under investigation by the General Medical Council.
Yesterday's measured judgment noted that the arguments on both sides would probably have to be revised in the years to come and that much more needed to be known about cot deaths, particularly whether there were genetic links. In a world in which experts remain divided over whether babies should be placed on their backs or their fronts, few could contest this conclusion. Sensibly, a review of present investigations is being carried out by Lady Helena Kennedy, QC. She is expected to recommend a protocol for investigations and propose that postmortems of all sudden infant deaths be carried out by paediatric pathologists.
