A national protocol to ensure that all sudden infant deaths in England and Wales are investigated thoroughly, to reduce the risk of wrongful convictions, will be recommended by an expert committee today.
The government is expected to implement the recommendations from a joint working group of the royal colleges for paediatricians and pathologists, chaired by the Labour peer Helena Kennedy QC.
The committee was set up after the court of appeal overturned the convictions of Angela Cannings and Sally Clark for murdering their babies, and Trupti Patel was acquitted on child murder charges.
Its recommendations are aimed at minimising the chances of innocent parents facing murder accusations.
It is hoped that the rigorous medically-led investigation it calls for will help to identify possible genetic, environmental or other causes of cot death.
A key recommendation is for all postmortem examinations in unexplained baby deaths to be carried out by paediatric pathologists or pathologists with paediatric training, and performed in line with a special protocol.
In some miscarriage of justice cases, including that of Sally Clark, postmortems were done by adult pathologists without specific knowledge of infants.
The committee will also recommend changes to try to reduce the chances of expert witnesses in murder trials influencing juries by straying outside their areas of expertise.
It will suggest that judges should be satisfied that witnesses due to give evidence are expert in the field and should be under a duty to give clear instructions to such witnesses to keep to their own fields.
However, the recommendations do not mention Sir Roy Meadow, the paediatrician who used statistics on the probability of cot death in the Sally Clark trial.
His evidence was thought to have played a key role in her conviction and was later criticised by the Royal Statistical Society.
The committee proposes a pre-trial hearing for expert witnesses in baby murder trials, where experts identify the issues on which they agree. With those issues defined, the trial would then focus on the issues where there was disagreement, leaving less scope for extraneous matter which could influence the jury.
The pre-trial hearing is also intended to limit the scope for experts with maverick theories, like Colin Paterson, a pathologist and defence witness who was struck off this year by the General Medical Council for misleading courts with his theory of "temporary brittle bone disease", a condition few experts believe exists. He gave evidence for more than two decades in courts in England, Scotland and America before he was discredited.
The national protocol, based on one already operating in south-west England, would recognise that in more than 90% of sudden infant deaths, there is no suggestion that a parent has mistreated the baby.
Doctors would play a key role alongside police. When an unexplained death of a baby occurs, a paediatrician and a police officer would see the parents in the hospital's accident and emergency department, then visit them at home with the family's GP or health visitor. A full medical and social history would be taken, and a postmortem carried out by a specialist.
Two or three months later, all the professionals involved with the family would discuss the case. The family would be given a written explanation of whatever was known about the cause of death.
The main obstacle to implementing the protocol is a shortage of paediatric pathologists. There are only 44 consultant paediatric pathologists and four in training.
However, given the small number of sudden infant deaths - about 300 a year - the committee believes that, with extra training for adult pathologists and forensic pathologists, the manpower could be available in about two years.
