The tragic consequences of 'expert' opinion

Sally Clark, the Cheshire solicitor, who was wrongly jailed for life in 1999 for murdering her two children, has died in her sleep at the age of 42. Although there has, as yet, been no coroners inquest, family members have said that, while Mrs. Clark was not known to be suffering from a specific illness, her health was in ruins as a result of the conviction and the traumatic experience she underwent at the hands of British 'justice'.

Her first child, Christopher, was found dead in his cot aged 11 weeks by his mother in 1996 and she discovered her second child, Harry, aged 6 weeks, to be dead in his cot two years later. The second child was found to have a brain inflammation consistent with, paediatricians claimed, severe shaking.

What was NOT said at Mrs. Clark's trial was that there were other circumstances which could have led to the brain deformities and, in fact, Home Office pathologists had found lethal doses of a meningo-coccal type bacteria in the child's system about which the defence team was not informed.

The final nail in Sally Clark's coffin was the testimony of Professor Sir Roy Meadow who claimed, testifying for the Crown, that the chances of two siblings dying of 'cot death syndrome' were 1 in 73 million. He appears to have plucked that figure out of the air and, given his paediatric stature, the jury believed him. It was the death knell for any chance Sally Clark had of being found innocent.

Later the Royal Statistical Society wrote to the Lord Chancellor asking for any evidence to back Sir Roy's estimate and of course there was none. The figures were off the top of his head.

Poor Sally Clark was jailed for life and I can still recall the face of her husband after the trial was over, a man in shock convinced that the truth would have come out before the jury reached a verdict.

Well th truth DID out, but not before Mrs. Clark had spent three years in prison, abused as a child killer by fellow inmates, having already suffered the tragedy of losing her two children. Sir Roy Meadow was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the medical register but both decisions were overturned on appeal and he is free to continue exercising his 'expert' opinion.

Sally Clark was released from prison in 2003 after all this deception and hypothesis came to light. I remember seeing her standing on the steps of the appeal court with her husband, a young woman of 38 whose hair was prematurely grey, her eyes were sunken and she looked many years older than her age. She was free but her life had been ruined both by tragic personal circumstances and by the British legal system.



Now, four years later, Sally Clark is dead, maybe the last act in a tragedy that should never have happened on such slender circumstantial evidence. I believe the real villain here is the adversarial system of justice which places more emphasis on the prosecution and the defence outwitting one another than it does in getting to the truth of the matter. It is always hoped, in our system of justice, that this adversarial conflict gets to the right result in the end. I have long had my doubts about the wisdom of this assumption and, particularly in child death cases where so much weight is placed on expert testimony and medical probability, it is clearly gravely flawed.

Sally Clark is not the only young woman to have been convicted - and then cleared - of murdering her children based solely on expert evidence which has subsequently proved to be unreliable, but she is perhaps the first to have so clearly and so tragically suffered the ultimate consequences of stress, depression and ill-treatment that such a miscarriage of justice can engender.

Let us hope that this is a wake up call to the legal system and a motivator to ensure that considerable changes are implemented in child death cases before a mother can be sent away for life on the supposition of a so called expert and the vagaries of believing medical probabilities.