Another case of a mother whose baby son was taken away after she was wrongly accused of harming him. The medical evidence was "fundamentally flawed".

Child abuse case drove mother to abortion

Extract:

"Last week, a High Court judge said that the parents had experienced a "nightmare" after a "false finding by a court".

The family, from Oldham, cannot be identified for legal reasons. In court, the child was referred to only as K.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Ryder said: "The parents bore an almost intolerable burden of being unjustly accused of inflicting serious injury on their infant son. They lived for 12 months with the opprobrium and suspicion of friends and neighbours."

"The judge pointed out how a senior neuroradiologist, Dr Wellesley St Clair Forbes, had used language which was "too absolute" in relation to the possible cause of the baby's alleged injuries.
The case emerged as victims of miscarriages of justice prepared to unveil a campaign aimed at changing the way medical evidence is considered in court.

Among those at the launch at Westminster this week will be Angela Cannings, who spent 18 months in prison after being wrongly convicted of killing two of her children, both victims of cot deaths; and Ian and Angela Gay, cleared in a retrial this month of poisoning their adopted son with salt and shaking him. The couple served 15 months in jail after being convicted of manslaughter in 2005.

The event will begin with a minute's silence for Sally Clark, the solicitor who died two weeks ago. She served three years in prison for murdering her two babies before her conviction was quashed and she was freed in 2003."

"A circuit judge, Judge Newton, repeatedly refused the parents' requests for a second expert opinion from a doctor.

When the opinion was -finally obtained from Dr Neil Stoodley, a consultant -paediatric neuroradiologist, in July 2005, he called Dr Forbes's findings "fundamentally flawed" and "incapable of withstanding logical analysis". "