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". "

Friends of Sally Clark, who died on Friday, have attacked the authorities for failing to support her after she was freed from prison.

Sally Clark was 'let down' by authorities - Observer article

Extracts:

"Friends of Sally Clark, who died on Friday, yesterday attacked the authorities for failing to support her after she was freed from prison.

Clark was wrongly jailed for the murder of her two sons and was later cleared. Angela Cannings, who was also falsely convicted for the murder of her two sons and was close to Clark, launched an angry broadside against health and social service teams for leaving the former solicitor to cope without professional help."

"Penny Mellor, a friend of the Clark family, said that Mrs Clark's time in prison had left a stain on the rest of her life. She was assaulted by other prisoners and lived in fear that they would try to poison her food. 'If you've been convicted as a child killer you become a focal point for all the hatred in prison,' Mellor said.

Mrs Clark, 42, was found guilty of murdering her sons, Christopher and Harry, but was cleared by the Court of Appeal in 2003 in a landmark ruling that highlighted serious flaws in the use of evidence provided by expert witnesses. She was found to have been wrongly convicted of the two murders after medical evidence emerged which had not been presented at her trial.

Professor Sir Roy Meadow gave evidence during her trial, claiming that the probability of two natural unexplained cot deaths in the family was 73 million to one. That figure was disputed by the Royal Statistical Society and other medical experts, who said the odds of a second cot death in a family were around 200-1."

I wonder whether Professor Sir Roy Meadow ever even apologised to Mrs Clark or the other women whose lives he destroyed when he wrongly accused them of murdering their babies? - I doubt it.

Victims of medical negligence also get little or no help from the authorities, and the so-called complaints procedures are just a waste of time and effort for the complainants.