Criminal Law - A Miscarriage of Justice.

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Hemis No:198788

Criminal Law.

Assignment 1.  Part B.

A Miscarriage of Justice.

Hemis No:198788.

Word count:3,000

As there is no material regarding this case ‘in print’ as of yet,

all sources of information used have been attached as appendices.


Sally Clark.

  • On the 9th November 1999, after a four week trial at Chester Crown Court, Sally Clark was found guilty and convicted of the murder of her two children.

  • The Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body which investigate miscarriages of justice in England, sent Sally Clark’s case to the Court of Appeal.

  • On the 2nd October 2000 at the Court Of Appeal, the guilty verdict was upheld. They ruled that the case against Sally Clark was ‘overwhelming’ despite the support of fresh evidence.

  • The Criminal Cases Review Commission has ordered, that the case should go back to the Appeal Court because of the new medical evidence put forward, contained in a report overlooked at the original trial, which shows that Harry, the second baby to die, suffered from staph aureus at the time of his death, which almost certainly killed him

  • Sally is now serving the forth year of her life sentence.


The case of Sally Clark is a long and difficult one to understand.  There are no precedents in this area of law and no books have been published regarding this case, as it has not yet been recognised by the courts. This is a landmark case and Sally Clark is not the only innocently convicted woman awaiting justice. Donna Anthony was convicted on Meadows Law and is in Durham prison.  Maxine Robinson was given two life sentences at Sheffield Crown Court.

The definition of a miscarriage of justice is a clear one, a failure to attain the desired end result of ‘justice’, and it can most definitely be applied in Sally’s case.

In order to understand how this case was tried and how the verdict of guilty was reached, the following questions have to be defined.  What is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Hereafter SIDS)? What is ‘The Prosecutors Fallacy’?  What is Meadows Law?   Within this essay I will address these issues and attempt to establish the true statistics involved in SIDS, state the most likely causes of death for the Clark babies, establish what the prosecution said in order for the jury be suspicious of Sally and try to deduce how important to the jury the flawed statistics used by the expert witnesses were.

Two expert witnesses who the media widely reported at the time of Sally’s trial were; Sir Roy Meadows and Dr Alan Williams, who were called to speak about SIDS.  SIDS is the term given when an infant dies and when no adequate explanation can be found to explain the death.  It is sometimes referred to as cot death, as many babies are found, having been  put to bed in a perfectly healthy state, dead in their cots. Meadows and Williams are both believers in the new theory of forensics that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome does not exist. They think that the term should be ‘Inexplicable’ death (in other words, possible murder).

Williams was the man who raised the alarm about Sally Clark. During the Court of Appeal hearing, crucial aspects of evidence were given by him. These were in direct conflict with the views of other experts. The prosecutions medical evidence changed completely  between committal and trial, prompting one paediatrician to say in court that he had never previously been involved in a case where so many of the Prosecution’s medical findings crumbled to dust.

Dr Williams should not have been relied upon because he is not a paediatric pathologist and the prosecution have admitted that fundamental errors were made by him in the post-mortem examinations. In addition to this Dr Williams was found to have made crucial mistakes in another case. Roy Meadows is a knighted professor and it is agreed by all that he is a superb performer in the witness box. He has recently admitted however that the crucial evidence given by him on whether one of the babies had been smothered was based on data that his secretary had accidentally shredded.

In his book ‘The ABC of Child Abuse’, Meadow writes, “One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder until proved otherwise.  It is a crude aphorism but a sensible working rule for anyone encountering these tragedies”.

This is what is now referred to as Meadow's Law and because of the apparent acceptability of this statement; the burden of proof has imperceptibly shifted in cases where more than one baby dies in the same family for no clear reason. Meadows Law is a criminal theory to which there is no easy way out. From the juries point of view, 1st there’s a mother in the dock. What’s she doing there if she hasn’t done anything wrong? 2nd there are two dead babies. 3rd there is a learned professor who says either these deaths are not natural or they are murder. This shifts the burden of proof straight onto the mother.  The juries’ reaction is ‘if she can prove that she did nothing to her babies we’ll let her off’.  She can’t so she must be guilty.

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During the initial trial, there were nine days of very complex and conflicting medical evidence for the jury to digest, some of which Stephen Clark, an experienced lawyer, struggled to understand. In the middle of this medical confusion, within a few moments of discussing SIDS, Roy Meadow told the court that the chances of this happening is Sally’s case was 1 in 73 million, it could only happen once in a century. This statistic, unlike all the other complicated medical evidence was easy to understand.  It was terribly wrong and it sealed Sally’s fate. It was a statistical smoking gun, ...

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A well written and very comprehensively researched essay. Though now outdated, much of the content remains accurate and valid. 4 Stars.