Mick Hartley

The Observer have a bleak interview with Angela Cannings:

Mrs Cannings was jailed for the murder of seven-week-old Jason in June 1991 and 18-week-old Matthew in November 1999. Another child, Gemma, aged 13 weeks, died in 1989. As with Jason, the coroner had given Gemma’s cause of death as sudden infant death syndrome. It was only when Matthew died that sympathy turned to suspicion.

The jury that convicted Mrs Cannings heard evidence from Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a paediatrician who has regularly appeared as an expert prosecution witness in child murder cases. Meadow coined his own ‘Meadow’s law’, which stated the death of one child in a family was a tragedy, two suspicious and three murder. But this shown to be fundamentally flawed when Meadow’s wild use of statistics were blamed for three serious miscarriages of justice that came to light in 2003.

In the year Mrs Cannings was released, Sally Clark and Trupti Patel, who were jailed for murdering their children largely on the strength of Meadow’s evidence, walked free.

The Cannings’ verdict prompted the Attorney-General to announce a review of hundreds of other cases. In addition, local councils were instructed to look into thousands of cases where parents had been forced to give up their children in the family courts after experts had accused them of abuse.

Meadow, 70, and no longer practising, is up before the General Medical Council in April on charges of gross misconduct.

In recent months Mrs Cannings has found it difficult to contain her anger when she thinks about how Meadow pronounced judgment on her without even interviewing her. ‘Because of his position the jury listened to him, they thought he must have been right. But he never met me, he never met Terry. He devastated our lives.’

She also singles out the Crown Prosecution Service, the police and Wiltshire social services for criticism, and expresses incredulity that those who were involved in her conviction are still working.

‘The hardest thing was going into a witness box and defending myself. But how do I defend myself when I don’t know why my babies died. What do I say?’

The Cannings’ case has been turned into a BBC drama, starring Timothy Spall and Sarah Lancashire, to be screened on Tuesday 22 February on BBC1 at 9pm. Which is all well and good, but, while we may have learned our lesson here, elsewhere, when medical science is unable to supply the answers for infant death, courts are still deferring to Professor Sir Roy Meadow’s dubious authority, and convicting parents of murder.