Sally Clark (née Lockyer, 15 August 1964 – 15 March 2007)[1] was an English solicitor who, in November 1999, became the victim of a miscarriage of justice when she was found guilty of the murder of her two infant sons.
The prosecution case relied on flawed statistical evidence presented by paediatrician Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million.
Journalist Geoffrey Wansell called Clark's experience "one of the great miscarriages of justice in modern British legal history".
Clark's experience caused her to develop severe psychiatric problems and she died in her home in March 2007 from alcohol poisoning.
[6] Clark had post-natal depression and received counselling at the Priory Clinic, but was in recovery by the time her second son, Harry, was born three weeks premature on 29 November 1997.
[4] Home Office pathologist Dr Alan Williams withheld the results of bacteriology tests on Clark's second baby which showed the presence of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus in multiple sites including his cerebro-spinal fluid.
[1] The nature of her conviction as a child-killer, and her background as a solicitor and daughter of a police officer, made her a target for other prisoners.
[1] Later, it came to light that microbiological tests showed that Harry had a colonisation of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, indicating that he had died from natural causes, but the evidence had not been disclosed to the defence.
[4] This exculpatory evidence had been known to the prosecution's pathologist, Alan Williams, since February 1998, but was not shared with other medical witnesses, police or lawyers.
[11] The evidence was unearthed by her husband from hospital records obtained by the divorce lawyer Marilyn Stowe, who provided her services free of charge because she felt that "something was not right about the case".
[4] For her second appeal a report regarding the medical evidence was provided by Sam Gulino, a prosecution forensic pathologist for the State of Florida, US.
It was clear that sound medical principles were abandoned in favour of over-simplification, over-interpretation, exclusion of relevant data and, in several instances, the imagining of non-existent findings.
He stated in evidence as an expert witness that "one sudden infant death in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless proven otherwise" (Meadow's law).
[14] In a 2004 article in Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, Professor of Mathematics Ray Hill of Salford University concluded, using extensive SIDS statistics for England, that "after a first cot death the chances of a second become greatly increased" by a dependency factor of between 5 and 10.
In order to calculate the probability of Clark's innocence, the jury needed to weigh up the relative likelihood of the two competing explanations for the children's deaths.
Meadow arrived at the 1 in 8,500 figure by taking into account three key characteristics possessed by the Clark family, all of which make SIDS less likely.
But this implication is totally false, because the very same factors which make a family low risk for cot death also make it low risk for murder.During the second appeal, the court noted that Meadow's calculations were subject to a number of qualifications, but "none of these qualifications were referred to by Professor Meadow in his evidence to the jury and thus it was the headline figures of 1 in 73 million that would be uppermost in the jury's minds".
[4] Clark's release in January 2003 prompted the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith to order a review of hundreds of other cases.
[21] In June 2005, Alan Williams, the Home Office pathologist who conducted the postmortem examinations on both the Clark babies, was banned from Home Office pathology work and coroners' cases for three years after the General Medical Council found him guilty of "serious professional misconduct" in the Clark case.
His conduct was severely criticised by other experts giving evidence and opinion to the court and in the judicial summing up of the successful second appeal.
[24] The nature of Sally Clark's wrongful conviction as a child-killer, and her background as a solicitor and daughter of a police officer, made her a target for other prisoners.
[8] A family spokesman stated "Sally was unable to come to terms with the false accusations, based on flawed medical evidence and the failures of the legal system, which debased everything she had been brought up to believe in and which she herself practised."