Sally Clark
Encyclopedia
Sally Clark was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 solicitor
Solicitor
Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...

 who became the victim of an infamous miscarriage of justice
Miscarriage of justice
A miscarriage of justice primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. The term can also apply to errors in the other direction—"errors of impunity", and to civil cases. Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn, or "quash", a wrongful...

 when she was wrongly convicted of the murder of two of her sons in 1999. Even after the conviction was overturned, she never recovered from the experience, developed a number of serious psychiatric problems including serious alcohol dependency and died in 2007 from alcohol poisoning.

Clark's first son died suddenly within a few weeks of his birth in 1996. After her second son died in a similar manner, she was arrested in 1998 and tried for the murder of both sons. Her prosecution was controversial due to statistical evidence presented by pediatrician
Pediatrics
Pediatrics or paediatrics is the branch of medicine that deals with the medical care of infants, children, and adolescents. A medical practitioner who specializes in this area is known as a pediatrician or paediatrician...

 Professor Sir Roy Meadow
Roy Meadow
Sir Samuel Roy Meadow is a British paediatrician and professor, who rose to initial fame for his 1977 academic paper on the now controversial Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and his crusade against parents who, he believes, wilfully harm or kill their children. He was knighted for these works...

, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering sudden infant death syndrome
Sudden infant death syndrome
Sudden infant death syndrome is marked by the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by medical history, and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation. An infant is at the highest risk for SIDS during sleep, which is why it is sometimes...

 was 1 in 73 million, which was arrived at by squaring 1 in 8500 for likelihood of a cot death in similar circumstance. The Royal Statistical Society
Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...

 later issued a public statement expressing its concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts" and arguing that there was "no statistical basis" for Meadow's claim.

Clark was convicted in November 1999. The convictions were upheld at appeal in October 2000 but overturned in a second appeal in January 2003, after it emerged that the prosecutor's pathologist had failed to disclose microbiological reports that suggested one of her sons had died of natural causes. She was released from prison having served more than three years of her sentence. The journalist Geoffrey Wansell called Clark's experience "one of the great miscarriages of justice in modern British legal history". As a result of her case, the Attorney-General ordered a review of hundreds of other cases, and two other women convicted of murdering their children had their convictions overturned. Clark died of acute alcohol poisoning in her home in March 2007.

Early life

An only child, she was born as Sally Lockyer in Devizes
Devizes
Devizes is a market town and civil parish in Wiltshire, England. The town is about southeast of Chippenham and about east of Trowbridge.Devizes serves as a centre for banks, solicitors and shops, with a large open market place where a market is held once a week...

. Her father was a senior police officer with Wiltshire Constabulary
Wiltshire Constabulary
Wiltshire Police, formerly known as the Wiltshire Constabulary, is the territorial police force responsible for policing Wiltshire and Swindon in the south-west of England.-History:...

 and her mother was a hairdresser. She was educated at South Wilts Grammar School for Girls
South Wilts Grammar School for Girls
South Wilts Grammar School for Girls, or just South Wilts Grammar School or SWGS, is a secondary school in Salisbury, south Wiltshire, England. It is an Academy with specialist Mathematics and Computing College status.-History:...

 in Salisbury
Salisbury
Salisbury is a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England and the only city in the county. It is the second largest settlement in the county...

. She studied geography at Southampton University, and worked as a management trainee with Lloyds Bank
Lloyds Bank
Lloyds Bank Plc was a British retail bank which operated in England and Wales from 1765 until its merger into Lloyds TSB in 1995; it remains a registered company but is currently dormant. It expanded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and took over a number of smaller banking companies...

 and then at Citibank
Citibank
Citibank, a major international bank, is the consumer banking arm of financial services giant Citigroup. Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, later First National City Bank of New York...

.

She married Steve Clark, a solicitor, in 1990, and she left her job in the City of London
City of London
The City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...

 to train as a solicitor
Solicitor
Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...

. She studied at City University, London
City University, London
City University London , is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1894 as the Northampton Institute and became a university in 1966, when it adopted its present name....

, and trained at Macfarlanes, a city law firm. She moved with her husband to join the law firm Addleshaw Booth & Co
Addleshaw Booth & Co
Addleshaw Booth & Co was an English law firm which merged with Theodore Goddard in May 2003.Itself the product of a merger between Booth & Co. and Addleshaw Sons & Latham, Addleshaw Booth was a 'heavyweight' in the North of England legal sector, with offices in Leeds and Manchester...

 in Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...

 in 1994. They bought a house in Wilmslow
Wilmslow
-Economy:Wilmslow is well known, like Alderley Edge, for having many famous residents, notably footballers, stars of Coronation Street and rich North West businessmen. The town is part of the so-called Golden Triangle in the north west together with Alderley Edge and Prestbury...

 in Cheshire
Cheshire
Cheshire is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although its largest town is Warrington. Other major towns include Widnes, Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow...

.

Conviction for murder

Her first son, Christopher, was born on 22 September 1996. Apparently a healthy baby, he was found dead in his cot at 11 weeks old on 13 December. Suffering from post-natal depression; after counselling at the Priory Clinic, she was in recovery by the time her second son, Harry, was born on 29 November 1997, three weeks premature. However, he was also found dead at eight weeks on 26 January 1998. On both occasions, she was at home alone with her baby, and there was evidence of trauma, which could have been related to attempts to resuscitate them.

She and her husband were both arrested on 23 February 1998 on suspicion of murdering their children. On the advice of her lawyers, she twice refused to answer questions, and was charged with two counts of murder. She always denied the charge, and was supported throughout by her husband. She gave birth to a third son in 1999.

She was tried at Chester Crown Court, before Mr Justice Harrison and a jury. The prosecution was controversial due to the involvement of the pediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow
Roy Meadow
Sir Samuel Roy Meadow is a British paediatrician and professor, who rose to initial fame for his 1977 academic paper on the now controversial Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and his crusade against parents who, he believes, wilfully harm or kill their children. He was knighted for these works...

, former Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...

, who testified at Clark's trial that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering cot death
Sudden infant death syndrome
Sudden infant death syndrome is marked by the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by medical history, and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation. An infant is at the highest risk for SIDS during sleep, which is why it is sometimes...

 was 1 in 73 million. He likened the probability to the chances of backing an 80-1 outsider in the Grand National four years running, and winning each time.

She was convicted by a 10-2 majority verdict on 9 November 1999, and given the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment
Life imprisonment
Life imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment for a serious crime under which the convicted person is to remain in jail for the rest of his or her life...

. She was widely reviled in the press as the murderer of her children. Despite recognition of the flaws in Meadow's statistical evidence, the convictions were upheld at appeal in October 2000. She was imprisoned at Styal women's prison
Styal (HM Prison)
HM Prison Styal is a Closed Category prison for female adults and young offenders, located in the village of Styal in Cheshire, England. The prison is operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service.-History:...

, near her home in Wilmslow, and then Bullwood Hall women's prison
Bullwood Hall (HM Prison)
HM Prison Bullwood Hall is a Category C men's prison and Young Offenders Institution, located in Hockley, Essex, England. The prison is operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service.-History:Bullwood Hall was built in the 1960s originally as a female borstal...

 in Hockley
Hockley
Hockley is a large village and civil parish in Essex, England located between Chelmsford and Southend-on-Sea. More specifically it lies between Rayleigh and Rochford. It came to prominence during the coming of the railway in the 1890s and at the 2001 census had a population of 13,616 people, many...

 in Essex. 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. Her husband left his partnership at a Manchester law firm to work as a legal assistant nearer the prison, selling the family house to meet the legal bills from the trial and first appeal.

Later, it came to light that microbiological tests showed that Harry had colonisation of staphylococcus aureus
Staphylococcus aureus
Staphylococcus aureus is a facultative anaerobic Gram-positive coccal bacterium. It is frequently found as part of the normal skin flora on the skin and nasal passages. It is estimated that 20% of the human population are long-term carriers of S. aureus. S. aureus is the most common species of...

 bacteria, suggesting that her second son may have died from natural causes
Death by natural causes
A death by natural causes, as recorded by coroners and on death certificates and associated documents, is one that is primarily attributed to natural agents: usually an illness or an internal malfunction of the body. For example, a person dying from complications from influenza or a heart attack ...

, but the evidence had not been disclosed to the defence. This 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. The evidence was unearthed by the divorce lawyer Marilyn Stowe
Marilyn Stowe
Marilyn Stowe is an English solicitor. She has been described by The Times as "one of the most formidable and sought-after divorce lawyers in the UK", and described as "one of the country's leading divorce lawyers". She is also known for unearthing the medical evidence that freed Sally Clark, the...

, who provided her services free of charge because she felt that "something was not right about the case". It also became clearer that the statistical evidence presented at Clark's trial was seriously flawed. Her case was referred back to the Court of Appeal
Court of Appeal of England and Wales
The Court of Appeal of England and Wales is the second most senior court in the English legal system, with only the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom above it...

 by the Criminal Cases Review Commission
Criminal Cases Review Commission
The Criminal Cases Review Commission is an non-departmental public body set up following the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice itself a continuation of the May Inquiry. It aims to investigate possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland...

, and her convictions were overturned in a second appeal in January 2003. She was released from prison having served more than three years of her sentence.

Statistical evidence

The case was widely criticised because of the way statistical evidence was misrepresented in the original trial, particularly by Meadow. He stated in evidence as an expert witness
Expert witness
An expert witness, professional witness or judicial expert is a witness, who by virtue of education, training, skill, or experience, is believed to have expertise and specialised knowledge in a particular subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially and legally...

 that "one sudden infant death in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless proven otherwise" (Meadow's law
Meadow's law
Meadow's Law was a precept much in use until recently in the field of child protection, specifically by those investigating cases of multiple cot or crib death — SIDS — within a single family.-History:...

). He claimed that, for an affluent non-smoking family like the Clarks, the probability of a single cot death was 1 in 8,543, so the probability of two cot deaths in the same family was around "1 in 73 million" (8543 × 8543). Given that there are around 700,000 live births in Britain each year, Meadow argued that a double cot death would be expected to occur once every hundred years.

In October 2001, the Royal Statistical Society
Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...

 (RSS) issued a public statement expressing its concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts". It noted that there was "no statistical basis" for the "1 in 73 million" figure. In January 2002, the RSS wrote to the Lord Chancellor
Lord Chancellor
The Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, or Lord Chancellor, is a senior and important functionary in the government of the United Kingdom. He is the second highest ranking of the Great Officers of State, ranking only after the Lord High Steward. The Lord Chancellor is appointed by the Sovereign...

 pointing out that "the calculation leading to 1 in 73 million is invalid". There are several reasons why this is the case.

First, Meadow's calculation was based on the assumption that two SIDS deaths in the same family are independent of each other. The RSS argued that "there are very strong reasons for supposing that the assumption is false. There may well be unknown genetic or environmental factors that predispose families to SIDS, so that a second case within the family becomes much more likely than would be a case in another, apparently similar, family." The prosecution did not provide any evidence to support its different assumption. In a 2004 article in Pediatric 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.

Second, it is likely that the court committed a statistical error known as the "prosecutor's fallacy
Prosecutor's fallacy
The prosecutor's fallacy is a fallacy of statistical reasoning made in law where the context in which the accused has been brought to court is falsely assumed to be irrelevant to judging how confident a jury can be in evidence against them with a statistical measure of doubt...

". Many press reports of the trial reported that the "1 in 73 million" figure was the probability that Clark was innocent. However, even if the "1 in 73 million" figure were valid, this should not have been interpreted as the probability of Clark's innocence. 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. Although double SIDS is very rare, double infant murder is likely to be rarer still, so the probability of Clark's innocence was quite high. Hill calculated the odds ratio for double SIDS to double homicide at between 4.5:1 and 9:1.

Hill raises a third objection to the "1 in 73 million" figure: the probability of a child dying from SIDS is 1 in 1,300, not 1 in 8,500. 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. However, Meadow "conveniently ignored factors such as both the Clark babies being boys – which make cot death more likely". Hill also argues:
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". The appeal court concluded that "the evidence should never have been before the jury in the way that it was when they considered their verdicts". The judges continued, "we rather suspect that with the graphic reference by Professor Meadow to the chances of backing long odds winners of the Grand National
Grand National
The Grand National is a world-famous National Hunt horse race which is held annually at Aintree Racecourse, near Liverpool, England. It is a handicap chase run over a distance of four miles and 856 yards , with horses jumping thirty fences over two circuits of Aintree's National Course...

 year after year it may have had a major effect on [the jury's] thinking notwithstanding the efforts of the trial judge to down play it".

Aftermath

Clark's release in January 2003 prompted the Attorney General
Attorney General for England and Wales
Her Majesty's Attorney General for England and Wales, usually known simply as the Attorney General, is one of the Law Officers of the Crown. Along with the subordinate Solicitor General for England and Wales, the Attorney General serves as the chief legal adviser of the Crown and its government in...

 to order a review of hundreds of other cases. Two other women convicted of murdering their children, Donna Anthony
Donna Anthony
Donna Anthony is a British woman from Somerset who was jailed in 1998 after being convicted of the murder of her two babies. She was cleared and freed after having spent more than six years in prison....

 and Angela Cannings
Angela Cannings
Angela Cannings was wrongfully convicted in the UK in 2002 of the murder of her seven-week-old son, Jason, who died in 1991, and of her 18-week-old son Matthew, who died in 1999...

, had their convictions overturned and were released from prison. Trupti Patel
Trupti Patel
Trupti Patel is a qualified pharmacist from Berkshire, England, who was acquitted in 2003 of murdering three of her children, Amar , Jamie , and Mia ....

, who was also accused of murdering her three children, was acquitted in June 2003. In each case, Roy Meadow had testified about the unlikelihood of multiple cot deaths in a single family.

Meadow was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council
General Medical Council
The General Medical Council registers and regulates doctors practising in the United Kingdom. It has the power to revoke or restrict a doctor's registration if it deems them unfit to practise...

 in 2005 for serious professional misconduct, but he was reinstated in 2006 after he appealed. In June 2005, Alan Williams, the pathologist who conducted the postmortem examinations on both the Clark babies, was banned from Home Office
Home Office
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...

 pathology work and coroners' cases for three years after the General Medical Council found him guilty of "serious professional misconduct" in the Clark case. This decision was upheld by the High Court
High Court of Justice
The High Court of Justice is, together with the Court of Appeal and the Crown Court, one of the Senior Courts of England and Wales...

 in November 2007.

According to her family, Clark was unable to recover from the effects of her conviction and imprisonment. After her release, her husband said she would "never be well again". She was unable to read John Batt's book about her case, Stolen Innocence: A Mother's Fight for Justice.

By all accounts a broken woman, Clark was found dead in her home in Hatfield Peverel
Hatfield Peverel
Hatfield Peverel is a large urban village and civil parish in the centre of Essex, England. Its population, including the hamlet of Nounsley, is approximately 5,500 . Hatfield means a 'heathery space in the forest'; Peverel refers to William Peverel, the Norman knight granted lands in the area by...

 in Essex on 16 March 2007. It was originally thought that she had died of natural causes, but an inquest ruled that she had died of acute alcohol intoxication, though the coroner stressed that there was no evidence that she had intended to commit suicide.

Further reading


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK