Mother accused of baby murders is freed

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By Sandra Laville
(Filed: 11/12/2003)

Possible vaccine / cot death relation here.....

Mother accused of baby murders is freed
By Sandra Laville
(Filed: 11/12/2003)

A mother who spent 20 months in prison after being convicted of smothering her two baby sons was freed by the Court of Appeal yesterday in a ruling that could lead to scores of cases being reviewed.

Angela Cannings became the third woman in 11 months to have her conviction for murdering her babies quashed as unsafe.

Angela Cannings with her husband Terry outside the court

The controversial paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a key Crown witness, was again criticised when Lord Justice Judge, the deputy Chief Justice, said some of his evidence to the jury was "simply wrong".

Mrs Cannings, 40, who has a seven-year-old daughter, stood up in the dock and bowed her head as the judges announced that she was free to go.

In the public gallery, her husband Terry Cannings, 49, shouted and cheered and friends and family stood to applaud the decision. "She's free," shouted one friend. "She's coming home."

Mrs Cannings, of Salisbury, Wilts, lost three babies, Gemma, Jason and Matthew, to unexplained deaths between 1989 and 1999. She was charged with the murder of her sons after Matthew's death.

Clutching her husband's hand on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice, Mrs Cannings held back tears and said she had never given up hope that she would be released.

"On 12 November 1999 we lost our precious son Matthew after having previously lost our precious Gemma and Jason. We thought we had been through enough heartbreak. Then there was the police investigation, a trial, then conviction. These last four years have been a living hell. Finally, today, justice has been done and my innocence has been proved."

"Finally there are two special people in my life, my husband Terry, who has stood by me and always believed in my innocence, he is my soul mate. And our very precious daughter who over these last four years has been our inspiration."

Mrs Cannings said she was looking forward more than anything to returning home to be a "mummy", before being whisked away as part of a deal with a tabloid newspaper.

Lord Justice Judge suggested that not enough was known scientifically about the causes of cot deaths for juries to exclude natural causes of death in such cases.

"The door never seems to be closed to new views about what may or may not cause cot death," he said.

"We are here on the edge of known science and research is absolutely continuous and producing new results and opinions on a daily basis."

The three judges took just four minutes to quash Mrs Cannings's conviction after a five-day appeal. Lord Justice Judge said the reasons for their decision would be given later, but that there was no need to reflect further on her case. "We have reached a clear conclusion . . . this conviction is unsafe and accordingly will be quashed."

The case follows the acquittal of Trupti Patel for murdering her three babies and the quashing last January of Sally Clark's conviction for murdering her two sons. In each case Sir Roy was a key prosecution witness.

Sir Roy had told the Cannings jury that three deaths in one family was "very, very rare" and that he believed she had smothered her children. The judge noted that Sir Roy had already been criticised by three appeal judges in the Clark case for providing "grossly misleading" statistical evidence to the jury.

Hundreds of cases involving him, in the criminal and the family court, could now be reviewed.

Michael Mansfield, QC, for Mrs Cannings, told the Court of Appeal that no reasonable jury could have excluded natural causes of death for her two children and the use of the discredited Sir Roy was grounds for appeal alone.

Mr Mansfield said new evidence from soon-to-be-published research further discredited Sir Roy. It showed that a family who had suffered one cot death were 5.9 times more likely than an ordinary family to suffer another.

Sir Roy believes that, unless proved otherwise, one cot death is a tragedy, two are suspicious and three are murder.

Mrs Clark, 39, and her husband Steve, said yesterday: "It is imperative that when reliance is placed on supposedly expert witnesses, their expertise and objectivity are properly assessed.

We hope the presumption of innocence in these cases will never be forgotten again and that no more mothers are effectively required to prove their innocence if the causes of their babies' deaths cannot be easily identified."

Joyce Epstein, the director of the Foundation for the Study of Infant Death, said the case made it imperative that there was an overhaul of the way sudden infant deaths were investigated.

Miss Epstein blamed the rash of prosecutions on an attitude of suspicion amongst pathologists and paediatricians dating back to 1998 when Professor Michael Green, a pathologist, told colleagues to "think dirty" when a baby was brought in who had died suddenly.

William Bache, Mrs Cannings's solicitor, said he believed there were many other miscarriages of justice involving mothers wrongly accused of killing babies. He highlighted the case of Donna Anthony, from Somerset, who is awaiting an appeal against conviction.

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