Withheld tests free mother

LONDON - "My wife," declared Stephen Clark on the day in November 1999 when Sally Clark was convicted of murdering their two baby sons, "was a caring and devoted mother. She is innocent."

Since then, his unshakeable faith has never wavered and yesterday it was vindicated when Sally Clark was cleared by the Court of Appeal.

But it took more than three years of relentless endeavour and two appeals to bring her release from her life sentence.

The ordeal pushed the couple to the brink of bankruptcy and they were forced to sell their house near Manchester to cover legal costs.

In the end, their battle was won by the hidden secret of prosecution file number 89.

When Sally Clark, now aged 38, was convicted at Chester Crown Court, her husband had seen his wife condemned as the killer of their two sons, aged 11 weeks and 8 weeks - crimes, the prosecution said, that were "almost too horrific to contemplate".

She had been portrayed by police as an alcoholic who began drinking because of her husband's absences from home and fears that motherhood would destroy her looks.

Their third child, a boy, had been taken into care.

None of this affected Stephen Clark's devotion to his wife or his determination to bring about her release.

The couple met in London in 1988 when she joined Citibank, where he was a financial lawyer.

Two years later, they married and lived in north London before moving to Manchester and joining the firm of Addleshaw Booth & Co.

They bought a cottage in Wilmslow, Cheshire, and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, particularly after he was made a partner. But according to the picture painted by the prosecution at her trial, beneath this facade, the couple were at odds over when to start a family, with Stephen Clark more anxious than his wife, who was said to want to progress with her career.

She was unhappy at being unable to make friends in the area while her husband was away on business, indulging in his favourite sporting activities or being active on behalf of the Conservative Party.

There is no dispute that Sally Clark began to suffer from depression and drinking around the time of her first pregnancy in 1995. She was reprimanded for drinking at work during the pregnancy, admitted binge drinking and was given therapy for loneliness and depression.

Their first son, Christopher, was born in autumn 1996 and died on December 13. Although she had spent the morning writing invitations for his christening, the prosecution claimed she had killed him that night, while her husband was out with colleagues.

Sally Clark said she left him in a Moses basket by her bed, while she had gone to make a cup of tea; she had returned to find him a "dusty grey colour". The death was initially attributed to a lung infection.

Harry was born in November the following year and was found dead by his mother eight weeks later; her husband was preparing a bottle for the baby. Police began an inquiry into both deaths.

The prosecution case at the trial was thin. Evidence of Sally Clark's drinking was given at the committal hearing but was ruled inadmissible at the trial because there was no suggestion she had been drunk at the time of the deaths.

But one crucial fact demolished the family's claim that both deaths were cot deaths: a claim by Sir Roy Meadow, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, that the chance of two such deaths in one family were one in 73 million.

The Royal Statistical Society later wrote to the Lord Chancellor stating "there was no statistical basis" for the figure.

Peter Donnelly, professor of statistical science at Oxford University, said it was "just plain wrong". Double cot deaths in the same family are not that rare. According to the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths they occur "roughly once a year".

Encouraged by this and aided by Frank Lockyer, his father-in-law and a retired senior police officer, and John Batt, a criminal law solicitor, Stephen Clark and the family's lawyers began to assemble a case for appeal.

But their hopes were dashed at the first appeal in October 2000. Although the court accepted Sir Roy's statistic had been flawed, it did not release her because the judges were convinced there was "overwhelming" evidence of her guilt.

It was Stephen Clark who discovered the "smoking gun" which led to the case being referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. At the original trial, the jury asked whether any blood tests had been done on Harry. They were told by the prosecution that none was carried out.

But in July last year, Stephen Clark, after repeated requests, was eventually passed hospital documents showing Dr Alan Williams, the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examinations on both babies, had ordered blood tests for Harry.

These suggested a staphylococcal infection - a recognised cause of death in infants. The results were disregarded by Dr Williams as irrelevant and not disclosed to the defence. Yet they had been in Chester Crown Court during Sally Clark's trial, in file number 89.

The Court of Appeal was faced with new evidence. It was not a difficult job to allow the appeal. As Sally Clark's lawyers made clear, the suppression flew in the face of official guidelines and repeated rulings on disclosure.

These rulings - often a result of well-known cases of miscarriages of justice - state it is an obligation of the prosecution to disclose all material, and not incumbent on the defence to go looking for it. Sally Clark's case appears to have been added to that list.


- INDEPENDENT