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A reader
has sent a useful clarification regarding Munchausen's and shaken
baby syndrome. I have posted it at the bottom of this page.
Angela Cannings
UK mother exonerated
after quack doctor's "expert testimony" found worthless
Cannings' compensation
claim is rejected
By Cahal Milmo, 12 January
2005
Campaigners and legal experts
accused the Home Office yesterday of flouting human rights laws
over its refusal to pay compensation to a mother wrongly convicted
of the murders of two of her children.
Angela Cannings, who spent
18 months in prison for killing her infant sons, had her conviction
quashed a year ago after judges ruled that expert evidence given
by Professor Sir Roy Meadow had been flawed.
During the fight to secure
her release, her husband had to sell the family home and she
was forced to live separately from her surviving daughter for
two years before the trial.
Despite her ordeal, the Home
Office rejected an application for compensation from Mrs Cannings,
41, at least partially on the grounds that Sir Roy was an independent
witness.Campaigners claimed it defied provisions under Section
5 of the Human Rights Act which states that "everyone who
has been the victim of arrest or detention in contravention of
the provisions of this article shall have an enforceable right
to compensation".
The acquittal of Mrs Cannings
was the latest in a series of high-profile cases involving mothers
wrongly accused over the unexplained deaths of their infants,
including the solicitor Sally Clark, who is still waiting to
hear if her claim for compensation after three years in prison
has been successful.
Michael Naughton, a law lecturer
at the University of Bristol and founder of the UK Innocence
Network, said: "The compensation scheme operated by the
Home Office is contrary to the human rights legislation it introduced.
Someone whose conviction has been quashed by the courts is entitled
to compensation, whatever the grounds of that decision.
"Mrs Cannings faces up
to three years before she could prove that before the British
courts and then another two or three years if she needed to take
the case to Europe," he added.
The Home Office insisted last
night that it was "confident" that its compensation
system complied with the Human Rights Act. But legal experts
said that officials dealing with the compensation claim had failed
to take any account of the cost to Mrs Cannings of the loss of
her liberty or the effect on her family of their long legal battle.
Compensation will only be given
if the defendant has had to depart from the normal appeals process
or can be shown to have suffered from the actions of a "deficient"
member of a public authority.
Speaking from her home in Cornwall,
Mrs Cannings said: "We have lost four or five years of our
lives and none of it was our doing. The authorities took over
our lives and now they are saying no one is responsible."
She added that she was appealing
against the ruling.
Mrs Cannings was jailed for
life in 2002 after being convicted of murdering her sons - seven-week-old
Jason in 1991 and 18-week-old Matthew in 1999 - partly on evidence
from Sir Roy.
The Home Office refused to
comment on Mrs Cannings' compensation claim. But officials inferred
that her claim had fallen outside its criteria for both compulsory
and discretionary payments because Professor Meadow was a private
expert asked to "offer their opinions and expertise"
on evidence rather than a state employee.
'Inside, I feel such
anger and bitterness'
By Cassandra Jardine
(Filed: 20/12/2004)
At the back of Angela Cannings's
home in Saltash, Cornwall, is a balcony overlooking a valley.
"My greatest pleasure," she says, "is to go out
there and think." When her husband, Terry, observes her
on the balcony, the woman he sees is not the calm survivor who
can tell audiences of 500 about her bereavements, trial and imprisonment.
Alone, believing herself unobserved,
all the misery of the past 15 years catches up and contorts her
face to match what she calls "the mess inside".
Angela Cannings:
' I can only take one day at a time'
The euphoria of a year ago,
when her convictions for murdering her two baby sons were quashed
and she was released by the Court of Appeal, soon passed. "She's
free, she's free," began the song that her surviving daughter
Jade, then seven, wrote for the occasion. Her husband, Terry,
was with her, too, as they drove off to start a new life, having
made legal history.
Ten months earlier, Sally Clark
(also charged and convicted with murdering her infant sons) had
been freed by the Court of Appeal, but it was in the summing
up following Cannings's appeal that the three judges made a ruling
that should have made Britain a safer place for parents whose
babies suffer unexplained death.
Prosecutions, they said, should
no longer be brought, unless there is "additional cogent
evidence". Acknowledging that some abusers might go free
as a result, they said they were averting a greater evil, that
of breaking up families needlessly.
"Post-Cannings" is
now a legal tag, but becoming a household name has not made the
past year any easier. Angela may no longer be serving a life
sentence for murder but mother, father and daughter are beginning
a different kind of life sentence, one that no court is capable
of quashing.
It was on November 12, 1999
that their lives, already freighted with the repeated tragedy
of their babies' deaths, turned into catastrophe. That day, while
three-year-old Jade was at playgroup, their 18-week-old son Matthew
stopped breathing much as his sister Gemma had done in
1989 and his brother Jason in 1991.
Within hours of the child's
death, social services swooped. Jade was put on the "at
risk" register. As a suspected murderer, Angela was faced
with a choice between staying at home while her daughter was
fostered (with adoption the next step) or leaving home herself;
she chose the latter.
Just when they needed each
other most to grieve, the family were separated and pitched into
a long legal battle. For the two and a half years before the
trial, Angela was allowed to see her surviving child for only
six hours a week, under supervision. Even when at a family wedding,
she could not share a car with Jade for fear that she might harm
the child. "I lived in constant fear of losing her,"
says Angela, 40.
Roaming from one relative to
the next, Angela worked with lawyers to prepare her case. Her
supporters assumed that she would be acquitted, as there was
nothing in her life, apart from the medical evidence, to suggest
she was a murderer. The jury, however, found her guilty.
The jurors may have remembered
the misleading statistic that paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow quoted
at Sally Clark's trial, that the likelihood of two natural cot
deaths in one family was 1 in 73 million. She feels, too, that
her own performance in the witness box counted against her: "I
didn't handle myself well. I felt so frustrated at the way my
words were twisted."
On conviction, she was sent
to Durham jail to join Rosemary West and Victoria Climbie's aunt.
From there, she went to Bulwood Hall, where a fellow inmate's
greeting with scalding coffee landed her in hospital for a fortnight.
Thoughts of Terry and Jade kept her going and every night she
would kiss the photographs she kept under her pillow.
She is often asked why she
appears to have coped relatively well, when Sally Clark is even
more traumatised. "I suppose it was my upbringing. My brother
and sister both had hare lip/cleft palate and my mother just
got on with it. I have got on with it, too, but inside I am not
coping I feel such anger, bitterness and frustration."
In the New Year, a dramatised
version of the Cannings case will be broadcast, starring Sarah
Lancaster and Timothy Spall. Even living Cannings's life second-hand
proved harrowing for the former Coronation Street actress.
"She lost a stone in weight
and looked shaken," says Angela. That docudrama will stop
at the uplifting moment when Angela walked free from the Court
of Appeal it will not show the difficulties of the past
year.
"We allowed it to be made
so that Jade will be able to understand what happened when she
is older," says Angela. "What hurts me most of all
is what this has done to her and Terry."
Chain-smoking Terry describes
himself, before Matthew died, as "a happy-go-lucky"
type who put in so many hours as a bakery manager that he spent
little time with his family. When Angela had to leave home, he
was forced to give up the job that he calls "the love of
my life", and become Jade's full-time carer.
With no income and mounting
bills, he lost everything he had worked so hard for his
house, his savings, his identity. "Where's Mummy? What's
she done wrong?" Jade would ask him.
"I thought it would all
be over soon, so I said she was working in the bakery,"
he says. "In some ways, it was easier for Angela. She removed
herself from the world. She had her family and the lawyers to
keep her going. For me, there was just Jade. She used to beat
me up, hitting me in the face until I cried. Sometimes, I wouldn't
see anyone else for four or five days."
He took refuge in alcohol and
suicidal thoughts. Even now, he says: "Some days when I
wake up, all I can think of is going back to bed. I don't want
to go out; I can't meet people. My only security is my bedroom
and my living room. I'm not the bloke I was. The only good to
come of this is my relationship with Jade. I now know what many
fathers miss."
Of all the family's sufferings,
Jade's are the most poignant because so much of the damage was
done in "the child's best interests", to protect her
from a supposedly abusive mother. Although I visit at mid-day
on a weekday, Jade is at home. "She screams and sobs when
we take her to school," says Angela. "She thinks I
won't be here when she comes back."
Her parents call Jade a "Jekyll
and Hyde" character, sweet one moment, savage the next.
She is so insecure that she won't allow anything in her room
to be moved scarcely surprising since, in the course of
one day five years ago, she lost not only her baby brother but
also her mother.
In a sense, she lost her father,
too, as he was so distraught that she almost took charge of him.
Over time, offers of help from family faded, leaving only those
she calls "the horrible people" the police and
social workers who dominated her life, without actually helping
her.
"We went to meetings where
20 or 30 people talked about what was best for her, without having
met her," says Angela. "It was two years after Matthew's
death before they organised a play therapist for her. Then, as
soon as I was sent to prison, they stopped the therapy because
she was no longer 'at risk'."
Jade, who had grown fond of
the therapists, was once again suddenly bereft. "Worst of
all for her was never being mentioned because of the secrecy
rules surrounding children at risk. Everyone talked of the dead
children, but never Jade. It was as if she didn't exist."
It has been hard for the three
surviving members of the family to make a new life together.
But for Angela's will to make it work, they would not be all
under the same roof now. She has emerged from her four-year ordeal,
by her own admission, harder and more cynical, but fired by hope.
"I came out of prison
with two wishes," she says. "To live with my husband
and daughter, and to try to stop others suffering as we have
done."
Initially, they went to live
in Salisbury, where Angela and Terry had grown up, married and
had their children. "There were too many memories, so we
moved. We thought Cornwall would give us a fresh start and, by
now, I expected to be back at work as a shop assistant. But I'm
not ready. I can only take one day at a time."
Used to running to her father
for everything, Jade still turns to him for comfort and Angela
has had to control her jealousy. This summer, Jade began hitting
her mother. Terry isn't used to sharing their daughter, so it
has been hard for him, too. But, neither in Wiltshire nor Cornwall
has anyone from social services asked if they need help and it
took the couple 10 months to swallow their pride and ask for
assistance.
Angela and Terry are now receiving
counselling. Jade has asked for a play therapist: "I have
this big knot inside me," she has told her parents. She
is still waiting to see a child psychiatrist.
One of the black thoughts that
haunts Angela is a fear of being sent back to prison. It is still
not known why her babies died, although her family tree shows
many other infant deaths.
Theoretically, she could be
retried. That is highly unlikely, but the judges' words at her
appeal have not made the difference to others that she had hoped.
"Post-Cannings",
it is true, no criminal cases have been brought against parents
whose babies have died, where no other evidence exists. Angela,
however, feels anguished for those similarly convicted parents
whose appeals have either not yet been heard or who have been
told the legal grounds are insufficient, even though the cases
should probably never have been brought in the first place. She
worries, too, that nothing has changed in the family courts,
where 20 cases of suspected parental abuse are heard for every
one that goes to a criminal court.
"Cannings does not apply,"
Judge Butler-Sloss, President of the Family Division, announced
two weeks ago in a case where parents are trying to prevent the
adoption of the daughter they are accused of attempting to smother.
When cases are judged on "the
balance of probability" rather than "beyond reasonable
doubt", children are still being taken from parents on largely
unsupported medical evidence. In the new year, when she meets
the Attorney General, Angela will call for a public inquiry.
"In another year's time,"
she says, "I hope I will be able to paint a more cheerful
picture of my own family, and of the justice system in
this country"
Mother cleared of killing
sons
BBC, Dec. 10, 2003
A mother who was jailed for
life for murdering her two baby sons, has had her conviction
overturned.
Angela Cannings, from Salisbury,
Wiltshire, was sentenced in April 2002 for the murder of seven-week-old
Jason in 1991, and 18-week-old Matthew in 1999.
But on Wednesday, the Court
of Appeal overturned the conviction, saying it was unsafe.
Ms Cannings, 40, a former shop
assistant, always maintained that the two boys died of Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), or cot death.
SIDS was recorded as the cause
of death after Ms Cannings' first child, Gemma, died at the age
of 13 weeks in 1989.
Ms Cannings has one surviving
daughter, who was born in 1996.
After the conviction was overturned
Ms Cannings said outside the court: "These last four years
have been a living hell, finally today justice has been done
and my innocence has been proven.
"I would like to go home
now and be mummy to our very precious daughter."
Her solicitor, Bill Bache,
said she was "extremely relieved" but in an emotional
state.
"She is very grateful
to the Court of Appeal for putting right the injustice that occurred
at Winchester Crown Court on April 16 2002 when she was wrongly
convicted of the murder of two of her children," he said.
"It seems to her that
this is a prosecution which should never have been brought.
"They are extraordinarily
difficult matters. Still, nobody knows what causes cot death,
and until a good deal more information is known about that, it
would seem to me that prosecutions of the kind that have been
brought against her."
Ms Cannings' husband and stepson
were in court, and applause was heard when the verdict was announced.
Her appeal has been the last
of three major cases to receive high-profile attention because
of the prosecution's reliance on evidence from two main scientific
experts.
In January, solicitor Sally
Clark, who had been jailed for murdering her two baby sons, was
cleared by the Court of Appeal.
And in June, 35-year-old pharmacist
Trupti Patel was cleared of murdering her three babies by a jury
at Reading Crown Court
The government has now ordered
a review of the procedures used for investigating mothers accused
of murdering their own babies.
And the Crown Prosecution Service
has said it will look at whether to review past cases involving
certain medical experts, including Professor Sir Roy Meadow.
He was involved as a prosecution
witness in all three of the recent cases.
Cot death
The solicitor of another mother
jailed for murdering her two babies said he hoped Ms Cannings'
acquittal would help his client's bid for freedom.
Donna Anthony, of Yeovil, Somerset,
was 25 when she was given two life sentences in 1998 for murdering
her daughter and son.
She always claimed they were
victims of cot death but an appeal to quash the convictions was
unsuccessful in June 2002.
Ms Anthony's solicitor George
Hawks says Sir Roy was also an expert witness in the case against
her.
She has been in jail in Durham
for five-and-a-half years. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/wiltshire/3306271.stm
Published: 2003/12/10 21:01:30
GMT
© BBC MMIV
Fresh hope for women
jailed for killing their children
By Rebecca Mowling Crime
Reporter, Evening Standard, November 29, 2004
Six mothers jailed for killing
their babies have been given new hope of release from prison,
the Evening Standard can reveal.
Sources say one of the cases
being examined by the Criminal Cases Review Commission is that
of Donna Anthony, who was jailed for life six years ago for the
murders of her two children aged 11 months and four months.
All six cases - which could
be sent back to the Court of Appeal - hinge on expert evidence
that has been brought under scrutiny after a series of murder
trials involving infant deaths.
It is the first time the commission
has been able to consider the cases of parents convicted of killing
a child without there being new evidence or new issues that might
lead to a fresh appeal.The six applications were a result of
a Court of Appeal judgment earlier this year, which quashed Angela
Cannings's conviction for killing two of her children and suggested
some guilty verdicts may have been based on unreliable expert
evidence.
The three Appeal Court judges
dismissed medical expert Professor Sir Roy Meadow's "law"
on cot deaths that "one in a family is a tragedy, two is
suspicious and three is murder".
Sir Roy's discredited theories
were the basis for the cases against two other mothers, Sally
Clark and Trupti Patel, who were also later cleared.
After the Cannings judgment,
Attorney General Lord Goldsmith ordered a review of 258 similar
cases where a parent was convicted of killing a child under the
age of two in the past 10 years.
Twenty-eight cases were identified
by Lord Goldsmith, who wrote to each one to tell them they had
an opportunity to apply to the CCRC to investigate whether the
convictions were "unsafe".
The CCRC confirmed it is considering
six cases. Chairman Professor Graham Zellick, said: "Our
main job is to review the cases of those who feel they have been
wrongly convicted of criminal offences, or unfairly sentenced.
We do not consider innocence or guilt, but whether there is new
evidence or argument that may cast doubt on the safety of an
original decision.
"The new legal ruling
about infant death has allowed us for the first time to consider
cases where the conviction was made on the basis of medical expert
opinion."
'Every day prisoners
call me a baby-killing bitch'
By Rebecca Mowling, Evening
Standard, November 29, 2004
Donna Anthony was just 22 when
toddler Jordan suddenly stopped breathing in February 1996.
She had suffered respiratory
attacks before, but on this occasion Ms Anthony could not revive
her 11-month-old daughter, despite giving mouth-to-mouth. A postmortem
proved inconclusive and the coroner ruled it was a cot death.
Then, a year later, her four-monthold
son Michael, who had been released from hospital hours earlier,
also stopped breathing.
Doctors restarted his heart
but he had brain damage and Ms Anthony and husband Dean agreed
to have his life-support system switched off.
Finally, in 1998, after a police
inquiry based on little hard evidence and assisted by Sir Roy
Meadow, Ms Anthony was found
guilty of murdering her children and sentenced to life in prison.
The jury heard a button was
found in Jordan's stomach. Sir Roy was asked if the child could
have choked on it. His reply: "Accidental ingestion of foreign
bodies, so common in older toddlers and children, is really rare
under the age of one year." Studies have since shown youngsters
of a similar age to Jordan are quite capable of picking up objects.
Sir Roy said the odds against
two natural cot deaths were a million to one. The case is given
priority by the review commission. Ms Anthony, now 30 and in
Durham Prison, said: "They call me a baby-killing bitch
every day. But I didn't kill my children - I loved them."
The crucial cases
Evening Standard, Novemeber
29, 2004
The three cases of Sally Clark,
Trupti Patel and Angela Cannings changed the way the courts now
view baby deaths.
All had their convictions for
murdering their children quashed.
Solicitor Mrs Clark was convicted
of killing two of her children on Sir Roy Meadow's evidence.
But she was allowed to appeal
because fresh medical evidence cast doubt on post mortem findings.
It was revealed that results of some laboratory tests were not
passed on by an important witness, so lawyers on both sides were
unaware of their significance.
Pharmacist Trupti Patel was
acquitted of murdering her three babies after her trial heard
"Meadow's Law" was flawed.
Shop assistant Mrs Cannings,
from Salisbury had her conviction for killing two of her children
quashed.
The Appeal Court overturned
a jury's verdict she smothered seven-week-old Jason in 1991 and
18-week-old Matthew in 1999.
Mrs Cannings, 40, insisted
the babies were victims of cot death, as her first child, Gemma,
had been at the age of 13 weeks in 1989.
Cases of Six Convicted
Child Killers under Review
By John-Paul Ford Rojas,
The Sctosman, PA , November 29, 2004
Six people convicted of child
killing are having their cases investigated by the Criminal Cases
Review Commission, it emerged today.
They are among 28 cases referred
to the Commission following a review by the Attorney General,
a spokesman for the Commission said.
The Commission, which investigates
miscarriages of justice, has been unable to contact around a
dozen of that number and is still trying to contact others.
It is also looking into five
separate infant death cases to see if there are grounds for appeal.
The majority of the 11 are still serving their sentences.
The six being looked into include
the case of Donna Anthony, of Yeovil, Somerset, who was given
two life sentences in 1998 for killing two of her babies.
Prosecutors built the case
against her at her original trial around the evidence of the
now-discredited paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadows. An appeal
against the conviction was dismissed in 2000.
The Attorney General's review
followed the quashing of the conviction of Angela Cannings in
January this year for killing two of her children. That conviction
also relied on Sir Roy's evidence.
Today, at a press conference
in central London to launch the Commission's annual report, its
chairman Professor Graham Zellick, said changes were needed in
the way courts dealt with expert evidence.
He said: "I would have
thought that we have now reached the point where we needed to
re-examine the whole law of admissibility of expert evidence
from first principles".
He said judges should be allowed
to throw experts out of court if they did not think their evidence
should be relied on.
He said: "There ought
to be some quite straightforward legal framework which would
allow the judge to say 'get out of my court, don't come into
here with this nonsense'."
Note from a
reader
First, let me just congratulate
you on your great site, which has proved very informative to
me on several occasions. However, while looking for info on the
Angela Cannings case, today, I felt like making a couple of quick
notes.
While it is unmistakably true
that Münchausen's by Proxy can be (and is) overdiagnosed,
all the articles in the Münchausen section in IB give the
inexperienced reader the idea that it is only a construct of
Meadow's imagination.
In fact, what is being debated
by experts is its applicability to sudden infant death
cases, not its existence.
Münchausen's by Proxy
is, indeed, an (extremely rare) psychiatric condition and
anyone who has worked as a forensic pathologist can tell you
so. In fact, there are many cases in the medical literature of
children suffering for years of unexplained serious symptoms
(and even undergoing dozens of surgeries) only for it to be revealed
by Hospital surveillance cameras that all the symptoms
and lesions are produced by the mother. (It's usually the mother,
but not always - a famous case is the "Angel of Death",
the UK nurse who was convicted of several counts of homicide
and attempted homicide in a pediatric ward, and which is briefly
mentioned in one of the articles in IB.)
These children were all "miraculously"
cured of all their myriad ailments once isolation from the parent
or carer was instated.
What should be contested (and
what is Injustice) is the assumption that multiple cot deaths
must be due to Münchausen's. This is where Meadow's went
wrong.
(Though in some cases he's
correct - let us just remember the American mother who confessed
to over the decades having suffocated 8 biological children and
one adopted child, and simulating their cot death.)
Additionally, I'd just like
to mention that Shaken Baby Syndrome (which, in fact, has almost
nothing to do with Münchausen's by Proxy), contrary to what
one of the articles suggests, is very easy to identify in autopsies
performed by a skilled pathologist, as it leaves clear visual
evidence in the cadaver.
All this to say that while
it is imperative to fight injustice, one must fight it with facts
sometimes journalists aren't very knowledgeable on the
topics they must write, and what is simply a lack of information
comes across as erroneous and misleading. It doesn't suffice
to read an article and assume that the journalist researched
it properly and it must, therefore, be integrally correct.
A couple of notes on what Münchausen's
by Proxy really is (taken, perhaps, from a pathology book), would
greatly benefit the IB pages dedicated to it.
Keep up the great work!
H.E. Riss
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
