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Trupti Patel
Mother cleared of killing
babies
BBC, June 11, 2003
A mother has been cleared of
murdering her three babies by a jury at Reading Crown Court.
There were cheers as the jury
acquitted 35-year-old pharmacist Trupti Patel - who put both
hands over her mouth and let out a sob as she was cleared of
three counts of murder.
Mrs Patel, from Maidenhead,
Berkshire, denied killing her sons Amar and Jamie, and daughter
Mia between 1997 and 2001 - none of them survived beyond three
months.
Outside the court she said
she was "absolutely delighted".
Tremendous support
"Words can't describe
how we've been feeling. It should never have come to court."
After the verdict, the NSPCC
called for an overhaul of the way child death cases are investigated.
Mrs Patel's solicitor, Margaret
Taylor, said in a statement: "Trupti Patel has spent the
last year in torment.
"She walks from the court
a free woman.
"She wants to publicly
acknowledge the tremendous support she has received from her
husband, friends and family."
The jury of 10 men and one
woman acquitted Mrs Patel shortly after being sent out to deliberate
on Wednesday, following a six-and-a-half week trial.
Her family and friends erupted
with a cheer of "yes" from the public gallery as the
verdicts were announced.
'Jury should decide'
Mrs Patel closed her eyes and
began to shake as the verdicts on Amar and Jamie were read out
but began sobbing when the jury foreman gave the not guilty verdict
on Mia.
Mrs Patel was arrested following
the death of Mia, the third of her children to die.
She denied she had smothered
her babies or restricted their breathing by squeezing their chests.
A spokesman for Thames Valley
Police defended the force's decision to investigate.
"We took a decision that
there was evidence which a jury should have an opportunity to
decide on, as has now occurred," he said.
The NSPCC has now called for
an overhaul of the way child deaths are investigated.
Chris Cloke, of the NSPCC,
said: "Sometimes it can be very difficult to ascertain why
infants die.
'Back to normality'
"It is therefore absolutely
vital that these tragic incidents are properly investigated without
stigmatising parents.
"The NSPCC wants to see
systematic review and analysis of all child deaths by teams made
up of health experts, police and social service professionals."
Joyce Epstein, director of
the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, said most sudden
infant deaths were natural and that there was a high risk of
it happening with more than one child in a family.
"Unfortunately, there
is a current eagerness by some to view all sudden and unexpected
deaths with suspicion, particularly where there is a second death
in the family," she said.
Mrs Patel said they now wanted
to "get back to some sort of normality" and said of
her family: "They have never wavered. And that's what families
are all about."
Patel case raises questions
By Alison Holt
BBC social affairs correspondent , June 11, 2003
Each day for six weeks Trupti Patel walked into Reading Crown
Court to hear the deaths of each of her three babies discussed
in the most distressing detail.
Accused of their murder, she
sat in the dock listening intently to the evidence, her extended
family just a few feet away in the public gallery.
Throughout they have been united
in insisting she is not capable of killing her children. On Wednesday,
the jury agreed.
The tragedy of this case runs
deep. Not only has Trupti Patel had three babies die for sudden
unexplained reasons, but she has then been acccused of their
murders.
Her son Amar died in December
1997 at three months of age. Two years later Jamie died at just
two weeks and one day old.
They were said to be cot deaths,
but when Mia died in June 2001 the family was put under investigation.
She was three weeks and one day old. She also had four fractured
ribs.
The prosecution claimed that
Trupti Patel had squeezed the life from her tiny daughter, but
during the trial doctors said the ribs might have been fractured
as paramedics tried to resuscitate her on the way to hospital.
It is entirely possible
that research in the next few years will explain all sorts of
diseases that we can't explain at the moment
At the heart of the case is
the assertion made by medical experts for the prosecution that
cot death does not run in families, but murder does.
The defence disagreed and Mrs
Patel's 80-year-old grandmother travelled from India to give
evidence. She lost five babies for unexplained reasons.
There is also scientific evidence
that cot death runs in some families.
Dr David Drucker is a microbiologist
at Manchester University. He along with colleagues has discovered
a faulty gene which means the immune system of some babies doesn't
work well enough to fight everyday illnesses.
Infecting organisms
"The baby will respond
less well to infection," he said.
"It will respond less
well to toxins made by infecting organisms and if those toxins
are very poisonous, which they are, then it's not so surprising
that some of the babies with what's been called the cot death
gene are more vulnerable.
"You would expect them
to die with higher frequency than babies who don't have the so-called
cot death gene."
It's a complex area of medicine
and doctors still have along way to go before they understand
the causes of cot death.
But Dr Drucker said: "It
is entirely possible that research in the next few years will
explain all sorts of diseases that we can't explain at the moment.
"In fact I think you'd
have to be very stupid to think all the research into DNA is
not going to have that effect."
Mrs Patel is not the first
mother to face the trauma of being accused of murdering her own
children.
Earlier this year Sally Clark
was freed by the Court of Appeal after her convictions for murdering
her two babies were overturned.
It was only when vital blood
tests were found showing the second son had died of natural causes
that Sally Clark was able to clear her name.
Her husband Steve believes
in these cases mothers are presumed guilty.
"That's a reversal of
the burden of proof. In these cases the parents - normally the
mother - has to prove how the baby died and of course if the
doctors don't know, how can the parents know? All they can say
is we don't know."
The Clarks believe every unexplained
death of a child should be investigated by a team of a paediatric
experts.
This way a standard set of
tests would be carried out by people specialised in looking into
why a baby has died.
They say this would be the
best way of preventing other families living through the nightmares
that they and the Patels have faced.
- Without prejudice
Families denied justice
If a friend
of Lord Falconer can sort out a scandal in the justice system,
three cheers for cronyism
Nick Cohen, Sunday Observer,
January 16, 2005
The iron law of all
bureaucracies is 'first we protect ourselves'. In an ideal world
they would look to free themselves from scrutiny by operating
under the cover of secrecy. They would strive to deflect criticism
by maintaining the pretence that it was in the public interest
to operate in absolute privacy.
If they could go further they
would then make a breach of their secrecy a crime punishable
with all penalties up to and including imprisonment. In an ideal
world all bureaucracies would want to achieve the state of perfect
irresponsibility achieved by the Family Division of the High
Court.
I know it's only January and
it's rash to make predictions, but last week there was a strong
contender for the award for phoniest media commotion of the year
when Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, announced that he wanted
to let a little air into the system by appointing an old friend,
Sir Mark Potter, as the new president of the Family Division.
The cry of 'cronyism' was yowled
across Fleet Street. Shocked journalists discovered that Sir
Mark had no experience of family law. They reported that Dame
Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the retiring president, had recommended
that an insider be given the job, and Her Ladyship's wishes had
been ignored. It wasn't only Dame Elizabeth who was upset. Other
family judges resented the appointment and were furious that
the job hadn't gone to one of their own.
The charge-sheet lengthened
as the outrage grew, and no one stopped to wonder who in their
right mind would want to keep the courts the way they are.
If Charles Dickens were around
today, he'd be writing The Family Division. You might think that
as a British citizen you are innocent until proved guilty beyond
reasonable doubt. And so you are when you are charged with a
criminal offence.
But if you are ever unlucky
enough to be faced with the prospect of having your child taken
into care - a far worse punishment than a jail term for most
parents - you will find that the state need only prove that you
are guilty on the balance of probabilities.
You might think that it's a
basic tradition of the English law that justice must not only
be done but be seen to be done and that secret justice is no
justice at all. Not so in the Family Division. Enter into its
courts and you enter a British Guantanamo where basic traditions
no longer apply.
Like the sexist police officer
who will arrest the thug assaulting a stranger in the street
but dismiss a case of wife-beating as 'just a domestic', the
law applies lower and shabbier standards to families than criminals.
It's not merely that the cases
are held in secret. Nothing about them - court papers, expert
reports, statements from witnesses - can be made public without
the permission of the court. The inevitable consequence of secrecy
is conspiracy theory. The victims of the system see scheming
cabals everywhere. Fathers 4 Justice may be an unpleasant group
whose members destroy a plausible case with their misogyny and
violence. But when they complain about a feminist plot to make
sure that the system is 'stuffed from head to toe with ideological
dinosaurs who believe that fathers are dispensable' it's possible
to feel a touch of sympathy for them.
Why shouldn't they believe
that justice is a racket when the checks and balances aren't
there?
Far worse than the conspiracy
theorists without are the fantasists within. Like all closed
systems, family law is prone to attacks of collective mania.
Delusions sweep the minds of otherwise sane men and women because
there are no sceptical outsiders to bring them up short. In the
1980s and 1990s, the modern witch-crazes of satanic and ritual
abuse swept through social service departments and the courts.
They died down only to be replaced by Munchausen's syndrome by
proxy, an impressively difficult name for a criminally-vague
theory, which purported to explain otherwise inexplicable deaths
and injuries by asserting that parents were seeking attention
by harming their children.
After the scandalous miscarriages
of justice against Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel,
Munchausen's syndrome by proxy should have been finished. But
a list of 40 cases produced by the Telegraph found that parents
were still suffering in the Family Division courts. Readers said
that when their children had accidents or brittle bones or undiagnosed
illnesses they were accused of shaking them, hitting them or
seeking attention in the Munchausen manner. One case involved
a couple in Essex who had taken the baby to hospital because
he had a bump on his head. They were accused of attacking him.
They managed to find medical evidence which proved their innocence,
but it was too late: the boy had been adopted. No appeal. No
redress. The child was lost.
I'd love to be able to check
out the story. But anyone who gave me information would be in
contempt of court - and I'd be in contempt for seeking answers.
One story I can tell you about
is that of Mrs B. In all seriousness and solemnity she was accused
of administering 'some unidentified infected substance' which
caused her daughter to have 'potentially life-threatening' fits
in a Kent hospital. The mother was branded as yet another Munchausen
attention-seeker and had her daughter taken from her. Sarah Harman,
the mother's solicitor, was furious, and you can't blame her
for losing her temper. Even the tamest lawyer would rage that
the Family Division was off with the fairies again if she saw
a client lose a child for unspecific and uncontestable charge
of administering some unidentified infected substance.
She saw the chance to act when
Sir Roy Meadow, the man who coined the term Munchausen's syndrome
by proxy, was discredited. Harriet Harman, the solicitor general,
announced an inquiry into Munchausen cases, and, as luck would
have it, Sarah was Harriet's sister. She sent her details of
the case, and Harriet Harman passed them onto Margaret Hodge.
Mother and solicitor also spoke to journalists without identifying
the child.
For breaking the omertá
of the Family Division, Sarah Harman was hauled before a Family
Division judge, Mr Justice Munby. He ruled that the passing of
details of the case to Harriet Harman and Margaret Hodge were
contempts of court. He said she was guilty of 'suppres sio veri
and suggestio falsi', which is fighting talk even for non-Latin
speakers, and she now faces potentially ruinous disciplinary
action.
Munby's ruling may, however,
turn out to be double-edged: one of those judgments which is
fine in theory but preposterous in practice. Ever since secrecy
was imposed on the family courts in 1960, councillors and MPs
have found that they can't do their democratic duty and check
out their constituents' stories of heart-rending abuses of power.
The most notorious incident
was during the Rochdale witch craze when children were dragged
from their homes by social workers convinced they had uncovered
a coven of Lancashire devil worshippers. Parents went to their
councillors, who could do nothing because they had been warned
that it was illegal to ask what was going on.
What Munby has done is take
the absurdity to a new level. His ruling meant that it was a
contempt of court to tell the solicitor general, who is responsible
for the honest functioning of the legal system, and the Minister
for Children, who is responsible for the welfare of children,
about an alleged miscarriage of justice involving a child.
Before readers complain that
social workers have a terrible job and are damned if they do
intervene and damned if they don't, I must say that I agree.
I should add too that family judges are good men and women who
are asked to make decisions which can't possibly satisfy everyone.
For all that, a rotten system can corrupt, and cheeringly there
are signs everywhere that its rottenness is being noticed. Sarah
Harman is pointing out that Canada and Australia operate open
courts while protecting the welfare of the child. They stick
by principles of English law, which English judges have abandoned.
MPs on the Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee are getting
ready to recommend greater openness and even Butler-Sloss and
Munby are accepting that reform is needed.
If to make reform work Lord
Falconer has to parachute in a crony, well three cheers for cronyism.
Let's have more of it. If Dame Elizabeth doesn't like it, that's
good. If Family Division judges are resentful, that's better.
We should urge Lord Falconer to cram the bench with lawyers who
haven't been contaminated by decades of secrecy. If he runs out
of legal cronies, there's always his milkman, postman, lady who
does and teenage children. Anything and anyone will be better
than the status quo.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
