Then the children's minister Margaret Hodge put it at "no more than than the low hundreds." The truth is that appeals filed with the courts amount to "only a very small handful", Dame Elizabeth's office reveals. Press stories initially predicted that up to 5,000 care cases could be reviewed. In the family courts where Dame Elizabeth presides as head of the high court's family division, however - contrary to media expectations - there has been no flood of applications to re-open cases where children were allegedly wrongly taken into care on disputed medical evidence. The judgment has reverberated through the criminal courts, where appeals could now be brought by more than 30 parents whose convictions have been found to be questionable after the attorney general ordered a review of 297 cases over the past 10 years. A bulletin from her office in the latest newsletter for family law barristers says the judgment in the Cannings case is causing her "acute concern". Doctors' fears that they could suffer the same fate as the paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow, a prosecution witness in all three cases, and the pathologist Alan Williams, who carried out the postmortems on Clark's two sons - both vilified in the media and facing charges of serious professional misconduct at the General Medical Council - are causing them to think again about giving evidence in child abuse cases.Įngland's top family judge, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, and other senior judges have held crisis meetings with the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, and the heads of the royal colleges for paediatricians and pathologists. Overturning her conviction for murdering her two baby sons, Lord Justice Judge, the deputy chief justice, declared that no parent should ever again face prosecution for killing a child if there was serious disagreement between reputable experts about the cause of death and no other cogent evidence.īut nine months after Cannings was freed, and in the wake of the cases of Sally Clark and Trupti Patel, both ultimately cleared of killing their babies, there are serious worries that the fallout may be putting children at risk. Angela Cannings' case marked a milestone in the history of miscarriages of justice.
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