Clare Dyer, legal editor
Monday January 9, 2006
The Guardian

When Angela Cannings's convictions for murdering her two baby sons were quashed two years ago, the media speculated that dozens of parents found guilty of killing their children could have been convicted on flawed medical evidence.
Mrs Cannings, who had previously lost a baby daughter, spent nearly two years in prison after a jury found her guilty of the murders of seven-week-old Jason in 1991 and Matthew, 17 weeks, in 1999. The paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow, who has since been struck off by the General Medical Council, told the jury that the babies had probably been smothered, although other experts argued that the deaths could have been from natural causes.

The appeal court's statement that in such cases, where reputable experts disagree on the causes of death and there is no other cogent evidence, prosecutions should not go ahead sparked a review of baby killing cases over the previous 10 years, ordered by the attorney general.
But two years on, after an exhaustive trawl, just two parents - Donna Anthony and Lorraine Harris - have had their convictions for killing their children quashed. A third, Raymond Rock, had his conviction for murdering his girlfriend's 13-month-old daughter reduced from murder to manslaughter on the basis that he did not intend serious harm to the child.

A further review of 89 "shaken baby" convictions, in the light of an appeal court judgment last July, has thrown up fewer than five cases causing concern, the attorney general will reveal in a report to be published soon.

The Cannings case also prompted the then children's minister, Margaret Hodge, to order a separate review of more than 30,000 cases in the family courts, where
children were removed from parents found by the court to have harmed them or a sibling. At the time commentators suggested that around 5,000 care orders could be overturned.

The first stage, which looked at more than 5,000 cases still going through the courts, produced only one case in which the care plan for the child was changed.

The figures for the review of around 30,000 cases in which care orders had already been made have never been published. But a spokesman for the Association of Directors of Social Services told the Guardian that the number of cases where the review produced a
change in the outcome was "in the low double figures".

Lawyers who represent parents in care cases criticised the minister for allowing social services departments to review their own cases. Professionals in the field argued from the beginning that the review would create a lot of work to little effect because very few care cases are decided wholly or exclusively on medical evidence which is disputed.

But the expected flood of applications by parents to the court of appeal to reopen care cases has also failed to materialise. Only two cases have gone to appeal, and in both the court ruled that the decision to remove the child from the family was justified.

A long-term fallout from the crisis of confidence in expert evidence is a serious shortage of paediatricians willing to testify in court. In a current case involving a Birmingham couple fighting for the return of their baby, taken into care soon after her birth in summer 2004, no British paediatrician was willing to prepare a report to help decide whether the mother killed the couple's first baby, a son who died aged four months in 1999. A foreign paediatrician has been found to take the case, but the search has put the hearing back till at least June and possibly October.

The couple's second child, a daughter born in 2000, was taken into care after a high court judge concluded that the mother had smothered the first child, and has now been adopted.