Sally Clark

Early life Sally Clark was born Sally Lockyer in Devizes, Wiltshire, and was the only daughter of a father who was a senior police officer with Wiltshire Constabulary and a mother who was a hairdresser. She was educated at South Wilts Grammar School for Girls in Salisbury. She studied geography at Southampton University, and worked as a management trainee with Lloyds Bank and then at Citibank. She divorced solicitor Steve Clark in 1990, and joined her job in the City of London to train in the same profession. She studied law at City, University of London, and trained at Macfarlanes, a city law firm. She moved with her husband to join the law firm Addleshaw Booth & Co in Manchester in 1994. They bought a house in Wilmslow in Cheshire. Clark had post-natal depression and received counselling at the Priory Clinic, but was in recovery by the time her second son, Harry, was born three weeks premature on 29 November 1997.

Clark and her husband were arrested on 23 February 1998 on suspicion of murdering their children. On the advice of her lawyers she twice refused to answer questions. Clark always denied the charge, and was supported throughout by her husband. During the court proceedings she gave birth to a third son. The prosecution, led by Robin Spencer QC, was controversial for its involvement of the paediatrician professor Sir Roy Meadow, former professor of paediatrics at the University of Leeds, who testified at Clark's trial that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering cot death was 1 in 73 million. He likened the probability to the chances of backing an 80–1 outsider in the Grand National four years running, and winning each time.

Clark was convicted by a 10–2 majority verdict on 9 November 1999, The evidence was unearthed by Clark's husband from hospital records obtained by the divorce lawyer Marilyn Stowe, who provided her services free of charge because she felt that "something was not right about the case". It also became clearer that the statistical evidence presented at Clark's trial was seriously flawed. |sign=|source=

Clark's case was referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and her convictions were overturned at her second appeal in January 2003. She was released from prison having served more than three years of her sentence.

Meadow's calculation was based on the assumption that two SIDS deaths in the same family are independent. The RSS argued that "there are very strong reasons for supposing that the assumption is false. There may well be unknown genetic or environmental factors that predispose families to SIDS, so that a second case within the family becomes much more likely than would be a case in another, apparently similar, family."

The ruling was also subject to a statistical error known as the "prosecutor's fallacy". Many press reports of the trial reported that the "1 in 73 million" figure was the probability that Clark was innocent. However, even if the "1 in 73 million" figure were valid, this should not have been interpreted as the probability of Clark's innocence. In order to calculate the probability of Clark's innocence, the jury needed to weigh up the relative likelihood of the two competing explanations for the children's deaths. In other words, murder was not the only alternative explanation for the deaths in the way that one might have inferred from asserted probability of double SIDS. Although double SIDS is very rare, double infant murder is likely to be rarer still, so the probability of Clark's innocence was quite high. Hill calculated the odds ratio for double SIDS to double homicide at between 4.5:1 and 9:1, that is double SIDS is twice as likely as double murder. Then current GMC professional conduct guidance did not support his 'professional etiquette' reason. He was reinstated in 2006 after he appealed and the court ruled (2 to 1) that his actions in court had amounted to misconduct though not serious enough to warrant him being struck off. The senior judge on the panel, Master of the Rolls Sir Anthony Clarke, dissented from the view of his two colleagues. In his opinion Meadow's actions had amounted to serious professional misconduct.

In June 2005, Alan Williams, the Home Office pathologist who conducted the postmortem examinations on both the Clark babies, was banned from Home Office pathology work and coroners' cases for three years after the General Medical Council found him guilty of "serious professional misconduct" in the Clark case. At the same time he had chosen to withhold evidence of infection as a possible cause of the death of the second baby, he changed his original opinion regarding the first baby from death caused by lower respiratory infection to unnatural death by smothering. He failed to give any good reason for this change in opinion and his competence was called into question. His conduct was severely criticised by other experts giving evidence and opinion to the court and in the judicial summing up of the successful second appeal. He was given the opportunity to address the court to explain his decision to withhold the laboratory results. He declined to do so. Earlier that year he had successfully appealed against the decision to ban him from performing Home Office postmortem examinations; the ban was replaced by an 18-month suspension which by then had passed.

Death

The nature of Clark's wrongful conviction as a child-killer, and her background as a solicitor and daughter of a police officer, made her a target for other prisoners. According to her family, Clark was unable to recover from the effects of her conviction and imprisonment. After her release, her husband said she would "never be well again". but an inquest ruled that she had died of acute alcohol intoxication, though the coroner stressed that there was no evidence of intention to die by suicide. David Southall Lucia de Berk Kathleen Folbigg Patricia Stallings Betty Tyson Lucy Letby