Wrongly convicted by an incompetent court

UK: The Home Office decided that Angela Cannings is not entitled to compensation for the 18 months she spent in prison, convicted for the murder of her two children, seven-week-old Jason in 1991 and 18-week-old Matthew in 1999. She has always maintained that they died of natural causes.

Mrs Cannings's conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in December 2004 when the evidence given by Professor Sir Roy Meadows, the paediatrician providing expert witness testimony on which the Crown based its case, was totally discredited. So why no compensation?

The law allows different means for victims of wrongful conviction to be compensated. The Home Office has a statutory duty to make an award if a conviction is quashed on an appeal following a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission - the organisation that investigates alleged miscarriage of justice cases that failed to be overturned at their first appeal.

Alternatively, compensation is awarded if a conviction is quashed on appeal under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 or if a Free Pardon is granted. In these cases, some new fact must be shown, the non-disclosure of which was not attributable wholly or partially to the applicant. In other words, evidence comes to light that trashes the conviction.

As the Home Office see it, Angela Cannings does not qualify for compensation because her wrongful conviction was overturned through her routine appeal.

Alternatively, the Home Office can make awards on a discretionary basis when an applicant has spent time in custody, for example where there is serious malpractice by a public authority, such as the police, or if an accused person is completely exonerated (whether at trial or on appeal).

This means that the Home Office could have chosen to put this matter to rest and award compensation as they did in the £650,000 reported to have been awarded to Michael O' Brien, one of the so-called Cardiff Newsagent Three. Mr O'Brien spent 11 years in prison for the robbery and murder of Philip Saunders in 1988.

In December 1999, the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction and declared that all three were the victims of 'regular and condoned police malpractice'.

But in this case, Angela Cannings's claim has been rejected, apparently on the grounds that Professor Sir Roy Meadow was an independent expert witness and therefore not a public authority of the criminal justice system. Miscarriage of Justice, it is claimed, was therefore not the responsibility of the Crown.

There is another way of looking at the Home Office's rejection of Angela Cannings's claim, one that points to violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Under Article 5(5) of the ECHR, everyone who has been the victim of arrest or detention in contravention of any provisions of the Convention shall have an enforceable right to compensation.

The most relevant provision states at Article 5 (1a) that lawful detention must follow a conviction by a competent court.

From this it follows that, if the trial in which Angela Cannings was convicted can be shown to have been incompetent, she has an enforceable right to compensation.

As far as Professor Meadows's evidence is concerned, it was totally discredited by the Court of Appeal as 'manifestly wrong' and 'grossly misleading'.

But without Professor Sir Roy Meadows's hypotheses, there would not have even been a suspicion that a crime had been committed, let alone criminal charges brought against Angela Cannings.

The case for the Crown rested entirely upon his 'expert' opinion that the chances of two babies dying naturally within the same family were 73 million to one, a claim since shown to have no validity at all.

It is easy to imagine the impact of such a statistic upon the judge and the jury in the trial. They had no specialist knowledge on the subject and were led by the Crown to the inevitable conclusion that a guilty verdict was their only option.

Yet, without Meadows's evidence there probably would not have even been a trial. There was no material evidence of any kind to indicate that Jason and Matthew had been murdered. No identification evidence, no confession, no other forensic evidence of any kind at all.

The Crown cannot divorce itself so easily from the source and the consequences of the evidence that caused such a disturbing miscarriage of justice, a grieving mother convicted of the murder of her own children.

Their attempt to do so represents an abuse of the safeguards that exist to prevent wrongful convictions. It is a misuse of the remedies that exist to innocent victims of miscarriages of justice.

Criminal trials are not at the mercy of 'rogue' expert witnesses. The Crown has a duty to ensure that the proper standards of proof are required for criminal convictions. Sadly, such standards were absent in the trial of Angela Cannings and so the Crown stands liable for the compensation to which she is entitled.

Dr Michael Naughton is a Lecturer in crime and justice studies at the University of Bristol and a Founding Director of the Innocence Network UK.

Experts in child abuse cases face inquiry
UK: The government launched an official inquiry into the quality of expert medical evidence in child abuse cases last Thursday, as the implications of the miscarriage of justice in the Angela Cannings case continued to perplex ministers.

By Michael Naughton posted 18 January 05

Related:

Experts in child abuse cases face inquiry
UK: The government launched an official inquiry into the quality of expert medical evidence in child abuse cases last Thursday, as the implications of the miscarriage of justice in the Angela Cannings case continued to perplex ministers.

Australia

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World

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