adow, wrote the seminal paper on salt-poisoning. Meadow did not give evidence in the trials of the Gays, but he laid the intellectual groundwork for the prosecutions. His paper on salt-poisoning, like his work on cot deaths, is dross. Jean Golding, professor of epidemiology at Bristol University, has compared Meadow’s scientific method to “stamp-collecting”.
The system’s second mistake is its failure to ask whether a crime took place. The attorney-general should spare time to read the notes of the original meeting of the experts, chaired by the crown’s junior barrister, Andrew Lockhart, before the first trial of the Gays. Nowhere does anyone ask, “are we absolutely certain that we have properly ruled out natural causes?” Instead, foul play was assumed….
The system’s third mistake is to overvalue expert witnesses as demigods and write off friends and family as irrelevant. At the first trial, the crown’s lead expert on salt-poisoning was Professor George Haycock of Guy’s hospital. He did the calculations that said the Gays must have poisoned Christian with 4 teaspoons of salt. The Gays were convicted.
Enter Dr Glyn Walters, a retired chemical pathologist. He is an oldie with two hearing aids, but cross him at your peril. His calculations said: natural causes, a faulty or reset osmostat. Haycock told the Court of Appeal that he couldn’t knock down Walters’s numbers. The Gays were freed — but then told by the court that they had to face a retrial.
At no time did the crown ever put any weight on the good character of the Gays and their families. I got to know all of them a little after they were freed from prison. Their families are all patently good people. Ian and Angela are gentle and caring. She lost her womb to cancer when she was 16. That’s why they wanted to adopt.
How could it be that the expert Professor Haycock was relied upon so heavily at the first trial but dropped by the prosecution for the second? Meanwhile, the views of a score of the Gays’ family and friends were discounted at both trials. Could it be that one is a middle-class professor and the rest people with Black Country accents?
When a child dies of abuse, and the authorities have been judged to have bungled, all hell is let loose. A public inquiry often follows. But when the opposite wrong happens — a child dies of natural causes and their parents (natural or adopted) are falsely accused — nothing much takes place. So long as the system remains convinced that it hasn’t done anything wrong, we can be pretty confident that someone else will end up in prison for a crime that never happened.
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