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This mother lost a child on the evidence of a disgraced doctor

'This mother lost a child on the evidence of a disgraced doctor. Now she could lose a second'

Daily Mail Article By Tom Kelly

December 15 2005

 

A COUPLE whose daughter was put up for adoption on the evidence of a disgraced doctor are fighting to stop another of their children being taken from them.
 

Karen and Mark Haynes’s first baby, a boy, died mysteriously aged four months.
Their second, a daughter, was taken by the authorities when she was 20 minutes old after doctor Professor Sir Roy Meadow – who has since been discredited – accused the mother of suffocating her firstborn.

Four medical experts disagreed with Meadow’s evidence. Mrs Haynes was not charged with murder and was exonerated by a police inquiry. Despite this the baby was put up for adoption.

The couple’s third child – known as S – was taken into care soon after her birth last July.
Her parents are fighting to have her returned to them before she is given to new parents. They have given up hope of having their other child back.

The couple argue Meadow’s opinion is discredited after he was struck off the medial register for giving ‘erroneous’ and ‘misleading’ evidence which led to three other mothers being wrongly convicted of murdering their babies. In July, the 72-year-old was found guilty of serious professional misconduct at a General Medical Council hearing for giving misleading evidence which led to long jail terms for Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony.

A family court hearing next year will rule whether the Hayneses’ child should be returned to her parents or be put up for adoption. Meanwhile, the couple have six hours’ supervised contact with their daughter at their home in Birmingham from Monday to Friday. Once a month, they see her on Saturday for four hours.

Yesterday, a High Court judge rejected an interim appeal by the couple to have the number of supervisors reduced from two to one during these sessions.

Mr Justice Charles ruled it should be up to the judge in the family court to make a decision on the suitability of Meadow’s evidence and on what should happen to S. The couple’s solicitor William Bache said outside court: ‘It is a situation in which the parents are suffering the utmost anguish.’ Mrs Haynes’s first child was born in 1998. The midwife’s reports said 39-year-old Karen, a former book keeper, and her son had an excellent relationship.

 

But in January 1999, the four-month-old child fell ill and died in hospital after slipping into a coma.
His parents believe his heart may have failed as medical notes said he had a hole in his heart.
Mrs Haynes gave statements to police about his death, but no further action was taken.
 

But when she was six months’ pregnant with her second child, born in 2000, Birmingham Social Services ordered her to attend a family court hearing in which Meadow – who never spoke to the Hayneses personally – gave evidence.
 

In a report, he wrote: ‘I believe that smothering was the probable cause of the severe illness, events and death.’
Another distinguished paediatrician and three pathologists disagreed, saying the mother had not murdered her son, but Justice Joy Bracewell ‘preferred’ Meadow’s opinion. Meadow, of Weeton, North Yorkshire, was knighted for services to child health when he retired as Professor of Paediatrics at St James’s University Hospital, Leeds, in 1998.
 

The case against Mrs Cannings, who lost three babies to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, gave prominence to the so-called ‘Meadow’s Law’. He claimed: ‘One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, unless proven otherwise.’

But Appeal Court judges claimed the theory was ‘on the edges of known science’ and quashed Mrs Cannings’s conviction in 2003. She had spent 18 months in jail after being convicted of murdering two of her babies.
Sally Clark, of Wilmslow, Cheshire, was jailed in 1999 for smothering her two sons after Meadow said the probability of two cot deaths in the same family was 73million to one.

She was freed on appeal in 2003 after other studies suggested the figure is probably closer to 64 to one.
Karen and Mark Haynes’s names have been changed for legal reasons.

t.kelly@dailymail.co.uk