Let’s hope Sally Clark stayed in today …

I’ve got a rather uncared-for Miscarriages of Justice page which I may have transferred to Blogistan but the link on my home page still points to my old Geocities site. It gives details of a few pending cases of people in jail, or recently in jail, who either shouldn’t be or shouldn’t have been. All but one of the people on there, alhamdu lillah, are now free. They are not the most infamous incidents where people spent 15 or even 25 or more years in jail, but the most obviously crazy cases, like the woman jailed for first-degree murder for her boyfriend’s killing of her daughter while she was asleep, and the young girl jailed for murdering a toddler in Texas despite the lack of any evidence, and two of the women jailed in the UK after suffering multiple cot deaths which experts presumed were murders. Some of these are still in jail, but last year they started being released, beginning with Sally Clark.

Clark was jailed on two counts of murder and spent more than three years in jail, before being cleared (at her second appeal) last January. The case seems to typify the sort of “presumption of guilt” which Islam so forcefully condemns – the term “Su’ al-dhann”, the opposite of the benefit of the doubt, does not exist in English – and I don’t see this sort of thing happening in a Muslim country unless it was part of a deliberate stitch up with political motives (then again, are there any Muslim countries with a jury system?). People just don’t naturally assume that a mother would do this; that a British jury would think otherwise in the absence of conclusive evidence may be the result of sensational stories involving female murderers in the tabloid press. We (English and Americans) boast that our legal systems have an inbuilt presumption of innocence until proven guilty, but someone can be found guilty without it even being proved that the “victim” is actually dead!

This also seems to be another case of science and scientists being held in greater esteem than they actually deserve; in the 1970s the controversy was about forensic “science” which turned out to be false when cleaning agents found on the hands of Irish housewives were “proven” to be explosives, and this time round we saw the use of statistics by someone not trained how to use them. People believe a scientist because they believe that “science” does not lie. The truth is, they don’t realise that they may be listening to a paid “expert” witness, or a childless elderly man with a problem with women, or someone so sold on his pet ideas and “discoveries” that he cannot entertain any other explanation for what he sees, or all three.

Clark and her husband rejected all requests for interviews, but her husband was interviewed by the Times newspaper which is starting a serialisation of a new book about the case. The husband mentioned in the interview that Sally Clark is unaware that he was giving an interview to the Times or any other newspaper, and as for the book, she did not read the final draft and “would really rather this wasn’t happening”. So why has the Times put this story on their front page rather than hiding it inside the supplement? Perhaps they presumed that Sally Clark would stay indoors? At least one paper printed articles vilifying Sally Clark after she was convicted; some of the same papers later got on her side when it looked like the evidence was on her side. But at the end of the day, all they are out to do is sell papers.