Sally Clark height - How tall is Sally Clark?

Clark was tried at Chester Crown Court, before Mr Justice Harrison and a jury. 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.

Hill raised a third objection to the "1 in 73 million" figure: the probability of a child dying from SIDS is 1 in 1,300, not 1 in 8,500. Meadow arrived at the 1 in 8,500 figure by taking into account three key characteristics possessed by the Clark family, all of which make SIDS less likely. However, Hill said that Meadow "conveniently ignored factors such as both the Clark babies being boys – which make cot death more likely". Hill also argued:

Sally Clark (August 1964 – 15 March 2007) was an English solicitor who, in November 1999, became the victim of a miscarriage of justice when she was found guilty of the murder of her two infant sons.

The nature of Sally 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". A family spokesman stated "Sally was unable to come to terms with the false accusations, based on flawed medical evidence and the failures of the legal system, which debased everything she had been brought up to believe in and which she herself practised." It was stated in the later inquest that she was diagnosed with a number of serious psychiatric problems, "these problems included enduring personality change after catastrophic experience, protracted grief reaction and alcohol dependency syndrome." Clark was found dead in her home in Hatfield Peverel in Essex on 16 March 2007. It was originally thought that she had died of natural causes, but an inquest ruled that she had died of acute alcohol intoxication, though the coroner stressed that there was no evidence that she had intended to commit suicide.

Meadow was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council in 2005 for serious professional misconduct. It was during the GMC hearing that, when questioned directly, he made his first public apology for the effect of his 'misleading' evidence. He cited 'legal advice' and 'professional etiquette' as the reasons for the delay. 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. The decision of the GMC was upheld by the High Court in November 2007. 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.

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 prosecution did not provide any evidence to support its different assumption. In a 2004 article in Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, Professor of Mathematics Ray Hill of Salford University concluded, using extensive SIDS statistics for England, that "after a first cot death the chances of a second become greatly increased" by a dependency factor of between 5 and 10.

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

Clark's release in January 2003 prompted the Attorney General to order a review of hundreds of other cases. Two other women convicted of murdering their children, Donna Anthony and Angela Cannings, had their convictions overturned and were released from prison. Trupti Patel, who was also accused of murdering her three children, was acquitted in June 2003. In each case, Roy Meadow had testified about the unlikelihood of multiple cot deaths in a single family.

In October 2001, the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) issued a public statement expressing its concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts". It noted that there was "no statistical basis" for the "1 in 73 million" figure. In January 2002, the RSS wrote to the Lord Chancellor pointing out that "the calculation leading to 1 in 73 million is invalid".

Clark was convicted in November 1999. The convictions were upheld on appeal in October 2000, but overturned in a second appeal in January 2003, after it emerged that Alan Williams, the prosecution forensic pathologist who examined both babies, had failed to disclose microbiological reports that suggested the second of her sons had died of natural causes. Clark was released from prison having served more than three years of her sentence. Journalist Geoffrey Wansell called Clark's experience "one of the great miscarriages of justice in modern British legal history". As a result of her case, the Attorney-General ordered a review of hundreds of other cases, and two other women had their convictions overturned. Clark's experience caused her to develop serious psychiatric problems and she died in her home in March 2007 from alcohol poisoning.

Clark was convicted by a 10–2 majority verdict on 9 November 1999, and given the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. She was widely reviled in the press as the murderer of her children. Despite recognition of the flaws in Meadow's statistical evidence, the convictions were upheld at appeal in October 2000. She was imprisoned at Styal women's prison, near her home in Wilmslow, and then Bullwood Hall women's prison in Hockley in Essex. The nature of her conviction as a child-killer, and her background as a solicitor and daughter of a police officer, made her a target for other prisoners. Her husband left his partnership at a Manchester law firm to work as a legal assistant nearer the prison, selling the family house to meet the legal bills from the trial and first appeal.

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. She was later charged with two counts of murder whilst the case against her husband was dropped. Clark always denied the charge, and was supported throughout by her husband. During the court proceedings she gave birth to a third son.

Later, it came to light that microbiological tests showed that Harry had colonisation of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, indicating that he had died from natural causes, but the evidence had not been disclosed to the defence. This exculpatory evidence had been known to the prosecution's pathologist, Alan Williams, since February 1998, but was not shared with other medical witnesses, police or lawyers. The evidence was unearthed by her 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.

Clark's first son died in December 1996 within a few weeks of his birth. Her second son died in similar circumstances in January 1998. A month later, Clark was arrested and tried for both deaths. The defence argued that the children had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The prosecution case relied on flawed statistical evidence presented by paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million. He had arrived at this figure by approximating the square of 1 in 8500, as (erroneously) being the likelihood of SIDS in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical Society later issued a statement arguing that there was no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".

Clark's first son, Christopher, was born on 26 September 1996. Court documents describe him as a healthy baby. On 13 December Clark called an ambulance to the family home. The baby had fallen unconscious after being put to bed, and was declared dead after being transported to the hospital. Clark suffered from 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. However, he was also found dead on 26 January 1998, aged 8 weeks. On both occasions, Clark was at home alone with her baby and there was evidence of trauma, which could have been related to attempts to resuscitate them.

Sally Clark was born Sally Lockyer in Devizes, Wiltshire, and was an only child. Her father was a senior police officer with Wiltshire Constabulary and her mother 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 married solicitor Steve Clark in 1990, and left her job in the City of London to train in the same profession. She studied at City University, 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.