Sally Clark and Sir Roy Meadow Part II

Well, I was going to do a determined fisk of Terry Hamblin's attack on Sally Clark just after her death, but there is a problem. Namely that the post has vanished. The url is inactive, and there is nothing on Hamblin's blog anymore. May be the negative reaction to his appallingly insenstive and crass comments was too much for Hamblin, and he has decided to go back to wittering on about technical medical issues. Which I suppose is a shame - I am not a fan of censorship in any form, even self-censorship.

However DK has quoted the most insulting of Hamblin's comments on Sally Clark, namely:

"Perhaps [Clark] was possessed by guilt that she really had killed her kids and remorse that she had brought down two eminent professors of paediatrics in getting the decision reversed."

Um, yeah, well, it would be worth pointing out that when the full results of the autopsy into the death of her second son were revealed and when Roy Meadow's statistics were dismissed Sally Clark's conviction was quashed. In other words, she was innocent. She didn't kill her kids. I accept the court may have got it wrong in setting her free as courts are fallible, but from my limited layman's knowledge it appears that Sally was innocent and her imprisonment was a gross miscarriage of justice. The decision was reversed based on evidence.

And I very much doubt that Sally was worried about bringing down two eminent professors not least because they actually brought themselves down. In Roy Meadow's case by getting it wrong time and time and time again.

But the simple truth is I don't care whether Hamblin thinks Clark murdered her children. Hell, he is entitled to his own viewpoint, so as far as I am concerned he can believe that evil pixies came from Outer Mongolia to kill those two boys. What I do object to is the timing - there is no way that Hamblin should have voiced his ill-informed and obnoxious opinions so soon after Sally Clark's death was announced. To do so simply heaps further insult and unhappiness on a family that has been torn apart by the death of children, then the unjust imprisonment of the mother, and then the premature death of the mother. I wonder how Hamblin would feel if he lost a loved one, only to find a blog somewhere that accuses that loved one of terrible crimes.

There were other parts of Hamblin's post that riled me, such as the veiled accusation that Clark may have killed herself (before any autopsy or inquest) and also the tenuous link between depression, alcoholism and child killing. But as the post doesn't exist anymore and I can't quote directly from it, I will leave it.

However I would note that Hamblin's writings displayed all the cold and clinical disassociation from reality and from human feelings and suffering that Sir Roy Meadow also showed when he helped innocent women be sent to prison with ill thought out and poorly researched statistics.