Sally Clark

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.

Clark's first son died in December 1996 within a few weeks of his birth, and her second son died in similar circumstances in January 1998.

A month later, Clark was arrested and tried for both deaths.

The defense 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 squaring his estimate of a chance of 1 in 8500 of an individual SIDS death 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 22 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 had 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.

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 while 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.

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

Clark was convicted in November 1999.

The 17-day trial began on 11 October 1999.

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.

Home Office pathologist Dr Alan Williams withheld the results of bacteriology tests on Clark's second baby which showed the presence of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus in multiple sites including his cerebro-spinal fluid.

During the trial the jury asked specifically if there were any 'blood' test results for this child.

Williams returned to the witness box to deal with their query.

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 Lord Goldsmith ordered a review of hundreds of other cases, and two other women had their convictions overturned.

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.

Clark's experience caused her to develop severe psychiatric problems and she died in her home in March 2007 from alcohol poisoning.

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.