"She's gone," he says to the nurse, who nods quietly. "Come to daddy," he says as he scoops up the most precious little thing that ever happened to us. As he lifts her the nurse unplugs her and removes all the tubes. That's it. She's dead.
   But there's a peculiar thing about the treatment of mothers and fathers who suffer when children die. Lose one child from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, there's a recording of natural causes. But then a couple of years later, a second child dies in almost identical circumstances. And one or other of the parents is accused and convicted of murdering both children.
   Who knows whether the first pathologist was wrong - natural causes? And if those deaths arose because of a Mendelian genetic flaw, there is a one-in-four chance that EVERY child they have will be at extreme risk of death. Or if there's mitochondrial genetic mutation (inherited from the mother alone) then EVERY single child she has will be at extreme risk of death, without exceptional medical care.
   Yet the criminal courts (so far) have ignored these facts because tests for genetic flaws of this type are only in their infancy. And there's no money in it to finance mass research.
   Such flaws MUST occur, for it happened in Birmingham that a mother lost THREE babies from sudden unexpected death. She couldn't be charged with murdering them, for one death occurred in hospital when she was nowhere near. If it wasn't for a fluke she'd now be a "Momstrosity" [to use one newspaper headline] serving three life sentences.

Ken Norman is chairman of the Portia Trust and wrote The Lynch-Mob Syndrome which covers the cases of Louise Woodward, Helen Stacey, Manjit Basuta, Maxine Robinson and Sally Clark, among other, lesser-publicised parents and carers accused of child-murder - and almost certainly no more guilty than you or I.

And just to prove there is a problem of attitude within the British legal establishment, a quote which should chill the soul of any socially responsible citizen:
   "It may be better that innocent people should serve life sentences than that the law should be seen to make gross errors."  Lord Justice Denning.