Sally Clark - Aftermath

Aftermath

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". It was stated in the later inquest that Mrs Clark was diagnosed with a number of serious psychiatric problems, "hese 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.

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.

Meadow was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council in 2005 for serious professional misconduct, but he was reinstated in 2006 after he appealed and the court ruled that his misconduct was not serious enough to warrant him being struck off. In June 2005, Alan Williams, the 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. This decision was upheld by the High Court in November 2007.