British babysitter has murder conviction quashed

More overconfident medical guesswork

A babysitter sentenced to life for the murder of her neighbour’s two-year-old son was released from prison yesterday after the Court of Appeal declared her conviction unsafe and ordered a retrial. Suzanne Holdsworth, 37, a mother of two who has spent three years behind bars, was driven away from Low Newton prison in Co Durham with a blanket over her head.

Lord Justice Toulson, Mr Justice Aikens and Judge Michael Baker, QC, granted her conditional bail after ordering a new trial over the death of her neighbour’s son, Kyle Fisher. At her trial at Teesside Crown Court, Ms Holdsworth was accused of repeatedly banging Kyle’s head against a wooden banister. She was said to have “snapped” while minding Kyle at her home in Hartlepool, while the child’s 19-year-old single mother was having a night out. She was jailed for life and told that she must serve at least ten years before she could apply for parole. Ms Holdsworth has consistently denied injuring the child and claimed that he had suffered a fit as they sat watching television.

The prosecution case was that the boy died from a fatal brain swelling, or oedema, caused by a blow or blows of significant force. Jurors were told that the impact on his head was similar to being thrown from a car at 60mph. Kyle was taken to hospital after the injury, in August 2004, and died two days later.

During her appeal, which was opposed by the Crown, Ms Holdsworth’s lawyer, Henry Blaxland, told the judges that the doctors who gave evidence at trial “got it wrong” and “collectively failed to diagnose” that the child had a “highly unusual brain”, with abnormalities that predisposed him to epilepsy. Fresh evidence established that there was a reasonable possibility that the child suffered a prolonged epileptic seizure, he argued. The opinion of experts called on behalf of Ms Holdsworth was that Kyle’s condition, including an injury to the orbit of the right eye suffered in an accident a year before his death, predisposed him to epilepsy.

Overturning her conviction, Lord Justice Toulson said it was the court’s view that if the fresh medical evidence had been given at her trial it might reasonably have affected the jury’s decision to convict. He said that Ms Holdsworth’s conviction “must be judged unsafe”. “Conclusions of medical experts on the cause of an injury or death necessarily involve a process of deduction, that is inferring conclusions from given facts based on other knowledge and experience. But particular caution is needed where the scientific knowledge of the process or processes involved is, or may be, incomplete.” He added: “As knowledge increases, today’s orthodoxy may become tomorrow’s outdated learning. Special caution is also needed where expert opinion evidence is not just relied upon as additional material to support a prosecution but is fundamental to it.”

After the hearing, Ms Holdsworth’s partner of 19 years, Lee Spencer, a lorry driver, said: “She is a wonderful person and she is a wonderful mother. Children come first in her life. To say she put a child’s head into the banisters at 60mph is absolutely ridiculous.” Ms Holdsworth’s solicitor, Campbell Malone, said: “She’s obviously very relieved at the outcome and understands it is the necessary first stage in the process of clearing her name.”

Kyle’s family said in a statement that was issued through Cleveland Police: “All we have ever wanted was to know the truth about what happened to Kyle. Since his death our lives have focused around the case. Not one of us has been able to move on. Today’s decision has brought all the heartache back. However, we will fully co-operate in the preparation for the retrial.”

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FLDS and common law marriage

Googling around, I found a web page from the Travis Country, Texas, Domestic Relations department (bureau? agency?), detailing the requirements for common law marriage in Texas. So far as I can tell, an FLDS couple meets those requirements, provided that the woman was his first wife and old enough to legally marry him. The page claims that being in a common law marriage has the same effect as an ordinary marriage. If so, the assertion by the Texas authorities that the couples were not legally married looks distinctly shaky.

[After I posted this, someone in a Usenet discussion pointed out a provision in the family code that prohibits persons under 18 from entering into a common law marriage. I don't know how that applies to someone who entered into it in another state and then moved to Texas.]

The Texas authorities claim that, out of 53 girls 14-17, 31 either are pregnant or have had at least one child--a way of putting it that obscures the fact that only two are actually pregnant. The age of consent in Texas is 17, so a 17 year old girl can be pregnant without any law having been violated. The minimum legal age for marriage (with parental consent) is 16, so if there was a legitimate marriage, a sixteen year old girl can be pregnant without any law having been violated. It sounds from the page I found as though a common law marriage counts.

The minimum marriage age was raised from 14 to 16 only three years ago. So a woman who is currently 17 might have been legally married at 14 and had one or more children by now.

There is a further point worth making here. A lot of the support for the attack on the FLDS comes from the widely held view that the normal pattern is for girls to be married off to older men shortly after they reach puberty and promptly start having babies. It is hard to see how that can be true if, as the Texas authorities have admitted, only two girls out of 53 in the 14-17 year age group were pregnant. And if that picture is false, that undercuts the whole argument for the extraordinary treatment they have been subjected to.

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(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)