Балғындарды қорғау заңнамасындағы құрылысқан теория

Discredited theory in child protection law
Meadow's Law is a discredited legal concept in the field of child protection, intended to be used to judge cases of multiple cot or crib deaths – Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) – within a single family.

The "law" has it that because cot deaths are a rare phenomenon and difficult to explain by natural causes, it can be reasoned that "one is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless there is proof to the contrary." Meadow's reputation went into decline with a series of legal reverses for his theories, and in July 2005 he was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council for tendering misleading evidence. Meadow's licence was reinstated in February 2006 by a London court. Meadow attributes many unexplained infant deaths to the disorder or condition in mothers called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. According to this diagnosis some parents, especially mothers, harm or even kill their children as a means of calling attention to themselves. Its existence has been confirmed by cases where parents have been caught on video surveillance actively harming their children, but its frequency is subject to debate as Meadow claimed to have destroyed the original data which he used to substantiate the law. As a result of the 1993 trial of Beverley Allitt, a paediatric nurse convicted of killing four children under her care and injuring five others, Meadow's ideas gained ascendancy in British child protection circles, and mothers were convicted of murder on the basis of his expert testimony. Thousands of children were removed from their parents and taken into care or fostered out because they were deemed to be 'at risk'. From 2003, however, the tide of opinion turned: a number of high profile acquittals cast doubt on the validity both of Munchausen's and 'Meadow's Law'. Several convictions were reversed, and many more came under review.

Firstly, Meadow was accused of espousing the so called prosecutor's fallacy in which the probability of "cause given effect" (i. e. the true likelihood of a suspect's innocence) is confused with that of "effect given cause" (the likelihood that innocence will result in the observed double cot death). In reality, these quantities can only be equated when the likelihood of the alternative hypothesis, in this case murder, is close to certainty. Since murder (and especially double murder) is itself a rare event, the probability of Clark's innocence was certainly far greater than Meadow's figure suggested. An equivalent error is to accuse anybody who wins a lottery of fraud.

The second criticism was that Meadow's calculation had assumed that cot deaths within a single family were statistically independent events, governed by a probability common to the entire affluent non smoking population. No account had been taken of conditions specific to individual families (such as a hypothesised "cot death gene") which might make some more vulnerable than others. The occurrence of one cot death makes it likely that such conditions exist, and the probability of subsequent deaths is therefore greater than the group average (estimates are mostly in the region of 1:100). Combining these corrections with estimates of successive murder probabilities by affluent non smokers, Mathematics Professor Ray Hill found that the probability of Clark's guilt could be as low as 10% (based solely on the fact of two unexplained child deaths, and before any other evidence was considered).