Review: Murder, Medicine and Motherhood: Hart
| Author | Laura Hoyano |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijep.2014.18.2.452 |
| Published date | 01 April 2014 |
| Date | 01 April 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
REVIEW
REVIEW
Emma Cunliffe
MURDER, MEDICINE AND MOTHERHOOD
Hart (Oxford, 2011), ISBN: 9781849461573, hbk, £38;
9781847316608, Adobe PDF ebook, £34.20
Notwithstanding the sweeping title, this book is about one case: Kathleen
Folbigg’s 2003 conviction in New South Wales for the murder of three of her
children and the manslaughter of a fourth, when they were aged between 19 days
and 19 months, for which she is still serving cumulative sentences of 30 years’
imprisonment. As Emma Cunliffe notes in her conclusion, this is the only case in
Australia or England in which a conviction still stands of a mother for the
homicide of her children, where there was considerable scientific uncertainty as
to whether the cause of death was non-natural. So the question for the reader is
what this singular, now apparently aberrant, case tells us about ‘the relationship
between medicine, motherhood, criminal justice and the media’, beyond its own
boundaries.
Cunliffe offers a provocative and intriguing socio-legal reconstruction of the
Folbigg trial and multiple pre-trial and post-conviction appeals (comprising 17
written judicial decisions), especially of the competing expert theories to
ascertain cause of death in recurrent infant deaths within the same nuclear
family. She takes the categorical position from the outset that Kathleen Folbigg
was wrongly convicted of killing her four children, whilst refraining from
compiling a vindication of innocence. Instead, she tests the prosecution case
against the criminal standard of proof, and ‘positions that proof within the social
and medical context from which it arose’. Herein lies the claim to significance of
this detailed study of a single case.
Cunliffe provides in Chapters 3 and 4 a useful account of the Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome (SIDS) versus homicide debate, showing how appropriately qualified
and cautious empirical research by Emory into recurrent infant deaths coalesced
with Sir Roy Meadow’s discovery of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy to produce a
theory that such deaths were necessarily unnatural.
doi:10.1350/ijep.2014.18.2.452
200 (2014) 18 E&P 200–204 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE & PROOF
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