A Controversial Conviction !

The name Kathleen Folbigg is familiar to many people.   She has spent the last eighteen years in prison, serving a thirty year sentence for the murder of four of her children.  It was a controversial murder trial that put her behind bars because the medical examiner could find no evidence that these four children did not die of natural causes.

It seems that babies Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura all died before they reached their second birthday and the odds against this happening seemed improbable.  Public opinion was sharply divided and the tipping point came when the mother's diaries were introduced as evidence.

Kathleen Folbigg wrote that she was experiencing " difficulties " in managing her babies and the prosecution convinced the jury that this was the motive that caused the mother to smother her children. Despite any evidence, the jury brought down a guilty verdict and the judge sentenced accordingly.

A lot of people think this conviction and sentence is wrong and this led to a Court of Appeal hearing which upheld the outcome.  During all this time, the prisoner has not wavered in claiming her innocence.

The case has caused many people to compare it to the Lindy Chamberlain conviction, where she spent time in prison after a Dingo abducted her baby and a police investigation claimed to find incriminating blood stains in the family car.  Innuendo was rife on public media and Lindy served time in prison until an item of children's clothing was found in a Dingo den.  The appeal that followed totally cleared her and she received an apology. 

Now a fourteen page petition bearing the signature of  ninety medical practitioners and science leaders has been presented to the Governor of New South Wales calling for Kathleen Folbigg to be granted an immediate pardon.   This stems from the recent unravelling of the human genome.  Scientists are now finding that two of the children carried a mitigation of their calm2 gene which made them susceptible to death in infancy and the other two had this in a milder form.

It is significant that the prosecution offered no valid evidence to indicate smothering, and yet Kathleen Folbigg was convicted on purely circumstantial evidence.  It seemed improbable that four children in the same family would all die of natural causes and this doubt was taken into account when the jury made their verdict.

Obviously, the New South Wales Governor will give this petition appropriate consideration and it is likely to be granted.   The prisoner would have become eligible for parole in 2028 when she had served twenty-five years of her sentence, but a pardon will raise the matter of compensation.

This will probably continue the controversy.   How do you compensate someone for the loss of eighteen years of their life, stuck in a prison cell for a crime they did not commit  ?