"Stolen Innocence" - The Story of Sally Clark

A Mother's Fight for Jusice

By John Batt

Sally Clark Homepage
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The imprisonment for life of solicitor Sally Clark for the murder of her two babies, which existed only in the fevered imaginations of incompetent medical experts, was described in the British Parliament as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in our history.

I have known Sally for 30 years. I sat beside her at her trial with a watching brief for her family. The worst moment of her life, and probably mine, was when the foreman of the jury said ‘guilty’ twice. As every lawyer knows, if you are careless enough to step into the path of a miscarriage of justice it consumes you to the exclusion of everything else until it is put right. As a solicitor, I joined Sally’s defence team and worked full time on her case for the next three and a half years, when she was freed. As a writer, I felt compelled to tell her story, not only for it’s own sake which I was able to do from the inside, but because it was symptomatic of what I came to believe were a huge number of miscarriages of justice in the Family and Criminal Courts throughout the English speaking world These have been brought about largely by experts giving evidence based on hunches and not science.

I earned my spurs as a writer in television drama as one of the creators and writers of two long running series, "The Main Chance" and "Justice". I suspect that this is why my friend and actor, Edward Woodward, told me that reading Stolen Innocence was more like a film script for a thriller than a biography.

The story is told in three voices: Sally’s, over 200 pages of hand written notes, many of which I have quoted verbatim, the third person story of Sally’s life, the drama-laden trial and appeals, and almost as a voice-over, my own comments explaining what is really going on behind the impenetrable legal jargon and formalities.

John Batt.

The hardcover book was published in 2004.

The paperback is published on 4 August 2005 by Ebury Press.

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