Wrongfully jailed for 20 years, Australia’s ‘most hated woman’ likely to receive record compensation
Wrongfully jailed for 20 years, Australia’s ‘most hated woman’ likely to receive record compensation
Kathleen Folbigg was considered country’s worst female serial killer and spent two decades in jail. Now she is free and has cleared her name
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
But on Thursday, Folbigg’s convictions were quashed by an appeals court following an inquiry that examined new scientific evidence and found there was reasonable doubt of her guilt.
Folbigg’s original guilty verdict was not based on medical evidence that explained how her four young children – Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura – died between 1989 and 1999 aged between 19 days and 18 months.
The case against Folbigg also relied on Meadow’s Law – a controversial and now discredited precept that three or more sudden infant deaths in one family were murders until proven otherwise.
She called out misogynistic reasoning in Folbigg’s case, noting normal behaviour such as working part-time and putting her children in childcare so she could go to the gym were viewed painted as suspicious in court.
A breakthrough came in 2018 when research by a team of experts, including immunologist Prof Carola Vinuesa, found Folbigg and her two daughters – Laura and Sarah – carried a rare genetic variation known as CALM2-G114R.
The genetic evidence and fresh medical research by an international team of scientists – which included identifying that the two boys, Caleb and Patrick, carried variants in a gene known as BSN “shown to cause early onset lethal epilepsy in mice” – were again raised in another inquiry earlier this year.
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Holy cow. Meadow's law sounds like it's for punishing people with genetic diseases or the worst luck
Meadow’s Law – a controversial and now discredited precept that three or more sudden infant deaths in one family were murders until proven otherwise.
This is like the insidious logic applied in the name of terrorism and pedophilia — "innocent until proven guilty... unless 3 infants die... Then it's zero-evidence auto-murder, and may god have mercy on your soul".
Meadow’s Law sounds like something a James Bond villain would say. Because it is. It’s based on this quote from Goldfinger:
Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.
Being burned for witchcraft seems worse.
Excellent anti-death penalty here. A place like Texas would have already executed her.
For what it's worth, Meadow's law is described by the article as a "precept" because it was never an actual legislated law. Just a concept thought up by a now-discredited British paediatrician. Even taking it on its own terms, it's a "law" in the way "Betteridge's Law" or "Cunningham's Law" are laws.