Friday, Jun 13, 2003
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By Hasan Suroor
Trupti Patel, 35, who had been accused of killing her three babies over a period of four years was set free after key medical witnesses produced by the prosecution failed to convince the jury that the deaths were unnatural despite the suspicious circumstances in which they happened. The jury was also apparently persuaded by the testimony of Ms. Patel's grandmother, flown here specially from Gujarat, that her own five children had died in infancy without any obvious cause. Even as an emotionally shaken Ms. Patel sobbed with joy, after the verdict was announced, and declared that the case should ``never have gone to the court'' in the first place the mystery of how her three infants suddenly died between 1997 and 2001 remained. Hers is the fourth in a series of what have come to be known as ``cot deaths'' in which mothers have been accused of smothering their children. Ms. Patel, a pharmacist married to a business analyst, was arrested in May last year after her third child, — 22-day-old daughter, Mia — died mysteriously in a replay of the deaths of her two other infants: three-month-old Amar, in 1997, and 15-day-old Jamie two years later. In all cases, the children had suddenly collapsed and stopped breathing. Ms. Patel consistently denied the charges and said her reaction after Mia's death was of ``complete shock.'' ``I couldn't believe that this could happen three times,'' she said. The case against her rested largely on the testimony of a leading but controversial paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow who famously said that ``one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder''. He had testified in two similar cases previously, one of which was later quashed. As the case progressed in a blaze of media publicity, doubts began to be raised about Sir Roy's theory and on Wednesday it took the jury barely 90 minutes to deliver a ``no-guilty'' verdict. The landmark judgment, greeted with shouts of joy by Ms. Patel's family, is likely to affect the way ``cot deaths'' would be perceived in future. Last year alone, over 300 ``cot deaths'', in which the cause was never established, were reported. Ms. Patel, who belongs to a Punjabi family which moved to Britain in the sixties, grew up in Lancashire. ``We're over the moon. We're really relieved,'' her husband, Jayant, said.
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