I am not sure what I found the saddest when reading this. Lorraine Harris spent 16 months in prison wrongly accused of shaking her baby to death. At the start of her sentence she gave birth to a baby boy who was taken from her within hours of his birth and forcibly adopted.
Five years on and her conviction was quashed due to medical evidence. On Monday the High Court upheld the Home Office decision not to award compensation. The reason for this, it was not a newly discovered fact that cleared her, it was simply a revised statement of a medical opinion! This is British Justice at its best.
The whole story is awful. To have your child die and then be accused of killing it. How do you grieve under those circumstances. Having to spend five years of your life in prison with sex offenders then get released on electronic tag. Having to cope with all that while every single day thinking about the child that was taken from you at birth. Lorraine says having her son taken from her has been the hardest thing to cope with, her son is now seven years old.
What choked me to tears was the statement she said about her son. She said she accepted the view of her son's adoptive parents, who refused her contact on the basis that it would be too disruptive. All she knows is that he lives somewhere in Yorkshire. I would like to see just how disrupted the son feels when he is older and discovers that he was denied any kind of relationship with his mum. The adoptive parents aren't thinking of the child they are pure and simple thinking of themselves. The adoption should never of happened, an innocent mother had her son taken away. A child cant have too many people to love them and I'm sure there could of been a way for the adoptive parents to allow a healthy loving relationship to develop and for them all to share in the happiness of his life. Alas no, they obviously have the mentality of 'finders keepers' and 'ownership, 9/10s of the law.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7139385.stm
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Getting all the facts
Indeed this is a tragic case... once that shows leaves lots of gaps and questions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/derbyshire/4469981.stm
Baby killer mother set to appeal
A former Derby woman jailed for killing her baby son is set to appeal against her conviction.
Lorraine Harris, 35, was given a three-year sentence in 2002 after being convicted of manslaughter.
She is thought to be one of several people due to go to the Appeal Court in the summer who were involved in so-called Shaken Baby Syndrome cases.
While Ms Harris was serving her sentence, she gave birth to a second son who was then forcibly adopted.
'Happy baby'
She was living in Alvaston when her four-month-old son Patrick died in December 1998 but still returns to the city from her new home to visit his grave.
"He was a happy baby, didn't want for anything, was well looked after and very much loved," said Ms Harris.
"I woke up, went to check on him, picked him out of his cot and he was all floppy.
"While I was waiting for the ambulance to come I gave him mouth-to-mouth - it was all a blur after that."
She added: "It's a never-ending nightmare. There's a lot of things that should have been used in the original trial that weren't.
"If they were used I might not have ended up going to jail."