• NightFantom@slrpnk.net
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    6 months ago

    Fuck, imagine your kids dying from some (at that point) unknown and undetectable genetic disease, and getting thrown into jail on top of that.

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      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.

      Guilty until proven innocent as well!

      • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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        6 months ago

        Reading the summery. A law that assumes 3 deaths is murder “until prove otherwise”. Ations like childcare while she worked part time and attended the gym seen as suspicious.

        People need to remember this is exactly the sort of law some anti choice for women women groups in the US will lead to.

        • Zagorath
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          6 months ago

          A law that assumes 3 deaths is murder “until prove otherwise”

          Not a law. As previously stated on the [email protected] thread:

          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.

          • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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            6 months ago

            Ok. Not sure losing 20 years to a court basing ideas on such things is any better. Seems even 20 years ago a defence would be able to provide diverging experts. 20 years ago genetics was fairly well understood even if we know more now. The idea of a family having a common issue was fully expetlcted in the 1990s let alone 2000.

            As a anacdotal example. My family surrers from an eye condition. Thar was believed to be the result of a period of illness in my father i. The 70s

            My brother had it from 10 and my more recently.

            It was about 1990 rhat the experts started to recognise ot was a genetic conditio. Carried by all males. So the time this woman was jailed. The ideas had been well known in science for iver 10 years. Someone would have been able to provide expert witness doubting the paediatric ideals.

            But lets be honest. Much of the US laws being instituted in firced borth states is based on similar unsupported ideals)

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    6 months ago

    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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