BBC Radio 4 NOW: very interesting programme on about the case of the couple jailed for killing their adopted son Christian

[Caligyulea]

They're looking at how parents accused of murder are treated - this one looks like yet another case of miscarriage of justice.

It's on now in case anyone's interested.

(Cali can you check out Chazy?)

Will do!

I think I've read about this case. is it the one where he had really weird med test results and they were accused of making him eat salt?

That's the one. I remember thinking at the time that it must actually be quite difficult to force-feed a child the amount of salt they said the couple did without him vomiting.

Also dealt with the secrecy of the family courts, focusing on a couple who have lost all 3 of their kids because they 'probably' abused the middle one. Again the evidence presented in court was flimsy and contradictory. Absolutely shocking.

I think the parent of one of the jailed couple posted here once - just after they'd been convicted. It sounds as if it's following the pattern set by other high-profile cases which have turned out to be miscarriages of justice, doesn't it? 'We can't explain the salt levels, therefore the parents must be murderers...' Is this the standard of proof the criminal justice system demands?

On Breakfast this morning, some guy said he actually tried to drink the salt concoction 5 times and each time he threw up straight away. He said it was the bodies natural reaction to it. He also said he thought the boy could have had a rare type of salt diabetes. All very very sad.

Saw a bit about this on the lunchtime news - the salt levels in the little boy's body corresponded to him being fed 4 and a half teaspoons of salt. The defence say there is no evidence that this is even medically possible - that he would have been sick. They are looking into the possibility that he had an extremely rare form of diabetes - where salt levels rather than sugar goes haywire.

Wasn't there, at the time, evidence that the potential adoptive parents had been quite cruel to him and thought him less than "perfect" and that's why they murdered him?

There was footage of him on the news - from a few weeks before he died - he was a very beautiful little boy

Yep. And there was a lot made of the fact that the adoptive father (in a panic) rang up the SW and said "he's like a vegetable".

Not PC language, but not proof of wanting to murder someone.

Also the words were never really put in their true context. I suspect he was trying desperately to convey to a less than sympathetic social worker, how ill the little boy seemed to be. It later emerged that medical records showing a history of the boy's ill health prior to adoption had never been shown to the adoptive parents.

I hadn't heard of any of this but it sounds horrendous.

Poor wee boy and poor poor parents it fhey were trying to get help.

Someone told me Meadows was involved in this case.

Apparently once he was in hospital his salt levels didn't drop suggesting that something was physiologically wrong.

Yes. And it was something the medical experts ignored in favour of the unlikely possibility that the parents had managed to force that much salt down the child without him vomiting.

Call me paranoid, but I am actually really frightened by this kneejerk hostility to parents.

Another tragic feature of this little boy's death was that he had been very settled with foster parents who wanted to adopt him and his siblings, but were turned down for being too old. If he did suffer from some undiagnosed illness, the outcome may have been the same anyway, of course. But it just all is so sad.