Parents cleared of abuse told they may not be reunited with their child
Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter unlikely to get family court to overturn decision to put baby up for adoption, shadow justice secretary suggests.
Karrissa Cox sends a message to her child, who was taken into care at six weeks old.

The parents of a baby taken into care and given up for adoption after they were wrongly accused of abuse are unlikely to be reunited with the child, the shadow justice secretary has suggested, as they vow to fight the initial decision.

Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter said they would launch a legal battle to overturn the adoption. The couple were cleared of abuse more than three years after they took their six-week-old baby to hospital with bleeding in the mouth following a feed.

The baby was taken into care and the couple were charged with child cruelty after doctors noticed bruises and what were thought to be fractures on the baby’s body. Social services later found adoptive parents after a ruling of abuse by the family courts.

But the criminal case against Cox and Carter collapsed on Wednesday after they were found not guilty of child cruelty and neglect at Guildford crown court.

Defence experts discovered the child was suffering from Von Willebrand disease, a blood disorder that causes a person to bruise easily, as well as a vitamin D deficiency, which causes infantile rickets. An independent radiologist, commissioned by the prosecution, concluded that he doubted there were any fractures at all.

But the shadow justice secretary, Lord Falconer, said appealing against the decision of a family court from four years ago would present significant hurdles. The court would have to consider the consequences of uprooting the child after being raised for so long by other parents,
he said.

Falconer told the Today programme: “Assuming that the criminal case produced some new evidence, procedurally it would be perfectly open to the parents to apply to have the order set aside. But in considering whether to set aside the orders, the family court will ask itself one question – what’s in the best interest of the child? Three or four years with a new family might mean the disruption is too much.”

In a statement, Cox and Carter, both 25, from Guildford, Surrey, said: “We took our child to hospital seeking help and they stole our baby from us.”

The couple were allowed supervised contact with their first and only child until about a year ago. Cox told the Daily Mirror: “It is heartbreaking to know our child is out there, living and breathing in someone else’s arms. We miss our child a lot. We wish we had our child
back.”

Carter, a former soldier, added: “We will fight till our last breath. No parent should go through this, ever. This just rips your soul away from you. We wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

Lawyers have criticised the decision of the family court to finalise the adoption before the criminal court had made its ruling. The couple’s barrister, Michael Turner QC, said: “These innocent parents have been spared a criminal conviction and a prison sentence for a crime they never committed. Their life sentence is that they are likely
never to see their baby again.”

Turner said he presented expert evidence to the family court within a few moments of the final adoption order being made. He told the Today programme: “[The expert witness] said immediately not only are these not fractures, but this child has eight classical signs of infantile rickets. I served that report on the family court within moments of them making the final adoption order. Do they review it? No. They confirm the final adoption order.” Emma Fenn, also of Garden Court chambers, said: “This tragic case highlights the real dangers of the government’s drive to increase adoption and speed up family proceedings at all costs. It also shows the perils of the continued inaction relating to a nationwide epidemic of vitamin D deficiency and rickets, and the grave injustice that can result when relying on the opinions of medical professionals alone to conclude child abuse.”

Falconer said: “The problem here is that the criminal case took place quite a long time after the main hearing in the family case. You’d want them to be heard much more closer together so that if one case threw light on another, then both courts would have the same degree of information before coming to their separate conclusions.” He noted, however, that the parents were in contact with the child for two and a half years after the incident, “which means that no final decision had been made for at least two and a half years. So it may not be completely futile in this case to make an application. 

But that’s a matter for the family court to decide”.

A Crown Prosecution Service spokesman said the criminal case was brought after expert medical evidence that supported the original charges of cruelty. “The case was then reviewed following new medical evidence which concluded that there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction on any of the charges,” he said. A spokesman for the Royal Surrey county hospital said “children’s safety is paramount” to all staff but “extensive bruising in a non-independently mobile child is always a trigger for further questions to be asked”.

In a statement, he added: “In this particular case, for the child’s safety, the baby was admitted to the Royal Surrey on the day of presentation and full assessments were undertaken by senior doctors in paediatrics and radiology, one of whom was our named doctor for safeguarding. Based on these assessments, a referral was made to
children’s social care. No decision about a child’s wellbeing is based on a single agency opinion. Decisions are made over time by health, police and children’s social care and are based on a range of factors.” A Surrey county council spokesman said: “Any case like this is really difficult and we’re always sensitive to the distress it will cause all
involved, but our main concern has to be the welfare of the child. Our decision in this case was taken on the basis of the medical evidence provided and the finding of the family court which, having heard the evidence, took the view [that] it was right for the child to be removed from their parents.”