Happy New Year 2025!
As 2024 ends and the new year lies ahead, we at Alexander Bennett Solicitors reflect on the difference we have made to so many people over the last 12 months, successfully defending and protecting hundreds of clients from charges which could have devastated lives and torn families apart.
A recent example of such a case, is our successful defence of a family whose lives were irrevocably impacted in 2001, when they were wrongly accused of deliberately harming their young baby. Despite the absence of any evidence supporting the charges, the mother was branded as a possible sufferer of ‘Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy’, a highly contentious label suggesting that mothers harm their children to gain attention. The author of this theory – Professor Sir Roy Meadow – has since been discredited.
In 2004, using Meadow’s theory to support their case, Birmingham Social Services pursued the parents through the courts and their young daughter was placed into the care of Birmingham Children’s services, with the High Court giving permission for the child to be adopted. The family appealed the decision twice but the appeals were denied and the parents were subsequently accused of abducting their daughter from her temporary foster family and returning to Bangladesh.
The family lived together without further incident until 2023, when the parents were arrested in the UK and charged with alleged child abduction relating to the reuniting of their family 19 years previously. It was at this stage that Alexander Bennett Solicitors was instructed as defence solicitors in the case and worked alongside counsel, Ben Williams of St Philips Chambers, to ensure that the historical injustices already suffered by the family would not be compounded.
Our team worked relentlessly on the Defence Case Statement and Representations, preparing and arguing the case in exceptional detail, with a view to persuading both the prosecution and the court that justice would not be served by pursuing this family any longer. In October 2024, the CPS offered no evidence and the verdict of ‘not guilty’ was returned at Birmingham Crown Court, righting a wrong that had overshadowed the lives of our clients for more than 20 years.
We are proud to be passionate advocates and fierce defenders of those who put their faith in us at the most critical times in their lives.
We wish all of our clients, colleagues and professional partners a Happy New Year!