THEY make the unlikeliest of revolutionaries. The pharmacist, the solicitor, and the former Tesco checkout lady. But make no mistake: Angela Cannings, Sally Clark and Trupti Patel, the three mothers freed after being wrongly convicted of murdering their babies, will in time be found to have shaken up the British justice system as surely as if they had painted the Old Bailey bright pink and popped a cherry on top.

To paraphrase the flawed reasoning of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a prosecution witness in all three cases, one wrongful conviction was a tragedy, two a travesty, and three a reason to wonder how the hell this medieval witchhunt could have come to pass in a modern nation. Cannings, Clark and Patel ran into trouble because they shared the naive belief that innocence is a cast-iron defence in British law. They could have pled guilty and walked away with probation or a spell in hospital. Others have. Yet they simply could not live with themselves if it was thought they had caused their babies to die.

Perhaps, had they known the medical and moral maze they would have to navigate to prove their innocence, they would have backed down. Since

no-one knows for sure what causes cot death, the odds were against them from the start. Juries, with little physical evidence to go on, were left prey

to the flattering attentions of expert witnesses, the men and women paid to shoot from the lip for whatever side, defence or prosecution, pays the invoice.

In the end, faced with conflicting accounts of what had happened, jurors no doubt fell back on their natural instincts. Always a bad move in any trial. All they knew was that an apparently healthy baby was alive one minute and dead

the next. And that this had

happened not once to these mothers, but twice or three times. Something was not right. The logic did not compute. It stretched credulity to believe that the hand which rocked

the cradle had not caused the death.

Bothered and bewildered, the jurors would have looked at the person, the woman, in the dock. Emotions, already running high, would have entered the stratosphere. Normal women don't end up in court for no reason. Good mothers ensure their children come to no harm.

All of these moral misjudgments, assumptions, and prejudices swirling round a courtroom. Cannings, Clark and Patel were lucky to get out alive. In another age, of course, they would not. The next time anyone demands an automatic death penalty for child murder, think of these three.

These women suffered from extreme prejudice, as mothers and as women. Yet, in atoning for the sins done to them, there is a danger of swinging the

pendulum too far the other

way and seeing every mother accused of this crime as an undisputed saint.

It has already been suggested that these cases are not brought at all, save for when the physical evidence is compelling. Others believe they should come before doctors rather than the police, as happens in Sweden. But what of the injustice done to the child itself

if these cases are not investigated and prosecuted like any other incident? And, most importantly, would we treat fathers suspected of killing their baby sons or daughters the same way?

We are guilty of the most wicked naivete to think that no parent ever harms their child. Any trawl through child cruelty cases of the past year proves that. Infanticide is as old as the hills on which babies were once left out to die when their parents did not want them or could not feed them. Without careful and expert examination of all infant deaths - most autopsies will be done by general pathologists rather than those with special knowledge of children - it is simply not possible to say with any certainty how many are suspicious. Most cot deaths are due to natural causes. But some are not.

Cannings, Clark and Patel are not alone in being put through hell for a crime they did not commit. Estimates of the number of other women behind bars who have been wrongly convicted of killing their babies varies from 20 to 50. That could rise further as more expert testimonies are challenged. This is a national scandal. But it would be an insult to all those innocent mothers wrongly accused if

the system were to be changed so that the guilty can escape punishment.

Justice should never have double standards. Women, so long the victims of such hypocrisy, should realise that special pleading helps no-one in the long run. Had Clark, Patel and Cannings been treated like every other accused, innocent until proven guilty by weight of evidence, they would never have been convicted in the first place.

These three women have made judicial history in the field of cot death. Because of them, juries in future will know that the seemingly impossible is not improbable. That experts can be wrong. And that prejudice has no place in a courtroom. In the end, the system worked for them. Justice, imperfect and messy, was done. Let it work for other innocent victims, too.