Mrs Marie Noe, of Kensington, Philadelphia, pleaded guilty to eight counts of second-degree murder, under an agreement announced by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. She had agreed with prosecutors to be sentenced to 20 years of probation, the first five of which must be served under home confinement. Deputy district attorney Charles Gallagher said the plea agreement was reached because of "the unusual circumstances of the case and the age of the case."

Defence attorney Charles Gallagher told the media: "This is not one of those situations where we have a heart of a killer. This is one of those situations that makes us human . . . some things happen in life that we cannot understand [such as sudden infant death syndrome]. The deaths of the eight children, none of whom lived longer than 14 months, occurred between 1949 and 1968. Two other children born to Mr and Mrs Noe also died, one being stillborn and the other dying in hospital six hours after birth.

The eight left hospital apparently in good health, but died at home. Richard, born March 7, 1949, died two months later; Elizabeth, born September 8, 1950, died at 13 weeks; Jacqueline, born April 23, 1952, survived for only three weeks; Arthur Junior, born April 23, 1955, lived for a fortnight; Constance, born on February 24, 1958, had a month of life; Letitia was stillborn on August 24, 1959; Mary Lee, born on June 19, 1962, lived for nearly six months; Theresa, born on June 28, 1963, died after six hours; Catherine Ellen was born on December 3, 1964 and lived for over 14 months; Arthur Joseph, born July 28, 1967, died on January 2, 1968.

In each case forensic examination showing no cause, death which was recorded as SIDS. Police never closed the investigation, however, and Mrs Noe was charged in 1998, a year after the eight deaths were declared to be suspicious in a book, "The death of innocents." In June 1999, walking with a cane and having an electronic monitoring bracelet around her waist, Mrs Noe answered the questions of a judge with slow, deliberate answers of "Yes" or "No."

Her husband sat in the courtroom, shaking his head as the names of the children were read out. In each case, she was alone at home with the child when it expired; she claimed that each had died during sleep. [Decades later, apnoea monitors could have been provided to sound alarm when breathing became spasmodic, and the infants might have been resuscitated.] Arthur Noe, her husband, has always believed her innocent. In an interview in 1998 he said: "That woman was not capable of doing such a thing. She wouldn't harm a fly. If I thought she was involved in any way I would have turned her in, because they were my children too."

She had faced life imprisonment but was not eligible for the death penalty because the appropriate law had not been passed at the time of the deaths. She was freed from prison on a £500,000 bond, with the electronic bracelet monitoring her movements so that she is confined to her home. The bail application in August 1998 had been opposed by prosecutors, describing her as a mass-murderer who should not be allowed on the streets. They indicated that her 77-year-old husband's failing health was a factor in the plea agreement.

The Portia Campaign believes that Mrs Noe may well be falsely convicted, the deaths being wholly natural, consequent upon an inherited genetic fault which meant that if the couple had produced twenty infants, all would have been at extreme risk of sudden infant cot death. If this is so, she is a ten-times grieving mother deserving of sympathy, not the ordeal which, by legal guesswork, has been thrust upon her. "It's important for the medical community and the legal community that she has admitted these murders," said attorney Charles Gallagher. [The importance is that, if they are wrong, they will fail to realise their error, and other innocent parents will suffer as Mrs Noe has done.]

Defence attorney Rudenstein said it was important for Mrs Noe as well. "Before she passes on to the next world she wants to understand what has occurred," he said. {It seems that her defender had not believed her to be innocent through all the years when she protested it. That, I believe, always severely sets back hope of acquittal.] The outcome is of extreme importance worldwide, for it means that other parents losing more than one child from SIDS will be suspected of murder.

The Lancet (Aug 1, 1998) has warned of the danger of misdiagnosed accusations of assault against parents or carers, "the consequences of such an error [being] appalling." Dr David Fagan, paediatric pathologist at Queen's Hospital, Nottingham, claims there are more problems with over-diagnosis than under-diagnosis. An 18-month study at Edinburgh University is intended to show for the first time that SIDS can run in families. "If we can demonstrate a good reason for cot death this will help parents [and the law] to understand their babies didn't die because of something they did wrong," said the research team chief, Dr Caroline Blackwell.

A girl of 14, Jenny Legg, of Long Easton, Derbyshire, is recorded by inquest as victim of an adult version of SIDS, the post-mortem having shown nothing wrong with her heart. The Portia Campaign believes that it is a convenient legal fiction to say that Mrs Noe is guilty of killing her children. She has been bribed, bullied, coerced, forced into an admission of killings that did not take place, rather than face the likelihood of life imprisonment. She alone can ever know whether she is guilty (and very possibly an admission of guilt by an Australian nanny in London, Louise Sullivan, was obtained in similar manner, contrary to the truth. These situations arise, we believe, when the law wants a conviction which might prove very difficult to obtain; it thereupon offers a plea bargain which reduced the penalty so greatly that it might be foolish to refuse.

This is not justice but a travesty of it: the consequence might be that a cold-blooded killer walks free from court while an innocent parent or carer serves life sentence, without possibility of release on licence so long as they continue to deny guilt. Mrs Noe's supposed guilt made world headlines before her trial opened and must hve influenced the jury. "Mother of all crimes" was the headline in the Guardian newspaper; "One cot death is a tragedy, two is a mystery, three is murder," read the sub-head, quoting a coroner, Halbert Fillinger, who had helped conduct autopsies on some of infants.

At the time of the autopsies Mr Fillinger must have decided there was no proof of infanticide, manslaughter or murder and that the deaths were natural. What new evidence did he have, years later, other than gossip and supposition? One of the accusations helping to convict her was that the deaths of her children years ago were recorded as natural, whereas today they would be recognised as suffocation. This argument can be reversed. Doctors then were unable to diagnose illnesses that are now treatable, and therefore all eight babies died unnecessarily.

Peanut allergy was not recognised in the years when Mrs Noe's babies were alive. If all had suffered severe nut allergy, nothing could warn them against contact with peanuts, or biscuits containing peanut oil or with this oil on the hands of their mother. The resultant anaphylactic shock might have killed every one of them, and been recorded as cot death. It is not proof of murder. The human body is subject to genetic changes (natural and unnatural), some of them beneficial to progeny, some calamitous. This is how we have evolved from apes, by natural selection, survival of the fittest, and blind chance. It's a process that produces genius and mental deficiency, athletic prowess and deformity, health and sickness, longevity and infant death.

Clinical biochemists, geneticists and paediatricians are all in the process of learning how infants might die naturally; knowledge of the full complexity of the immune system and the subtle irregularities that give rise to allergies may still not be known by the end of the next century. There are tens of thousands of ways in which a parent might unwittingly pass on built-in faults which are only waiting for the appropriate allergens to enter the body, producing likelihood or inevitability of death.

Gulf War Syndrome; organophosphate poisoning, carbonates, histamine, dairy products, mad cow disease, thalidomide, silicone breast implants, irradiated foods, flea collars, headlice shampoos, garden pest sprays, fly killers, ant powders, wasp and bee eradicators, vaporisers for killing insects, certain paints. When houses are sprayed with pesticides, the usual warning is to keep out for four hours (but the peak danger comes ten days later. The spray may have condensed on the surface of toys, which then go into the mouths of infants during play. Some individuals are known to be 30 times more susceptible than others.

"The most vulnerable stage of life is when you are forming, as a foetus or as an infant," says Dr Vyvyan Howard, senior lecturer in foetal and infant toxopathology at Liverpool University. Fruit, vegetables and cereals, he says, can contain residues of agricultural organophosphates far in excess of World Health Organisation standards (and infants are at exceptional risk because of their relatively low body weight. There is advice that parents should peel fruit, but some pesticides can persist in the flesh, particularly in peaches, grapes, apples, and in bran and muesli.

Isn't it conceivable that Mrs Noe, or her husband, are victims of evolution passing on to their children genetically-flawed seeds of death? Suppose that one or other has a genetic defect which was inherited by their children. Each infant's epiglottis, dura, kidneys, stomach, lung, heart slowed, speeded up, overheated, enlarged, contracted, raced when their blood, skin, nose, throat, eye, stomach formed an allergic, chemical, irritant reaction with sugar, salt, peanut, heat, cold, water, sunshine, cow's milk, lead paint, vitamin E, surfactant.

Each child may have suffered infection, botulism, immunity failure, hypothermia, malignant hyper-pyrexia, carbon-dioxide pooling, laryngeal spasm, thyroid-hormone imbalance, Ondine's Curse. All babies have a tendency to break the rhythm of breathing while asleep (as do adults. There can be a gradual drop in rate or depth of air intake, followed by cessation for perhaps 20 seconds. So far, this is quite harmless. These moments of apnoea cause the heart to pump blood deficient in oxygen and rich in carbon dioxide (hypoxia). The brain should prompt the resumption of breath. But if there is a slight abnormality in the throat (perhaps the beginnings of a mild cold), the heart may change its rhythm, further upsetting the oxygen, CO2 balance.

Prolonged Sleep Apnoea occurs, breathing slows, with intervals of perhaps 40 seconds. This is the Ondine's Curse cycle. the child may jolt itself out of it. Even a touch to the toe would be sufficient to restore normal breathing (a "near miss" incident. But if no one was there, peaceful death could result. [I believe Mr Noe was a night-watchman, and so his wife would have been alone while each baby slept, and might not have heard the abnormal breathing until it was too late.] An affidavit for Mrs Noe's arrest said: "All of the eight infants were in the exclusive custody of the mother [who described them] as gasping for breath and turning blue when rescue personnel called and discovered her alone with them." Presumably she called the rescue personnel on discovering each child in this state. . . . A very good description of syndromes in which a young infant ceases to breathe.

She was, it seems, trying to save their lives. In recent years, when a baby has died from SIDS, subsequent children are fitted with apnoea monitors, to give audible alarm of "near misses" and thus provide extra chance of avoiding tragedy. This was not done in the years when Mrs Noe's children died. Does it make her a murderer, or a caring, frantic mother? Of course, Ondine's Curse is only one possible explanation. There might have been suffocation. There might have been inherited deficiency, excess of trace elements, vitamin, biotin, thiamine, medium chain acylCoA hydehydrogenase. Or perhaps a couple of thousand other alternatives I have failed to mention.

Professor Bernard Knight, Britain's most eminent pathologist, has written that reports of three, four or even five deaths in a family are "over-publicised tragedies," indicating that to a pathologist such multiple deaths are to be expected. He had personal knowledge of 30 double cot deaths. Professor Peter Berry has said that sooner or later it was inevitable that two deaths would occur on the same night in the same house. In past centuries infant mortality was accepted; now scientists (and journalists) want answers for everything, and if none are available, they are invented.

Mrs Noe's children were each declared victims of cot death by those carrying out forensic tests. Then two authors came along perhaps hoping to make a quick name for themselves with a book, "Death of the Innocents," and without possibility of further forensic examination the original decisions were declared to be false. "She's not going to live (just like the others," said Mrs Noe, after one birth, and this is now quoted against her as evidence of intent to kill. Aren't they the words (quite possibly) of a devoted mother agonised by a series of earlier deaths? One physician, Abraham Perlman, say he ran extensive tests on Mrs Noe's fifth child; the series of deaths appeared "certainly questionable." So he was making specific, careful forensic examination for signs of infanticide, and could find none.

What better tribute to the mother's innocence could there be, although Dr Perlman (with forensic evidence no longer available) changed his mind at the time of the trial? Professor Molly Dapena of the University of Miami, one of the authorities quoted in the Guardian, betrayed astonishing ignorance of her own subject, if correctly quoted. "We are talking about a time when we didn't know all the facts about crib deaths" (thereby implying that Mrs Noe was guilty but undiscovered until now. The truth is that the world's medical experts to this day know little or nothing about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

A syndrome is not a specific condition "Syn" means with, together, alike. Drome means "to run." Syndrome: a group of concurrent symptoms of a disease; a characteristic combination. Once a specific pathway to infant death can be defined it is no longer SIDS but given a precise name. There, it would seem, is a specific form defined by Professor Dapena, which deserves to be known as Dapena Disease . . . but this is then removed from the group known as SIDS, which neither she nor anyone else can specifically define. SIDS is something like an unmapped desert tract between life and death.

Professor Dapena, and others, notice that certain children follow a similar track across this desert; their pathway can be mapped and given a name; it is no longer SIDS and perhaps becomes preventable. But there are a myriad other possible tracks which remain as unknown today as they were when the first of Mrs Noe's children died. This explanation is not my own. It is based on Professor Bernard Knight's book, "Sudden death in infancy." By now, as an eagle-eyed Sherlock Holmes, you must have spotted the flaw in Coroner Fillinger's logic. "One cot death is a tragedy, two is a mystery, three is murder," he says. But if three is murder, then two cot deaths indicate 66.6% suspicion; a single cot death shows the mother may be 33.3% on the way to being an evil killer.

The only protection for innocent babes is to hand out life sentences to all SIDS mums. . . . And since all new-born infants might suffer cot death, for pity's sake let's jail every pregnant woman. Of course there can be suspicion that Mrs Noe killed her children, but proof, after all these years, is impossible. There can be nothing but innuendo, suspicion, imagination and a hostile, headline-grabbing Press to convict her. Justice, it aint.