The acquittal was hailed as the first sign of a changed attitude by jurors towards mothers where there are multiple cot deaths. Now, lawyers said, there should be an end to prosecutions where there is little or no evidence of murder.

John Batt, the solicitor who led the campaign for the release of Sally Clark, a solicitor whose conviction for the murder of her two sons was quashed, said: “In the past, jurors have been naturally revolted at being told a mother had killed her babies. In the absence of any explanation from the mother as to why they had died, they were asked to believe the doctor.”

He added that jurors were beginning to ask: “What if the doctors are wrong?” Such cases should now be removed from the adversarial trial system altogether, he said.

“It is absolutely mad to try to find out how a baby died using a system with two competing sides effectively playing chess, not searching for truth — but trying to win the most votes from a jury.”

There were 350 baby deaths a year, he said. “But somehow if a mother suffers more than one of these, it must be murder. If a second baby is diabetic, we don’t say the mother must have injected it to make it so.”

Another fault was that if mothers accused of murder pleaded guilty, they could usually escape jail, because they would be charged with infanticide. “So they don’t go to jail if they admit it — a completely circular argument.”

Finally, Mr Batt said, prosecutions relied on the same group of experts on child abuse, who believed that second-baby deaths were all highly suspicious. “But cot deaths go back 2,000 years — the first mention is in the Book of Kings,” he said. “Why should a mother explain something medical science has been unable to explain for 2,000 years?”

But, he said, yesterday’s verdict “hopefully meant that there would never be another case like that”. Instead of trials he called for a national protocol like the one that has been instituted at Bristol, where post-mortem examinations were carried out by a paediatric pathologist, a paediatrician took a full family history and a panel then decided “on a balance of probabilities” whether a case should be referred to the police.

The Crown Prosecution Service said yesterday that it was too early to say whether a review of policy in such cases should be carried out.

The NSPCC called for the urgent implementation of recommendations in a report by the independent Review of Coroner Services last week.

These include that public judicial inquests are held into any child death in which it is beyond reasonable doubt that the child did not die of natural causes. There should also be standing protocols between all coroners, children’s services and child protection agencies outlining how they should work together in child-death investigations.

All post-mortem examinations on children, the NSPCC added, should be performed by a paediatric pathologist or a pathologist with specialist paediatric experience.

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