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Dame Mary Claire Hogg, DBE (born 15 January 1947), is a British lawyer and former High Court judge. She is the daughter of Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, and his wife, Mary Evelyn Martin, and is the sister of Douglas Hogg.
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Educated at St Paul's Girls' School, she was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1989. In 1995, she was named a judge of the High Court of Justice where she sat in the Family Division. At the time of her appointment she was only the seventh female High Court judge.
In 1995 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of law (LLD) by the University of Westminster, an institution founded by her great-grandfather Quintin Hogg.
She retired from the High Court in 2016, 6 days prior to the beginning of the trial of Ben Butler for killing his daughter (see below), whom she had previously exonerated despite advice from his local council not to.
Cases
Hogg caused controversy in 1996 when she ruled that a pregnant woman could be held in hospital against her will and forced to have her baby by Caesarean section. The woman had wanted to give birth naturally, but was advised by doctors that both she and the child were likely to die as she was suffering from pre-eclampsia. The ruling was later overturned at the Court of Appeal, which ruled that a pregnant woman could refuse medical help even if doing so risked her baby's life.
Disappeared British girl Madeleine McCann was made a ward of court, during summer 2007, on application by her parents.
During a court hearing on 7 July 2008 Hogg made an extraordinary plea to Madeleine's abductor to "show mercy and compassion" and reveal her whereabouts.
Murder of Ellie Butler
In March 2009, Ben Butler, who had a series of convictions for violent offences, was convicted and jailed for causing grievous bodily harm to his daughter, Ellie, a conviction which was overturned at the Court of Appeal. At subsequent custody proceedings, despite the opposition of social services, Hogg exonerated Butler and returned the daughter to her parents. Less than a year after his release, Butler went on to kill his six-year-old Ellie. The girls' school, Avenue Primary, had concerns about her welfare prior to her death but were unable to involve local authority social services as Hogg had ordered that social services should no longer be involved with the family. Beyond furnishing the Serious Case Review with necessary court orders, Hogg and other members of the judiciary refused to cooperate with it, an attitude that was condemned by a former president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services and the independent chair of the Sutton Safeguarding Board.