"Professor Sir Roy Meadow should not have been struck off"

Expert witnesses hailed Mr Justice Collin's ruling in February 2006 that professional bodies should not punish experts over evidence given in good faith as an "exciting" change in the law.

As well as ruling that Prof Meadow should not have been struck off last year, Judge Collins also overturned the General Medical Council's decision to find him guilty of serious professional misconduct. He said Professor Meadow had made - - "a mistake ... that was easily and widely made" which "does not justify a finding of serious professional misconduct".

Prof Meadow's reinstatement led to opposed responses, some hostile ones suggesting that aggrieved parties had not read the judgment closely and as a whole.

The case has of course attracted enormous interest. Googling for references in The Times, I found first a humorous one in the Rockall Times! More serious surveys of the implications are to be found in the BMJ (see below).

The Times reports that the Court of Appeal upheld the decision that Professor Meadow should not have been struck off as he had made an honest mistake, but stated that expert medical witnesses should still face penalties if they give bad evidence.
Expert e-wire, a free service that helps experts keep up to date with developments in all aspects of expert witness work, is worth reading.  I wonder how many of SCP's members who do medico-legal work know it?

The BMJ published a trenchant commentary deploring that "a Royal college rewrites child protection history": The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has not mentioned research work by Roy Meadow and David Southall in its advice on child protection.- - In much the same way as Stalin had people who had fallen from favour airbrushed out of photographs during the Soviet purges of the 1930s, so the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health seems to have shed virtually all reference to its two most troublesome members in a new handbook Child Protection Companion.  Paediatricians, already feeling beleaguered thanks to a concerted public and media campaign against individual doctors, will be dismayed that Roy Meadow and David Southall seem to have been written out of the medical history book by their own college.

Prof Southall himself has published a careful discussion of the Meadows/Collins judgment.

SCPNET visitors should familiarise themselves with the debate and the issues.

P G Woolf