Roy Meadow
Encyclopedia
Sir Samuel Roy Meadow is a British paediatrician and professor
, who rose to initial fame for his 1977 academic paper on the now controversial Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
(MSbP) and his crusade against parents who, he believes, wilfully harm or kill their children. He was knighted
for these works. He was instrumental in the procedure of a widely recognised great miscarriage of justice. He endorsed the dictum that “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise“ in his book ABC of Child Abuse and this became known as Meadow's Law and at one time was widely adopted by social workers and child protection agencies (such as the NSPCC
) in Britain.
He appeared as an expert witness
for the prosecution in several trials, in at least one of which his testimony played a crucial part in a wrongful conviction for murder. The British General Medical Council
(GMC) struck off Meadow from the British Medical Register after he was found to have offered “erroneous” and “misleading” evidence in the Sally Clark
case. Clark was a lawyer
wrongly convicted in 1999 of the murder of her two baby sons, largely on the basis of Meadow's evidence; her conviction was quashed in 2003 after she had spent three years in jail. Sally Clark never recovered from the experience, developed a number of serious psychiatric problems including serious alcohol dependency and died in 2007 from alcohol poisoning.
Clark's father, Frank Lockyer, who is a retired senior police officer, complained to the GMC, alleging serious professional misconduct on the part of Meadow. The GMC concluded in July 2005 that Meadow was guilty of serious professional misconduct and ordered that his name be struck from the register. Meadow appealed to the High Court
, which ruled in his favour in February 2006. The GMC appealed to the Court of Appeal
and in October 2006 by a majority decision, with the Master of the Rolls
, Sir Anthony Clarke, dissenting
, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the High Court in part ruling that Meadow's misconduct was not sufficiently serious to merit the punishment which he had received.
, Lancashire
, the son of Samuel and Doris Meadow. He studied medicine at Worcester College, Oxford, and later practised as a GP in Banbury. Throughout his early years in medicine, Meadow was a devoted admirer of Anna Freud
(daughter of Sigmund Freud
), whose lectures he would often attend. Speaking in later life, he said: "I was, as a junior, brought up by Anna Freud, who was a great figure in child psychology, and I used to sit at her feet at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. She used to teach us that a child needs mothering and not a mother." There is some controversy over these claims. According to the London Evening Standard
“The Anna Freud Centre, however, has denied any record of him in their famous ‘war babies nursery’. It reported no record of him completing a formal training there. What's more, their chief executive, Professor Peter Fonagy, claimed the words he attributed to Anna Freud were a ‘total misrepresentation of her philosophy."
Meadow was appointed as senior lecturer at the University of Leeds
and took up a chair in paediatrics and child health in 1980 at St James's University Hospital, Leeds.
In 1961, Meadow married Gillian Maclennan, daughter of Sir Ian Maclennan, the British ambassador to Ireland
. The couple had two children, Julian and Anna, before divorcing in 1974. Four years later he married his second wife, Marianne Jane Harvey.
medical journal, Meadow published the theory which was to make him famous.
Sufferers of his postulated Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
or MSbP (a name coined by Meadow himself) harm or fake symptoms of illness in persons under their care (usually their own children) in order to gain the attention and sympathy of medical personnel. This claim was based upon the extraordinary behaviour of two mothers: one had (Meadow claimed) poisoned her toddler with excessive quantities of salt. The other had introduced her own blood into her baby's urine sample. Although it was initially regarded with scepticism, MSbP soon gained a following amongst doctors and social workers.
(SIDS). Meadow was convinced that many apparent cot deaths were in fact the result of physical abuse.
Families that had suffered more than one cot death were to attract particular attention: "There is no evidence that cot deaths runs in families", said Meadow, "but there is plenty of evidence that child abuse does". His rule of thumb was that "unless proven otherwise, one cot death is tragic, two is suspicious and three is murder". (Although this dictum is believed not to have originated from Meadow's own lips, it has become almost universally known as Meadow's law
.)
was tried for allegedly murdering her two babies. Her elder son Christopher had died at the age of 11 weeks, and her younger son Harry at 8 weeks. Medical opinion was divided on the cause of death, and several leading paediatricians testified that the deaths were probably natural. Experts acting for the prosecution initially diagnosed that the babies had been shaken to death, but three days before the trial began several of them changed their collective opinion to smothering.
By the time he gave evidence at Sally Clark's trial, Roy Meadow claimed to have found 81 cot deaths which were in fact murder, but he had destroyed the data. Amongst the prosecution team was Meadow, whose evidence included a soundbite
which was to provoke much argument: he testified that the odds against two cot deaths occurring in the same family was 73,000,000:1, a figure which he obtained by squaring the observed ratio of live-births to cot deaths in affluent non-smoking families (approximately 8,500:1). The jury returned a 10/2 majority verdict of "guilty".
issued a press release stating that the figure had "no statistical basis", and that the case was "one
example of a medical expert witness making a serious statistical error." The Society's president later wrote an open letter of complaint to the Lord Chancellor
about these concerns.
The statistical criticisms were threefold: firstly, Meadow was accused of applying the so-called prosecutor's fallacy
in which the probability of "cause given effect" (i.e. the true likelihood of a suspect's innocence) is confused with that of "effect given cause" (the likelihood that innocence will result in the observed double cot death). In reality, these quantities can only be equated when the a priori likelihood of the alternate hypothesis
, in this case murder, is close to certainty. Murder (especially double murder) is itself a rare event, whose probability must be weighed against that of the null hypothesis
(natural death).
The second criticism concerned the ecological fallacy
: Meadow's calculation had assumed that the cot death probability within any single family was the same as the aggregate ratio of cot deaths to births for the entire affluent-non-smoking population. No account had been taken of conditions specific to individual families (such as the hypothesised cot death gene) which might make some more vulnerable than others. Finally, Meadow assumed that SIDS cases within families were statistically independent. The occurrence of one cot death makes it likely that the family in question has such conditions, and the probability of subsequent deaths is therefore greater than the group average. (Estimates are mostly in the region of 1:100.)
Some mathematicians have estimated that taking all these factors into account, the true odds may have been greater than 2:1 in favour of the death not being murder, and hence demonstrating Clark's innocence.
The perils of allowing non-statisticians to present unsound statistical arguments were expressed in a British Medical Journal
(BMJ) editorial by Stephen Watkins
, Director of Public Health for Stockport, claiming that "defendants deserve the same protection as patients."
in the autumn of 2000. The judges claimed that the figure was a "sideshow", which would have had no significant effect on the jury's decision. The overall evidence was judged to be "overwhelming" and Clark's appeal against conviction was dismissed.
Clark's supporters rejected this decision, calling it "intellectually dishonest" even though Meadow had at the time been fully vindicated. He responded to Watkins in a BMJ paper of his own, accusing him of being both irresponsible and misinformed. He reiterated his claim that "both children showed signs of both recent and past abuse" (injuries which the defence claimed were either misidentified in a badly-performed autopsy, or caused by the mother's attempts at resuscitation) and underlined the judges' controversial ruling that Clark and her husband had given "untrue evidence". He went on to bemoan the time likely to be "wasted" on any further investigation of the case: "In today's world," he wrote, "it is inevitable that....formal letters of complaint from the family to the Police Complaints Authority, the General Medical Council, the royal colleges, or other statutory bodies will be treated with respect and will consume considerable resources."
, and not from smothering as the prosecution had claimed. A second appeal was launched Sally Clark's conviction was overturned in January 2003. Sally Clark died on 16 March 2007 from alcohol poisoning, having never recovered from the trauma of losing her children.
Although the central reasons for the Clark appeal's success had nothing to do with Meadow, the discredited statistics were revisited in the hearing. In their ruling, the judges stated that "....if this matter had been fully argued before us we would, in all probability, have considered that the statistical evidence provided a quite distinct basis upon which the appeal had to be allowed."
used Meadow's expert testimony against Trupti Patel
, a pharmacist accused of killing three of her babies. After a highly publicised trial lasting several weeks, the jury took less than 90 minutes to return a unanimous verdict of "not guilty". Even then, a spokesperson for the prosecution stated that the crown would still be "very happy" to use Meadow's evidence in future trials. However, the Solicitor General for England and Wales, Harriet Harman (whose sister is Sarah Harman, a lawyer involved in another subsequent high profile case where the parents had been accused of harming their children) effectively barred Meadow from court work; she warned prosecution lawyers that the defence should be informed of court criticisms of Meadow's evidence.
, a mother convicted on Meadow's evidence was freed on appeal. She had been wrongly convicted of murdering two of her three babies, both of whom had died in their first few weeks of life. Following the quashing of her convictions, Meadow found himself under investigation by the British General Medical Council
for alleged professional misconduct.
showed that the prosecution's "no family history" argument had been incorrect: at least two of Cannings' paternal ancestors had lost an abnormally large number of infants to unexplained causes, making a genetic predisposition to cot death highly plausible.
The appeal was heard in December 2003 and the Court of Appeal declared the original conviction unsafe and allowed Cannings' appeal.
, gave the full reasons for allowing Cannings' appeal. His comments were scathing about the entire MSbP/cot death/murder theory, calling it a "travesty of justice". Some people expected that many convictions would quickly be overturned. In the event, however, only a relatively small number of appeals were actually launched, though most of these were successful (including that of Donna Anthony, who served six years for allegedly murdering her son and daughter). In addition to this, the law was changed such that no person can be convicted on the basis of expert testimony alone.
On 21 June 2005 Meadow appeared before a GMC
fitness to practise tribunal. On 13 July, the tribunal ruled that his evidence in the Clark case was indeed misleading and incorrect and on 15 July decided he was guilty of "serious professional misconduct". A decision was made that his name should be struck from the medical register, although the Society of Expert Witnesses commented that the severity of this punishment would cause many professionals to reconsider whether to stand as expert witnesses.
The following month, Meadow launched an appeal against this ruling. On 17 February 2006 High Court judge Mr Justice Collins found in his favour, ruling against the decision to strike him from the medical register. The judge stated that although the GMC had been right to criticize him, his actions could not properly be regarded as "serious professional misconduct".
On 26 October 2006 the Appeal Court overturned the High Court's earlier ruling, allowing expert witness
es to be disciplined once again but ruled that the High Court decision that Meadow was not guilty of serious professional misconduct should stand. However, on the issue of serious professional misconduct, the Appeal Court panel was split 2:1 with the dissenting judge, Sir Anthony Clarke, concluding Meadow was "guilty of serious professional misconduct" and provided detailed reasons for his conclusion. One of the other two judges, Lord Justice Auld
, said Meadow "was undoubtedly guilty of some professional misconduct" but that it "fell far short of serious professional misconduct" (see Richard Webster's article discussing the judgment.)
In 2004 Meadow’s ex-wife, Gillian Paterson, accused Meadow of seeing “mothers with Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy wherever he looked,” and implied that he was a misogynist: “I don't think he likes women... although I can't go into details, I'm sure he has a serious problem with women.” The article also revealed that Meadow had starred in an amateur production of The Crucible
by Arthur Miller
, playing Judge Danforth who falsely and recklessly accuses women of witchcraft and child killing and sentences them to death. Meadow confided to a friend that “he found it an uncomfortable part because he identified with this judge more than he was happy with.”
In interviews for BBC Radio 4
's File on 4
programme, Professor Jean Golding and Professor Ashley Grossman both questioned the reliability of the Meadow paper. The naturally occurring condition diabetes insipidus
was suggested as a more likely cause of an elevated salt level than deliberate salt poisoning.
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
, who rose to initial fame for his 1977 academic paper on the now controversial Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
Munchausen syndrome by proxy
Münchausen syndrome by proxy is a label for a pattern of behavior in which care-givers deliberately exaggerate, fabricate, and/or induce physical, psychological, behavioral, and/or mental health problems in others. Other experts classified MSbP as a mental illness...
(MSbP) and his crusade against parents who, he believes, wilfully harm or kill their children. He was knighted
Knight Bachelor
The rank of Knight Bachelor is a part of the British honours system. It is the most basic rank of a man who has been knighted by the monarch but not as a member of one of the organised Orders of Chivalry...
for these works. He was instrumental in the procedure of a widely recognised great miscarriage of justice. He endorsed the dictum that “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise“ in his book ABC of Child Abuse and this became known as Meadow's Law and at one time was widely adopted by social workers and child protection agencies (such as the NSPCC
NSPCC
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is a United Kingdom charity campaigning and working in child protection.-History:...
) in Britain.
He appeared as an expert witness
Expert witness
An expert witness, professional witness or judicial expert is a witness, who by virtue of education, training, skill, or experience, is believed to have expertise and specialised knowledge in a particular subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially and legally...
for the prosecution in several trials, in at least one of which his testimony played a crucial part in a wrongful conviction for murder. The British General Medical Council
General Medical Council
The General Medical Council registers and regulates doctors practising in the United Kingdom. It has the power to revoke or restrict a doctor's registration if it deems them unfit to practise...
(GMC) struck off Meadow from the British Medical Register after he was found to have offered “erroneous” and “misleading” evidence in the Sally Clark
Sally Clark
Sally Clark was a British solicitor who became the victim of an infamous miscarriage of justice when she was wrongly convicted of the murder of two of her sons in 1999...
case. Clark was a lawyer
Solicitor
Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...
wrongly convicted in 1999 of the murder of her two baby sons, largely on the basis of Meadow's evidence; her conviction was quashed in 2003 after she had spent three years in jail. Sally Clark never recovered from the experience, developed a number of serious psychiatric problems including serious alcohol dependency and died in 2007 from alcohol poisoning.
Clark's father, Frank Lockyer, who is a retired senior police officer, complained to the GMC, alleging serious professional misconduct on the part of Meadow. The GMC concluded in July 2005 that Meadow was guilty of serious professional misconduct and ordered that his name be struck from the register. Meadow appealed to the High Court
High Court of Justice
The High Court of Justice is, together with the Court of Appeal and the Crown Court, one of the Senior Courts of England and Wales...
, which ruled in his favour in February 2006. The GMC appealed to the Court of Appeal
Court of Appeal of England and Wales
The Court of Appeal of England and Wales is the second most senior court in the English legal system, with only the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom above it...
and in October 2006 by a majority decision, with the Master of the Rolls
Master of the Rolls
The Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England, known as the Master of the Rolls, is the second most senior judge in England and Wales, after the Lord Chief Justice. The Master of the Rolls is the presiding officer of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal...
, Sir Anthony Clarke, dissenting
Dissenting opinion
A dissenting opinion is an opinion in a legal case written by one or more judges expressing disagreement with the majority opinion of the court which gives rise to its judgment....
, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the High Court in part ruling that Meadow's misconduct was not sufficiently serious to merit the punishment which he had received.
Early career
Roy Meadow was born in WiganWigan
Wigan is a town in Greater Manchester, England. It stands on the River Douglas, south-west of Bolton, north of Warrington and west-northwest of Manchester. Wigan is the largest settlement in the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and is its administrative centre. The town of Wigan had a total...
, Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...
, the son of Samuel and Doris Meadow. He studied medicine at Worcester College, Oxford, and later practised as a GP in Banbury. Throughout his early years in medicine, Meadow was a devoted admirer of Anna Freud
Anna Freud
Anna Freud was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis...
(daughter of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
), whose lectures he would often attend. Speaking in later life, he said: "I was, as a junior, brought up by Anna Freud, who was a great figure in child psychology, and I used to sit at her feet at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. She used to teach us that a child needs mothering and not a mother." There is some controversy over these claims. According to the London Evening Standard
Evening Standard
The Evening Standard, now styled the London Evening Standard, is a free local daily newspaper, published Monday–Friday in tabloid format in London. It is the dominant regional evening paper for London and the surrounding area, with coverage of national and international news and City of London...
“The Anna Freud Centre, however, has denied any record of him in their famous ‘war babies nursery’. It reported no record of him completing a formal training there. What's more, their chief executive, Professor Peter Fonagy, claimed the words he attributed to Anna Freud were a ‘total misrepresentation of her philosophy."
Meadow was appointed as senior lecturer at the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
and took up a chair in paediatrics and child health in 1980 at St James's University Hospital, Leeds.
In 1961, Meadow married Gillian Maclennan, daughter of Sir Ian Maclennan, the British ambassador to Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
. The couple had two children, Julian and Anna, before divorcing in 1974. Four years later he married his second wife, Marianne Jane Harvey.
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
In 1977, in The LancetThe Lancet
The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is one of the world's best known, oldest, and most respected general medical journals...
medical journal, Meadow published the theory which was to make him famous.
Sufferers of his postulated Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
Munchausen syndrome by proxy
Münchausen syndrome by proxy is a label for a pattern of behavior in which care-givers deliberately exaggerate, fabricate, and/or induce physical, psychological, behavioral, and/or mental health problems in others. Other experts classified MSbP as a mental illness...
or MSbP (a name coined by Meadow himself) harm or fake symptoms of illness in persons under their care (usually their own children) in order to gain the attention and sympathy of medical personnel. This claim was based upon the extraordinary behaviour of two mothers: one had (Meadow claimed) poisoned her toddler with excessive quantities of salt. The other had introduced her own blood into her baby's urine sample. Although it was initially regarded with scepticism, MSbP soon gained a following amongst doctors and social workers.
The Allitt case
Meadow rose to public prominence in 1993, when he brought expert testimony in the trial of Beverley Allitt, a paediatric nurse accused of murdering several of her patients. Allitt was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Many saw this as a vindication of Meadow's theories.Child abuse and cot death
Meadow went on to testify in many other trials, many of which concerned cases previously diagnosed as cot death or sudden infant death syndromeSudden infant death syndrome
Sudden infant death syndrome is marked by the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by medical history, and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation. An infant is at the highest risk for SIDS during sleep, which is why it is sometimes...
(SIDS). Meadow was convinced that many apparent cot deaths were in fact the result of physical abuse.
Families that had suffered more than one cot death were to attract particular attention: "There is no evidence that cot deaths runs in families", said Meadow, "but there is plenty of evidence that child abuse does". His rule of thumb was that "unless proven otherwise, one cot death is tragic, two is suspicious and three is murder". (Although this dictum is believed not to have originated from Meadow's own lips, it has become almost universally known as Meadow's law
Meadow's law
Meadow's Law was a precept much in use until recently in the field of child protection, specifically by those investigating cases of multiple cot or crib death — SIDS — within a single family.-History:...
.)
The original trial
This trend was to reach its apogee in 1999 when solicitor Sally ClarkSally Clark
Sally Clark was a British solicitor who became the victim of an infamous miscarriage of justice when she was wrongly convicted of the murder of two of her sons in 1999...
was tried for allegedly murdering her two babies. Her elder son Christopher had died at the age of 11 weeks, and her younger son Harry at 8 weeks. Medical opinion was divided on the cause of death, and several leading paediatricians testified that the deaths were probably natural. Experts acting for the prosecution initially diagnosed that the babies had been shaken to death, but three days before the trial began several of them changed their collective opinion to smothering.
By the time he gave evidence at Sally Clark's trial, Roy Meadow claimed to have found 81 cot deaths which were in fact murder, but he had destroyed the data. Amongst the prosecution team was Meadow, whose evidence included a soundbite
Soundbite
In film and broadcasting, a sound bite is a very short piece of a speech taken from a longer speech or an interview in which someone with authority or the average "man on the street" says something which is considered by those who edit the speech or interview to be the most important point...
which was to provoke much argument: he testified that the odds against two cot deaths occurring in the same family was 73,000,000:1, a figure which he obtained by squaring the observed ratio of live-births to cot deaths in affluent non-smoking families (approximately 8,500:1). The jury returned a 10/2 majority verdict of "guilty".
Statistical controversy
Meadow's 73,000,000:1 statistic was paraded in the popular press, and provoked an uproar amongst professional statisticians who not only saw the figure as wrong, but deplored someone with no special statistical expertise presenting it as an expert witness. The Royal Statistical SocietyRoyal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...
issued a press release stating that the figure had "no statistical basis", and that the case was "one
example of a medical expert witness making a serious statistical error." The Society's president later wrote an open letter of complaint to the Lord Chancellor
Lord Chancellor
The Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, or Lord Chancellor, is a senior and important functionary in the government of the United Kingdom. He is the second highest ranking of the Great Officers of State, ranking only after the Lord High Steward. The Lord Chancellor is appointed by the Sovereign...
about these concerns.
The statistical criticisms were threefold: firstly, Meadow was accused of applying the so-called prosecutor's fallacy
Prosecutor's fallacy
The prosecutor's fallacy is a fallacy of statistical reasoning made in law where the context in which the accused has been brought to court is falsely assumed to be irrelevant to judging how confident a jury can be in evidence against them with a statistical measure of doubt...
in which the probability of "cause given effect" (i.e. the true likelihood of a suspect's innocence) is confused with that of "effect given cause" (the likelihood that innocence will result in the observed double cot death). In reality, these quantities can only be equated when the a priori likelihood of the alternate hypothesis
Alternate hypothesis
In statistical hypothesis testing,the alternative hypothesis and the null hypothesis are the two rival hypotheses which are compared by a statistical hypothesis test...
, in this case murder, is close to certainty. Murder (especially double murder) is itself a rare event, whose probability must be weighed against that of the null hypothesis
Null hypothesis
The practice of science involves formulating and testing hypotheses, assertions that are capable of being proven false using a test of observed data. The null hypothesis typically corresponds to a general or default position...
(natural death).
The second criticism concerned the ecological fallacy
Ecological fallacy
An ecological fallacy is a logical fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data in an ecological study, whereby inferences about the nature of specific individuals are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which those individuals belong...
: Meadow's calculation had assumed that the cot death probability within any single family was the same as the aggregate ratio of cot deaths to births for the entire affluent-non-smoking population. No account had been taken of conditions specific to individual families (such as the hypothesised cot death gene) which might make some more vulnerable than others. Finally, Meadow assumed that SIDS cases within families were statistically independent. The occurrence of one cot death makes it likely that the family in question has such conditions, and the probability of subsequent deaths is therefore greater than the group average. (Estimates are mostly in the region of 1:100.)
Some mathematicians have estimated that taking all these factors into account, the true odds may have been greater than 2:1 in favour of the death not being murder, and hence demonstrating Clark's innocence.
The perils of allowing non-statisticians to present unsound statistical arguments were expressed in a British Medical Journal
British Medical Journal
BMJ is a partially open-access peer-reviewed medical journal. Originally called the British Medical Journal, the title was officially shortened to BMJ in 1988. The journal is published by the BMJ Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association...
(BMJ) editorial by Stephen Watkins
Stephen Watkins
Stephen George Watkins is a former English cricketer who played one first-class and one List A match for Worcestershire in 1983.Watkins' solitary first-class appearance came against Oxford University in the middle of June 1983...
, Director of Public Health for Stockport, claiming that "defendants deserve the same protection as patients."
The first appeal
The discredited 1:73,000,000 figure was amongst the five grounds for appeal submitted to the Court of AppealCourt of Appeal of England and Wales
The Court of Appeal of England and Wales is the second most senior court in the English legal system, with only the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom above it...
in the autumn of 2000. The judges claimed that the figure was a "sideshow", which would have had no significant effect on the jury's decision. The overall evidence was judged to be "overwhelming" and Clark's appeal against conviction was dismissed.
Clark's supporters rejected this decision, calling it "intellectually dishonest" even though Meadow had at the time been fully vindicated. He responded to Watkins in a BMJ paper of his own, accusing him of being both irresponsible and misinformed. He reiterated his claim that "both children showed signs of both recent and past abuse" (injuries which the defence claimed were either misidentified in a badly-performed autopsy, or caused by the mother's attempts at resuscitation) and underlined the judges' controversial ruling that Clark and her husband had given "untrue evidence". He went on to bemoan the time likely to be "wasted" on any further investigation of the case: "In today's world," he wrote, "it is inevitable that....formal letters of complaint from the family to the Police Complaints Authority, the General Medical Council, the royal colleges, or other statutory bodies will be treated with respect and will consume considerable resources."
The second appeal and its aftermath
Meadow's vindication was to be short-lived: it transpired that another expert witness had failed to disclose the results of medical tests which had suggested that at least one of the Clark babies had died from the bacterial infection Staphylococcus aureusStaphylococcus aureus
Staphylococcus aureus is a facultative anaerobic Gram-positive coccal bacterium. It is frequently found as part of the normal skin flora on the skin and nasal passages. It is estimated that 20% of the human population are long-term carriers of S. aureus. S. aureus is the most common species of...
, and not from smothering as the prosecution had claimed. A second appeal was launched Sally Clark's conviction was overturned in January 2003. Sally Clark died on 16 March 2007 from alcohol poisoning, having never recovered from the trauma of losing her children.
Although the central reasons for the Clark appeal's success had nothing to do with Meadow, the discredited statistics were revisited in the hearing. In their ruling, the judges stated that "....if this matter had been fully argued before us we would, in all probability, have considered that the statistical evidence provided a quite distinct basis upon which the appeal had to be allowed."
Trupti Patel
In June 2003, the CPSCrown Prosecution Service
The Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for public prosecutions of people charged with criminal offences in England and Wales. Its role is similar to that of the longer-established Crown Office in Scotland, and the...
used Meadow's expert testimony against Trupti Patel
Trupti Patel
Trupti Patel is a qualified pharmacist from Berkshire, England, who was acquitted in 2003 of murdering three of her children, Amar , Jamie , and Mia ....
, a pharmacist accused of killing three of her babies. After a highly publicised trial lasting several weeks, the jury took less than 90 minutes to return a unanimous verdict of "not guilty". Even then, a spokesperson for the prosecution stated that the crown would still be "very happy" to use Meadow's evidence in future trials. However, the Solicitor General for England and Wales, Harriet Harman (whose sister is Sarah Harman, a lawyer involved in another subsequent high profile case where the parents had been accused of harming their children) effectively barred Meadow from court work; she warned prosecution lawyers that the defence should be informed of court criticisms of Meadow's evidence.
Angela Cannings
The following December Angela CanningsAngela Cannings
Angela Cannings was wrongfully convicted in the UK in 2002 of the murder of her seven-week-old son, Jason, who died in 1991, and of her 18-week-old son Matthew, who died in 1999...
, a mother convicted on Meadow's evidence was freed on appeal. She had been wrongly convicted of murdering two of her three babies, both of whom had died in their first few weeks of life. Following the quashing of her convictions, Meadow found himself under investigation by the British General Medical Council
General Medical Council
The General Medical Council registers and regulates doctors practising in the United Kingdom. It has the power to revoke or restrict a doctor's registration if it deems them unfit to practise...
for alleged professional misconduct.
The original trial
Cannings' case differed from Clark's in that there was no physical evidence. The prosecution rested upon what was perceived to be "suspicious behaviour" on the part of the mother (telephoning her husband instead of emergency services when one of the deaths occurred) and upon Meadow's opinion that she was an MSbP sufferer. He had told the jury that the boys could not have been genuine cot death victims because they were fit and healthy right up until the time of death (contradicting other experts who claim this is typical of SIDS cases). The prosecution had also rejected any genetic explanation, stating that there was no family history of cot death. Although no enumerated statistics had been presented, Meadow had told the jury that double cot death was extremely unlikely (an alleged ploy to get his false statistics "in by the back door".) The jurors took nine hours to return a guilty verdict.The 2003 appeal
Cannings had already lost one appeal but, in the wake of the Clark and Patel acquittals, the case was "fast tracked" for a second appeal. In the weeks that followed, an investigation by the BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
showed that the prosecution's "no family history" argument had been incorrect: at least two of Cannings' paternal ancestors had lost an abnormally large number of infants to unexplained causes, making a genetic predisposition to cot death highly plausible.
The appeal was heard in December 2003 and the Court of Appeal declared the original conviction unsafe and allowed Cannings' appeal.
Aftermath
In January 2004, the Deputy Chief Justice, Lord Justice JudgeIgor Judge
Igor Judge, Baron Judge PC is a Maltese-born English judge and has been Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, the head of the English judiciary, since October 2008...
, gave the full reasons for allowing Cannings' appeal. His comments were scathing about the entire MSbP/cot death/murder theory, calling it a "travesty of justice". Some people expected that many convictions would quickly be overturned. In the event, however, only a relatively small number of appeals were actually launched, though most of these were successful (including that of Donna Anthony, who served six years for allegedly murdering her son and daughter). In addition to this, the law was changed such that no person can be convicted on the basis of expert testimony alone.
On 21 June 2005 Meadow appeared before a GMC
General Medical Council
The General Medical Council registers and regulates doctors practising in the United Kingdom. It has the power to revoke or restrict a doctor's registration if it deems them unfit to practise...
fitness to practise tribunal. On 13 July, the tribunal ruled that his evidence in the Clark case was indeed misleading and incorrect and on 15 July decided he was guilty of "serious professional misconduct". A decision was made that his name should be struck from the medical register, although the Society of Expert Witnesses commented that the severity of this punishment would cause many professionals to reconsider whether to stand as expert witnesses.
The following month, Meadow launched an appeal against this ruling. On 17 February 2006 High Court judge Mr Justice Collins found in his favour, ruling against the decision to strike him from the medical register. The judge stated that although the GMC had been right to criticize him, his actions could not properly be regarded as "serious professional misconduct".
On 26 October 2006 the Appeal Court overturned the High Court's earlier ruling, allowing expert witness
Expert witness
An expert witness, professional witness or judicial expert is a witness, who by virtue of education, training, skill, or experience, is believed to have expertise and specialised knowledge in a particular subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially and legally...
es to be disciplined once again but ruled that the High Court decision that Meadow was not guilty of serious professional misconduct should stand. However, on the issue of serious professional misconduct, the Appeal Court panel was split 2:1 with the dissenting judge, Sir Anthony Clarke, concluding Meadow was "guilty of serious professional misconduct" and provided detailed reasons for his conclusion. One of the other two judges, Lord Justice Auld
Robin Auld
Sir Robin Ernest Auld was a Lord Justice of Appeal in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales.Sir Robin was educated at Brooklands College and King's College London. He graduated with a first class honours degree in Law in 1958, obtained a doctorate in Law in 1963, and he became a Fellow of...
, said Meadow "was undoubtedly guilty of some professional misconduct" but that it "fell far short of serious professional misconduct" (see Richard Webster's article discussing the judgment.)
In 2004 Meadow’s ex-wife, Gillian Paterson, accused Meadow of seeing “mothers with Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy wherever he looked,” and implied that he was a misogynist: “I don't think he likes women... although I can't go into details, I'm sure he has a serious problem with women.” The article also revealed that Meadow had starred in an amateur production of The Crucible
The Crucible
The Crucible is a 1952 play by the American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatization of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Province of Massachusetts Bay during 1692 and 1693. Miller wrote the play as an allegory of McCarthyism, when the US government blacklisted accused communists...
by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...
, playing Judge Danforth who falsely and recklessly accuses women of witchcraft and child killing and sentences them to death. Meadow confided to a friend that “he found it an uncomfortable part because he identified with this judge more than he was happy with.”
Ian and Angela Gay
In the 2005 trial of Ian and Angela Gay over the death of their adopted son Christian, the prosecution relied heavily upon Meadow's 1993 paper "Non-accidental salt poisoning", citing it many times throughout the trial. The judge also referred to the paper citing it five times during his summing up. Ian and Angela Gay were found guilty of manslaughter and spent 15 months in prison before their convictions were quashed.In interviews for BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
's File on 4
File on 4
File on 4 is a current-affairs radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It is produced in Manchester by the BBC's Radio Current Affairs department, and has won more than 40 awards.- External links :* *...
programme, Professor Jean Golding and Professor Ashley Grossman both questioned the reliability of the Meadow paper. The naturally occurring condition diabetes insipidus
Diabetes insipidus
Diabetes insipidus is a condition characterized by excessive thirst and excretion of large amounts of severely diluted urine, with reduction of fluid intake having no effect on the concentration of the urine. There are several different types of DI, each with a different cause...
was suggested as a more likely cause of an elevated salt level than deliberate salt poisoning.
See also
- Expert witnessExpert witnessAn expert witness, professional witness or judicial expert is a witness, who by virtue of education, training, skill, or experience, is believed to have expertise and specialised knowledge in a particular subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially and legally...
- Miscarriage of justiceMiscarriage of justiceA miscarriage of justice primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. The term can also apply to errors in the other direction—"errors of impunity", and to civil cases. Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn, or "quash", a wrongful...
- Timeline of young people's rights in the United Kingdom
External links
- Judgment of the Court of Appeal in the case of Regina vs. Cannings, Jan 2004.
- Meadow faces GMC misconduct hearing from The Guardian.
- 'Disappointed and disheartened' BBC News report on the reactions of the women who were jailed.
- GMC Fitness to Practice Panel finding of serious professional misconduct against Meadow, July 2005.
- Judgement in High Court appeal in case brought by Meadow against GMC finding of serious professional misconduct, Feb 2006.
- Court of Appeal judgement restoring the ability of the GMC to discipline misconduct by expert witnesses, Oct 2006.
- AsherMeadow, a web-based information resource devoted to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
- Information on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a website devoted to Munchausen syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy by expert Dr. Marc Feldman.