UK baby death expert faces misconduct hearing
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A British doctor who gave evidence at the trial of several women wrongly convicted of murdering their children faced charges of serious professional misconduct on Tuesday.
Paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow appeared at a hearing of the General Medical Council (GMC) in London and could be banned from practising if found guilty.
Meadow was an expert witness in the trial of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony, who were all freed by the Court of Appeal after serving years in prison after they had been wrongfully convicted of killing their children.
The GMC will consider evidence he gave at the 1999 trial of Clark, a solicitor accused of killing her two sons, Christopher and Harry.
She was found guilty of murder, but freed by the Court of Appeal in 2003.
The GMC will hear allegations that Meadows’ evidence was both “erroneous and misleading.”
Meadow argued at the trial that the chance of two babies dying of cot death within one family was “one in 73 million”, an assertion later disputed by experts as having no statistical basis.
Court of Appeal judges also said the claim was “tantamount to saying that without consideration of the rest of the evidence one could be just about sure that this was a case of murder.”
Meadow also gave evidence in the trial of Cannings, who was wrongly imprisoned in 2002 for smothering her two sons, and Anthony, who spent six years in jail for murder after being wrongfully convicted for killing her two infant children.
The unsafe verdict in the Cannings case prompted Attorney General Lord Goldsmith to launch an urgent review of 258 convictions involving the possibility of cot death, and has also led to calls for greater scrutiny of expert witnesses in child death cases.
New research has shown natural causes can explain the death of a second child in a family where one child has already died, discrediting Meadows’ “lightning doesn’t strike twice” theory.
The GMC said the hearing is scheduled to last until July 15.
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