Law Commission Consultation Paper
The Law Commission Consultation Paper on Expert Witnesses contains some mythology. PACA member David Murray penned this excellent response.
We have learnt over the last few years that no one and no profession is infallible. Some people can see the myths, but others are blind to them and are led by their prejudices.
Link to the Law Commission Consultation Paper on Expert Witnesses (PDF)
Text of the response by David Murray:
“You invite comments on the Consultation Paper.
PACA, is a group of Consultant Paediatricians and doctors together with lawyers, social workers and psychologists involved directly in Child Protection, or indirectly in the defence of doctors maligned in the media and punished by the General Medical Council for acting for the abused child against the abusers. May we ask you to consider the points made in the attached letter? We would be delighted to offer advice on the medical and forensic implications of working in this difficult field where our duty to children now requires us to defend ourselves against unfounded and often malicious commentary.
The Paper itself uses inaccurate evidence to illustrate poor medical and scientific expertise. It would make more sense to have used as an example of misleading expert evidence, not the Clark case, but a case in which such evidence had been shown conclusively to be in error, and for that error to have lead directly and materially to an unjust conviction, rather than to pick a case where the finding of murder was based on convincing medical and forensic argument remote from the supposed failings of expert witnesses, and then use that imagined failing to claim that such events are a problem. There is no “dogma that holds that two or more unexplained infant deaths should lead inexorably to the conclusion that a murder has been committed”, nor do Meadow or any other paediatricians cleave to it as the commissioners hold. There is no evidence that, “multiple cot deaths in a family could have underlying genetic causes”, nor can it be reliably stated that the occurrence of a second cot death is “usually from natural causes” when all, some, or none of such cases might be murder. How are we to reach sound conclusions as to the merits of procedures designed to protect against misleading opinion when the examples used to adduce such a necessity are so flawed that they discredit the real experts and take their lessons from the opportunist incompetent?
Meadow is not an example of flawed expertise but an expert traduced for being too astute and prescient. It was he who first realised that his ally in the comforting and treating of the sick child, its mother, may be the agent of its distress. Is it not odd that the country’s most distinguished expert in the misfortunes and murder of children should be the focus of an inquiry into flawed medical expertise? Is it not ironic that the wrong target has been selected with the expert of great value to the Court confused with the inexpert ‘expert’ who makes clinically implausible suggestions of a cause of death that are just sufficient to persuade the Court that there is a real dilemma and that justice is best served by prevarication?
Those who deserve scrutiny are not the leading figures in paediatric and forensic medicine but those whose imaginative diagnoses serve their purpose in Court but would be lethally dangerous if made at the bedside of a critically ill child: the retired haematologist who thinks Victoria Climbié died of a rare disease that inflicted marks on her body that seemed, to all but him, the indentation of the bicycle chain used to beat her, the retired biochemist with the first ever case of a novel syndrome to explain a child dying full of salt, the microbiologist who added to a dead baby’s list of injuries, typical of violent suffocating assault, the clinically unsound diagnosis of an infection of such ferocity that it overwhelmed the child in its bouncy chair in no more than ten minutes, the doctor flown in to say that dreadful injuries could have been caused by epilepsy rather than brutal contact with a banister rail. Constructive advocacy acts in the interest of clients but seldom for truth or the protection of vulnerable children. A great injustice has been done to Sir Roy Meadow and to the murdered children and should not be added to.”
