BRITAIN: Prof Sir Roy Meadow should never have been struck off for giving mistaken evidence as a medical expert that helped convict Sally Clark of murdering her two children, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
Mr Justice Collins's judgment was applauded by professional organisations whose members feared losing their livelihoods if their testimony proved to be wrong, as in Prof Meadow's case.
But mothers who were jailed for killing their own children and later released on appeal when his evidence was found to be flawed were scornful of the ruling.
Mr Justice Collins ruled that not only was the medical disciplinary panel's finding of serious professional misconduct unjustified, it had no right to pursue the complaint in the first place.
He said expert witnesses who give evidence to courts must be immune from any disciplinary action - save in exceptional circumstances - so that they are not deterred from coming forward.
When Mrs Clark's conviction was later quashed in the Court of Appeal, her father complained to the General Medical Council (GMC) that the professor's evidence amounted to serious professional misconduct. The 73-year-old professor was found guilty last July by the GMC of serious professional misconduct following a finding by its Fitness to Practise Panel that his conduct was "fundamentally incompatible with what is expected by the public from a registered medical practitioner".
Mr Justice Collins said Prof Meadow had made one mistake in his evidence - he misunderstood and misinterpreted the statistics.
"It was a mistake, as the panel accepted, that was easily and widely made. It may be proper to have criticised him for not disclosing his lack of expertise, but that does not justify a finding of serious professional misconduct."
But he also ruled that all witnesses giving evidence in good faith, although the testimony may be wrong, are protected from civil prosecution and disciplinary action.
Mr Justice Collins said it was "quite unnecessary" to erase from the medical register someone like Prof Meadow, whom he described as a first-class paediatrician to whom many families owed much.
Prof Meadow was acclaimed as an expert in the field of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids) and how such deaths could be differentiated from children harmed by their parents - so-called Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy.
He gave evidence that the risk of two infants dying naturally of Sids in a household such as Mrs Clark's was effectively one in 73 million.
Prof Meadow, of Woodgate Lane, Leeds, also gave evidence in the child murder trials of Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony, who were jailed for murdering their children but later cleared by the Court of Appeal.
Sally Clark's father, Frank Lockyer, a retired police superintendent, said his aim of ensuring "accountability" for what happened to his daughter had been achieved, despite the ruling.
And he stressed that the Clark family did not feel "vengeful" towards Prof Meadow and that they now wanted to get on with their lives. Mr Lockyer said: "A GMC panel of six, three of them doctors, considered what he did was serious professional misconduct.
"Today, a lone judge considers it wasn't. That probably says more about the system - that a judge can overturn six GMC people, three of them doctors," said Mr Lockyer.
He said that the consequences of Prof Meadow's mistake had been devastating for his solicitor daughter.
Donna Anthony, imprisoned for life in 1998 for killing her young daughter and son and freed on appeal last year, said of the ruling: "It seems to me he is now able once again to ruin other people's lives just like he has mine.
"Personally, all I have wanted for the last seven years is a simple apology and for him to admit he got it wrong."