In the Times, Dr Theodore Dalrymple articulates the profound unease I have felt at the decision by the General Medical Council to strike off the medical register Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the paediatrician whose apparent statistical error which formed part of his expert evidence in court was said to have helped convict a number of women of killing their babies, convictions which were later overturned. Dalrymple writes:

‘Professor Meadow did not wrongly convict anyone — only the courts could have done that. And if his statistical reasoning was so obviously and disgracefully wrong, why was he able for so long, according to the GMC, to persist in his errors, uninterrupted by defence experts and lawyers? (I leave aside the question of what part his statistical evidence actually played in the original convictions.) An error that is obvious once it has been pointed out may not be so very obvious before it is pointed out... Evidential value is not proof, however, and anyone who thought it were would be failing to understand the nature of proof in a criminal trial. The expert does not speak, and the jury convict or acquit accordingly; or if it does, the fault lies not with the expert, but with the court.

‘A society that is intolerant of error will soon become intolerant of truth, for truth rarely emerges except by the testing of error. In this connection, it is probably not irrelevant to note that Professor Meadow was a disseminator of an unwelcome and disturbing truth: that parents may sometimes maltreat their own children in bizarre ways, and those children, therefore, need to be protected from them. Although I am not a paediatrician, I can testify from personal clinical experience that parents are capable of doing things to their own children that, had I not had incontrovertible evidence, I should scarcely have credited as being possible. And all paediatricians in this country are familiar with the kind of cases that Professor Meadow described.’

Meadow has been made a scapegoat for a system which was at fault but which has got off scot-free. It was up to the defence to cross-examine Meadow and expose any flaws in his evidence. It failed to do so – and yet Meadow has now been struck off the medical register. Why? He committed no medical error or misconduct against his patients. At worst, he stumbled into an arena - statistics – on which he was not a specialist, and as a result made an error. The whole point of a trial, however, is that evidence should be tested to destruction. It wasn’t. So why has the medical profession treated this as a hanging offence for one of its own?

The most likely answer, as Dalrymple also suggests, is that the GMC was anxious to fall into line with the witch-hunt which developed after the convictions of these mothers were overturned. A sacrifice was demanded, and the GMC duly obliged. As a result, doctors will be far less willing to give evidence as expert witnesses, and in general there will be less chance that in cases of suspected child maltreatment, justice will be done.