On Friday the British Medical Association “struck off the register” an eminent paediatrician who had given flawed evidence in baby murder cases. This is the equivalent of a US doctor losing his licence. The reason I want to draw your attention to this is the possible implications for child abuse cases in the USA.
After retiring from clinical practice, he had become an “expert witness” and gave evidence so severely flawed that mothers convicted of child murder have been freed and several more appeals in other cases of murder and child protection are pending. The doctor coined the term “Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy”. Part of the reports I have heard indicated that he had been lecturing US doctors on his theories of child abuse.
Professor Sir Roy Meadows was the first president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. As well as naming Munchausen’s he also coined a dictum he used in cases of cot(crib) death. “One is unfortunate, two suspicious and three murder”. In cases where parents had lost two childen he gave, through ignorance of statistical analysis, the impression that this was sufficently rare to indicate the probability of murder. Such was his standing in the profession that evidence pointing to a natural death was overlooked.
As President of the Royal College and with such a distinguised main career, Meadows was highly respected and influential. There is every possibility that his erroneous statistics have been transmitted to US expert witnesses. There could be women sitting in US prisons (or worse) who are innocent of child abuse or murder and who are there because “experts” at their trials listened to Meadows.
Use this as an alert, if you know of any cases in your community that may be miscarriages of justice because of this man’s false theories being repeated, bring these Q&As or the report of his striking off to the attention of the appropriate people.
