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Professor Sir Roy Meadow - Villain or Scapegoat?
Preamble
The UK Register of Expert Witnesses conducts occasional spot surveys to gather the views of the 1000’s of experts
in its expert witness community. This spot survey is designed to find out how expert witnesses would answer the question, posed
by the on 20 June 2005 and reported on the
Press Association and BBC news services, namely:
‘Is Prof. Sir Roy Meadow a villain – as often portrayed in the press – or is he just a bloke doing his best being
made a scapegoat for [failings in] the legal profession?’
This survey is now closed. The final position in the survey is shown below.
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Results of the vote
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58.6% Yes |
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41.4% No |
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(Based on 244 responses)
Survey began at 14:00 on 21 June 2005. |
Comment
A number of expert witnesses responded to this Spot Survey by criticising both the approach and the question. We readily accept the shortcomings of the spot survey approach and the particular question we asked, but it was designed to test just one thing: Is the view held by a body of expert witnesses, and what's more a body of experts who have been on the receiving end of lots of detailed coverage of this topic through the UK Register of Expert Witnesses, consistent with the evidence currently in the public domain? Let's take the statistical evidence as an example.
The treatment of the statistical evidence is very interesting. We had, early on, formed the view, probably from media reports, that Meadow somehow arrived at this statistic out of the ether whilst giving his evidence. The account Meadow himself gives is somewhat different. It is contained in his response of the 5 Jan 2002 to a BMJ article. We quote from it below:
"There had been days of detailed pathological evidence, clinical opinions, and clinical discussion but only a few minutes of statistical discussion that had come relatively early in the trial. At the committal proceedings five months before the trial, at which medical evidence for the defence was not submitted, I referred to the frequency with which physical abuse recurred within families compared with the rarity of recurrence of sudden infant death syndrome. At the full trial, the detailed information concerning the likelihood of sudden infant death syndrome in successive children came from the recently published book reporting the results of the confidential inquiry into sudden unexpected deaths in infancy. [Fleming P, Blair P, Bacon C, Berry J, eds. Sudden unexpected deaths in infancy. London: Stationery Office, 2000.] The court had been provided with pages 91 and 92 of that book, which states that for a family in which the mother is over the age of 27, does not smoke, and has a waged income, "the risk of two infants dying as SIDS by chance alone will thus be one in (8543×8543), i.e. approximately 1:73 million." I had been asked to provide the text.
"I testified that in my opinion neither child's death was an example of sudden infant death syndrome. As it quickly became clear that none of the other clinical or pathological experts believed that the deaths were examples of sudden infant death syndrome, discussion of its recurrence rate was irrelevant. In the judge's final summing up, which extended to about 170 pages, there were only a few paragraphs about statistics. In these the judge advised the jury to treat the statistics with caution."
In effect, Meadow is pilloried for quoting a statistic from a supposedly authoritative source at the behest of the court.
The Court of Appeal decision in Cannings was quite clear in blaming the court system for that miscarriage (saying the court system should not allow a jury to choose between competing expert opinions based on no other supporting evidence). The court's handling of the Clark case should have been the same: no jury is competent to choose between competing expert opinions if there is no other supporting evidence.
One possible solution to the systemic failings identified by the Court of Appeal is the Daubert approach which we covered in the "Taking experts out of the court" item in the latest e-wire. The real benefit of the Daubert approach would flow from the fact that trained legal minds would have the chance to explore the opinion evidence in a pre-trial arena. In that way, it would be more likely that juries would not be asked to choose between conflicting expert opinions in isolation.
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