Medical experts, the law and professional regulation

摘要

Professor Sir Roy Meadow recently won his appeal in the High Court against a determination of serious professional misconduct made by a `fitness to practise' panel of the General Medical Council (GMC).1 Professor Meadow, an eminent paediatrician, was the medical expert who gave evidence in the case that led to Sally Clark's conviction for murder.2 His evidence was flawed—there was a statistical error. On appeal, Mr Justice Collins found that Meadow had given evidence in good faith, with no intention to mislead. However, he had made one technical mistake, which was to misunderstand and misinterpret statistics. The judge ruled that the GMC was wrong to make a finding of serious professional misconduct and to impose the ultimate sanction of erasure from the medical register. The rationale underlying this judgement is the principle of `witness immunity'. In a carefully reasoned analysis, he set out the history of the witness immunity rule (which is established in relation to civil proceedings), and stressed its fundamental importance because: