Roy Meadow

In 2009 Meadow relinquished his registration with the GMC and thus became unlicensed to practice medicine. In addition this voluntary erasure from the list of registered medical practitioners meant that he would no longer be answerable to the GMC should any further concerns be raised regarding any previous professional activity.

Sally Clark died unintentionally on 16 March 2007 from acute alcohol intoxication. She never recovered from the severe psychological trauma resulting from the experience of the deaths of two children, then being unjustly convicted of their murder with subsequent imprisonment leading to her being separated from her third baby.

The following month, Meadow launched an appeal against this ruling. On 17 February 2006 High Court judge Mr Justice Collins found in his favour, ruling against the decision to strike him from the medical register. The judge stated that although the GMC had been right to criticize him, his actions could not properly be regarded as "serious professional misconduct".

On 26 October 2006 the Appeal Court overturned the High Court's earlier ruling, allowing expert witnesses to be disciplined once again but ruled that the High Court decision that Meadow was not guilty of serious professional misconduct should stand. However, on the issue of serious professional misconduct, the Appeal Court panel was split 2:1 with the dissenting senior judge, Sir Anthony Clarke, concluding Meadow was "guilty of serious professional misconduct" and provided detailed reasons for his conclusion. One of the other two judges, Lord Justice Auld, said Meadow "was undoubtedly guilty of some professional misconduct" but that it "fell far short of serious professional misconduct" (see Richard Webster's article discussing the judgment.)

Clark's father, Frank Lockyer, complained to the GMC, alleging serious professional misconduct on the part of Meadow. The GMC concluded in July 2005 that Meadow was guilty, but he appealed to the High Court, which in February 2006 ruled in his favour. The GMC appealed to the Court of Appeal, but in October 2006, by a majority decision, the court upheld the ruling that Meadow was not guilty of the GMC's charge.

On 21 June 2005 Meadow appeared before a GMC fitness to practise tribunal. On the first day of Meadow's defence, Dr Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet, published an article in defence of Meadow. This controversial interference in the GMC process 'incensed' Sally Clark. Her husband Stephen later wrote to the Lancet to highlight Horton's "many inaccuracies and one-sided opinions" in order to prevent them prejudicing independent observers.

In the 2005 trial of Ian and Angela Gay over the death of their adopted son Christian, the prosecution relied heavily upon Meadow's 1993 paper "Non-accidental salt poisoning", citing it many times throughout the trial. The judge also referred to the paper citing it five times during his summing up. Ian and Angela Gay were found guilty of manslaughter and spent 15 months in prison before their convictions were quashed.

In January 2004, the Deputy Chief Justice, Lord Justice Judge, gave the full reasons for allowing Cannings' appeal. His comments included criticism of Meadow's evidence, of his standing as an expert witness and of 'experts' adopting an over-dogmatic stance :-

In 2004 Meadow’s ex-wife, Gillian Paterson, accused Meadow of seeing "mothers with Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy wherever he looked," and implied that he was a misogynist: "I don't think he likes women... although I can't go into details, I'm sure he has a serious problem with women".

Sally Clark's conviction was overturned in January 2003.

In June 2003, the CPS used Meadow's expert testimony against Trupti Patel, a pharmacist accused of killing three of her babies. After a highly publicised trial lasting several weeks, the jury took less than 90 minutes to return a unanimous verdict of "not guilty". Even then, a spokesperson for the prosecution stated that the crown would still be "very happy" to use Meadow's evidence in future trials. However, the Solicitor General for England and Wales, Harriet Harman (whose sister is Sarah Harman, a lawyer involved in another subsequent high-profile case where the parents had been accused of harming their children) effectively barred Meadow from court work; she warned prosecution lawyers that the defence should be informed of court criticisms of Meadow's evidence.

The appeal was heard in December 2003 and the Court of Appeal declared the original conviction unsafe and allowed Cannings' appeal.

Meadow's statistical figure was amongst the five grounds for appeal submitted to the Court of Appeal in the autumn of 2000. The judges claimed that the figure was a "sideshow", which would have had no significant effect on the jury's decision. The overall evidence was judged to be "overwhelming" and Clark's appeal against conviction was dismissed. This opinion, minimising the effect of Meadow's evidence, was described by a leading QC not involved in the case as "a breathtakingly intellectually dishonest judgement". Frank Ward, writing for MOJUK, preferred the term "intellectually incompetent".

Meadow's reputation was severely damaged after his appearances as an expert witness for the prosecution in several trials played a crucial part in wrongful convictions for murder. Despite having fundamental misunderstandings of statistics he presented himself as an expert in the field. The British General Medical Council (GMC) struck him from the British Medical Register after he was found to have offered erroneous and misleading evidence in the 1999 trial of Sally Clark, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of her two baby sons. Clark's conviction was overturned in 2003 but she never recovered from the experience, and died in 2007 from acute alcohol poisoning.

This trend was to reach its apogee in 1999 when solicitor Sally Clark was tried for allegedly murdering her two babies. Her elder son Christopher had died at the age of 11 weeks, and her younger son Harry at 8 weeks. Medical opinion was divided on the cause of death, and several leading paediatricians testified that the deaths were probably natural. Experts acting for the prosecution initially diagnosed that the babies had been shaken to death, but three days before the trial began several of them changed their collective opinion to smothering.

In 1993 Meadow gave expert testimony at the trial of Beverley Allitt, a paediatric nurse accused (and later found guilty) of murdering several of her patients.

Meadow was appointed professor of paediatrics and child health at the University of Leeds in 1980, based at St James's University Hospital, having previously been a Senior Lecturer in the same department. He retired with the title Emeritus Professor in 1998.

In 1977, in The Lancet medical journal, Meadow published the theory which was to make him famous. Sufferers of his postulated Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or MSbP (a name coined by Meadow himself) harm or fake symptoms of illness in persons under their care (usually their own children) in order to gain the attention and sympathy of medical personnel. This claim was based upon the extraordinary behaviour of two mothers: one had (Meadow claimed) poisoned her toddler with excessive quantities of salt. The other had introduced her own blood into her baby's urine sample. Although it was initially regarded with scepticism, MSbP soon gained a following amongst doctors and social workers.

In 1961, Meadow married Gillian Maclennan, daughter of Sir Ian Maclennan, the British ambassador to Ireland. The couple had two children, Julian and Anna, before divorcing in 1974. Four years later he married his second wife, Marianne Jane Harvey.

Sir Samuel Roy Meadow (born 9 June 1933) is a British retired paediatrician. He was awarded the Donald Paterson prize of the British Paediatric Association in 1968 for a study of the effects on parents of having a child in hospital. In 1977, he published an academic paper describing a phenomenon dubbed Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP). In 1980 he was awarded a professorial chair in paediatrics at St James's University Hospital, Leeds, and in 1998, he was knighted for services to child health.