Expert Evidence

Expert evidence has long been used by English courts. It is often needed but experts have a variety of backgrounds. They can be competent and honest. Other times it is different. The police are prone to use experts who are going to tell them what they want to hear and that means guilty. When a man gets to the top of the medical profession he can be plausible, confident and arrogant. He can also be totally wrong. Should you assume that an expert is right? Not when you are in the frame. Here are some examples to make the point. Are judges going to see through the waffle?  Yes, if you are lucky. Juries can be deceived too.

Marietta Higgs
An arrogant, dangerous fool who wants to believe that any child is the victim of sexual abuse. She is operating in Gillingham in Kent. Beware of her.

 

Doctor Camille De San Lorenzo
Is a paediatrician who diagnosed dozens of children as victims of sexual abuse. Two nursery nurses alleged to be guilty as a result. The High Court gave her a life time ban on giving evidence in child abuse cases. While the General Medical Council took a more nonchalant position, saying merely that some of her work was "inappropriate, irresponsible and unprofessional". A libel Judge found that the woman  was "unbalanced, obsessive and lacking in judgment".

Would you believe that she is still a senior lecturer and an honorary consultant at the University of Newcastle, with clinical duties at the Royal Victoria Infirmary? Think twice before you take a child there. See page 28 of Private Eye 1198 for more and better details.

Roy Meadow
Professor Sir Samuel Roy Meadow (born 1933) is a British paediatrician who rose to initial fame for his 1977 academic paper on the now controversial Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP) and his crusade against parents who willfully harm or kill their children. He was knighted for these works. He endorsed the dictum that “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise“ in his book ABC of Child Abuse and this became known as Meadow's Law and at one time was widely adopted by social workers and child protection agency in Britain. 

He appeared as an expert witness, in which his testimony played a crucial part in wrongful conviction for murder. The General Medical (GMC) struck off Meadow after he was found to have offered “erroneous” and “misleading” evidence in the Sally Clark case. Clark was a lawyer wrongly convicted in 1999 of the murder of her two baby sons, largely on the basis of Meadow's evidence; her conviction was quashed in 2003 after she had spent three years in jail. Sally Clark died in 2007 from alcohol poisoning, apparently never having recovered from her wrongful imprisonment.

I dare say that Meadow would still claim that he was right. He fouled up by his ignorance of elementary statistics and by assuming that sudden cot deaths are independent variables. The more fundamental error was his arrogance based on making it to the top of the profession.

 

Is this doctor responsible for parents being falsely branded as child abusers?  [ 29 October 2007 ]
QUOTE
Dr Southall, has been praised as a pioneer by colleagues, while vilified as arrogant and dangerous by patients [ He looks an arrogant rogue and scruffy to boot- Editor ]. He has also been in trouble over remarks he made concerning the case of Sally Clark, the mother who was given two life sentences for the murder of her two children before being released after medical evidence emerged to prove she was innocent.....

The suspicion is that justice may have been perverted by the paediatrician because vital evidence in the files — which established that the children he diagnosed as victims of parental abuse had never been harmed but were, in fact, genuinely sick — was deliberately hidden from criminal court judges [ The legal term is perverting the course of justice - Editor ].
UNQUOTE
Marietta Higgs tried it on and had 121 children stolen from their parents. See The women who went through an ordeal beyond belief.  She may well be unrepentant to this day. Other medics backed her on a basis of deep ignorance. See Stuart Bell - the relevant MP and very good. Professor Sir Roy Meadow was  very dangerous  too.

 

David Southall [ 24th May 2009 ]
QUOTE
A High Court judge is due to rule on a legal challenge by controversial paediatrician Dr David Southall against a decision to strike him off the medical register for serious professional misconduct.... The General Medical Council's (GMC) Fitness to Practise Panel decided in December 2007 that he had abused his position by accusing a mother of drugging and murdering her son...... The panel also accused him of having a "deep-seated attitudinal problem" [ Read that as gross arrogance - Editor ]....... It was the second time in three years Dr Southall, 60, had been found guilty of serious professional misconduct........... Dr Southall accused Mrs Clark's husband Steve of murdering the two boys on the basis of a television interview. At the time he was banned from child protection work for three years, a ban which expired last year.
UNQUOTE
Southall is an arrogant dangerous rogue who claims that he knows better. He has robbed parents of their children just like Marietta Higgs, caused huge distress and never admitted that he is the problem.

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
 
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Updated on 27/12/2011 09:25