Sir Samuel Roy Meadow (born 9 June 1933)[1] is a British retired paediatrician who facilitated several wrongful convictions of mothers for murdering their babies.
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.
[2] His work became controversial, particularly arising from the consequences of a belief he stated in his 1997 book ABC of Child Abuse that, in a single family, "one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise".
[3] This became known as "Meadow's law" and was influential in the thinking of UK social workers and child protection agencies, such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Speaking in later life, he said: "I was, as a junior, brought up by Anna Freud, who was a great figure in child psychology, and I used to sit at her feet at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead.
According to the London Evening Standard, representatives of the Anna Freud Centre claimed to have no record of him completing a formal training there and repudiated his description of her philosophy.
[13] 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.
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.
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.
By the time he gave evidence at Sally Clark's trial, Meadow claimed to have found 81 cot deaths which were in fact murder, but he had destroyed the data.
In addition he extrapolated his erroneous figures stating that the 1 in 73,000,000 incidence was only likely to occur once every hundred years in England, Scotland and Wales.
Some mathematicians have estimated that taking all these factors into account, the true odds may have been greater than 2:1 in favour of the death not being murder, and hence demonstrating Clark's innocence.
[23] The perils of allowing non-statisticians to present unsound statistical arguments were expressed in a British Medical Journal (BMJ) editorial by Stephen Watkins, Director of Public Health for Stockport, claiming that "defendants deserve the same protection as patients.
[citation needed] Meadow's vindication was to be short-lived: after the campaigning lawyer Marilyn Stowe obtained new evidence from Macclesfield Hospital, it emerged that another expert witness, Home Office Pathologist Dr Alan Williams,[25] had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence in the form of results of medical tests which showed that her second child had died from the bacterial infection Staphylococcus aureus, and not from smothering as the prosecution had claimed.
[28] 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.
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.
Following the quashing of her convictions, Meadow found himself under investigation by the British General Medical Council for alleged professional misconduct.
The prosecution rested upon what was perceived to be "suspicious behaviour" on the part of the mother (telephoning her husband instead of emergency services when one of the deaths occurred) and upon Meadow's opinion that she was an MSbP sufferer.
In the weeks that followed, an investigation by the BBC showed that the prosecution's "no family history" argument had been incorrect: at least two of Cannings' paternal ancestors had lost an abnormally large number of infants to unexplained causes, making a genetic predisposition to cot death highly plausible.
[30]Only a relatively small number of appeals were actually launched, though most of these were successful (including that of Donna Anthony, who served six years after being wrongly convicted of killing her son and daughter).
[32] 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.
[36] The failure to apologise, and not admitting that he was wrong, was the reason why Sally Clark's father, Frank Lockyer, had raised his concerns about Meadow with the GMC.
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.
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.