A statistic used in court by Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the paediatrician whose evidence helped send three innocent mothers to prison, should never have been quoted out of context, its author said today.
According to Professor Peter Fleming, a child health expert at Bristol University, Professor Meadow relied on medical research that Professor Fleming had written to supply a statistic, even though it was clear that the original work “was never intended as a real statistical estimate.”
Professor Fleming was giving evidence at the General Medical Council this morning where Professor Meadow is charged with serious medical misconduct.
Professor Meadow, 72, is accused of giving misleading statistical evidence at the murder trial of Sally Clark, a solicitor who was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing her two sons. Mrs Clark’s conviction was overturned in 2003.
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The statistic at the heart of the Professor Meadow’s case is his claim that the chance of two cot deaths in Mrs Clark’s relatively affluent family was “one in 72 million.”
He told her murder trial the odds of two cot deaths occuring in Mrs Clark’s relatively affluent family were 72 million to one, or the same as an 80-1 horse winning the Grand National four years running.
The statistic occurred just once in a study study of cot deaths among 472,000 British babies during the 1990s led by Professor Fleming, who said today that it should have been clear that the use of the statistic had been purely illustrative.
Professor Meadow was given exclusive access to the unpublished report because he had been invited to write the foreward. The author of the study told the GMC that he would have refused permission for Professor Meadow to cite the unchecked draft in court, but the expert witness never asked.
The tiny probability was arrived at by squaring the probability of a single cot death in an affluent family - one in 8,543. And in his evidence today Professor Fleming said that even the chance of a single cot death, because it was still so small, was statistically “somewhat unreliable”.
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Professor Fleming, who is an infant health and development physiologist at the Institute of Child Health at Bristol University, said that his research team had been worried about the misuse of the statistic as soon as they calculated it.
“I felt very concerned that a sentence out of context would be used in a way which did not reflect the real context of the report. I was trying to make the context of that sentence clearer. My intention was that the barrister would have the opportunity to raise these points if that particular sentence was raised in court,” said Professor Fleming
During the trial of Mrs Clark, Professor Fleming wrote to her defence lawyer to raise his concerns at the use of his statistic.
After Mrs Clark’s conviction, Professor Fleming held a meeting with his research team to discuss whether they should change the wording. But they decided not to because they felt the context “was clear and did not need it.”
Professor Meadow, once Britain’s most eminent paediatrician and a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, denies the charge of serious medical misconduct. The case continues.