Appeal launched against UK "expert witness" ruling

LONDON, July 10 (Reuters) The General Medical Council and the Attorney General began a challenge today against a High Court ruling that expert witnesses in criminal trials should be immune from punishment should they make ''honest mistakes''.

The Appeal Court challenge centres on the case of disgraced paediatrician Roy Meadow who gave misleading evidence during the trial of a woman wrongly jailed for killing her two sons.

The 73-year-old professor, knighted for his services to children and now retired, was struck off by the GMC after being found guilty of serious professional misconduct.

However, in February the High Court ruled he should not have been punished for making a genuine mistake.

The judge, Justice Andrew Collins, ruled: ''He made one mistake, which was to misunderstand and misinterpret the statistics.

''It is difficult to think that the giving of honest, albeit mistaken, evidence could, save in an exceptional case, properly lead to such a finding.'' However, Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith, intervening in the GMC's appeal on the grounds the matter is of such wide-ranging public interest, argued that the judge was wrong.

Goldsmith claimed that expert witnesses who make errors should not be given immunity by judges from action by their own disciplinary bodies.

He claimed this would make judges ''unpaid gatekeepers'' for other professions and take away the right of regulatory watchdogs of every profession to discipline their own members.

The GMC, which was also ordered to pay Meadow's legal costs of up to 100,000 pounds by the High Court, claimed the judge's ruling left the body ''toothless''.

Its lawyer Roger Henderson said the ruling would make practitioners immune from their regulatory bodies, which would not be in the public interest.

Sally Clark was jailed in 1999 for killing her two sons partly due to Meadow's evidence but the conviction was quashed in 2003.

At the earlier High Court hearing, Meadow's lawyer Nicola Davies had argued that his evidence that the chance of two unexplained cot deaths in the same family were 73 million to one was ''his honestly held belief'' at the time.

She said that to stigmatise what was found to be a mistaken belief as serious professional misconduct failed to recognise the role of legitimacy of debate in medicine.

Meadow's expert evidence was also used in the cases of Angela Cannings, who served 18 months after being wrongly convicted of killing her two sons, Donna Anthony, who served six years after being wrongly convicted of killing her son and daughter, and Trupti Patel, who was cleared of killing her three children.

The Appeal Court hearing is expected to last three days with a judgment given in writing at a later date.

REUTERS KD BST1807