This book is a disturbing read. It is a terrible indictment of the criminal system, the legal profession, and our own experts.
Figure 1.
John Batt
Ebury Press, £14.99, pp 336 ISBN 0 09 190070 0 www.randomhouse.co.uk
Rating: ★★★★
Solicitor Sally Clark was convicted in November 1999 of the murder of her two children, purely on the basis of medical expert testimony, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case attracted a high media profile, but since her conviction, later overturned on appeal, it is the role of the medical experts that has been on trial. As witnesses for the prosecution, they described retinal haemorrhages, bruises, broken bones, and injuries to the spinal cord. These were either seen in error or were consequences of the postmortem examinations. “I have never known a case where so many apparent findings have turned to dust on critical examination,” said one defence expert, paediatric pathologist Professor Peter Berry, at the original hearing (p 190).
The main prosecution expert failed to inform the court or the defence that multiple postmortem specimens, including the cerebrospinal fluid, grew Staphylococcus aureus. A medical knight of the realm, Professor Sir Roy Meadow, told the court that the chance that these deaths were natural cot deaths was 1 in 73 million. The statistic was quoted in every headline and is widely believed to have led to Sally Clark's conviction. Yet his basic understanding of the use of statistics was rudimentarily wrong and he was incorrect by several orders of magnitude.
The prosecution experts appear to have acted collectively, each in the cartel convinced of the authority of the other, and each convinced of Sally Clark's guilt. One expert, forensic pathologist Professor Michael Green, states elsewhere that 40% of all sudden infant deaths are murder (p 143). This is despite the fact that the incidence of SIDS has fallen precipitously following guidance on sleeping positions. Such experts are the hawks of child abuse. They see it everywhere. How are we to know if we should believe them or not?
In the original trial one by one the key forensic findings “turned to dust,” in Professor Berry's words. But reading John Batt's chilling book, the odd thing is that you feel that, once someone had pressed the button and the decision to try Sally Clark was made, the fact that the evidence dropped away was almost irrelevant. Somehow the momentum remained even when the substance had disappeared. The jury had seen one authoritative middle aged doctor after another—figures who might have treated them as children and filled them with confidence—state that this woman was guilty. The experts' facts had evaporated but their belief remained—and that was what the jury saw. The jury convicted on the authority of these doctors—and on the collective authority that medicine wields in our society.
And it is this that is the most disturbing. As individual doctors we are not responsible for the high regard in which our profession is held. It is a legacy that has built up over generations. When we make use of that authority we are its guardians. We have it only on trust. We rely on it in almost every consultation because without it we are nothing. The doctors being judged in this book acted like zealots. They professed certainty where there was doubt. They failed to retract when honesty required it. They betrayed that trust. And it does seem to me like a terrible thing to have done.