The consultant paediatrician David Southall will have to wait until after Easter to learn whether he will be struck off the medical register for accusing a father of murdering his two sons after seeing him in a television documentary.
Professor Southall escaped erasure by the General Medical Council, which suspended him from child protection work for three years, but the penalty was challenged in the High Court last week as “unduly lenient.” The Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, the body that oversees regulators in the health field, argued that erasure was “the only appropriate penalty.”
Professor Southall, 57, professor of paediatrics at Keele University, reported Stephen Clark to the police after watching an interview with him on Channel 4's Dispatches programme in April 2000. At the time, Mr Clark's wife, Sally, was serving a life sentence for murdering the couple's two baby sons, Christopher and Harry. Her conviction was later overturned as “unsafe.”
The paediatrician was convinced, after seeing the interview, that Mr Clark, not his wife, had murdered the babies. He told the GMC—which found him guilty of serious professional misconduct last August—that he still held that view.
Monica Carss-Frisk QC, for the council, said that Professor Southall's view, that Mr Clark was guilty beyond any reasonable doubt of having murdered two of his children, and therefore that his third child was at risk, was based on “little more than the television programme.”
Although Professor Southall had no connection to the case and had not read the papers, he contacted the police's child protection unit and raised concerns about the couple's surviving child.
Ms Carss-Frisk said that he had “entirely failed to recognise in any way that what he did was wrong,” believing “to this day” that he was right and offering no apology, nor showing any insight, remorse, or contrition.
The public “must have confidence that parents and children will not be put at risk by irresponsible reporting of such issues, which may lead to children being quite wrongly separated from their parents, and indeed prosecutions being mounted on an entirely false basis,” she said.
Kieran Coonan QC, for Professor Southall, acknowledged that his client “did go wrong” but said it was “a single incident over 30 years of an unblemished career.”
“Erasure would be both disproportionate and draconian and could demoralise other professionals in the very difficult child protection field,” he said.
Mark Shaw QC, for the GMC, defended the decision not to strike off Professor Southall, who, he said, had had a “distinguished and outstanding” career despite his “Achilles' heel,” which was “the firmness of his views on child protection issues and the zeal with which he advances those views.”
Judgment was reserved until after Easter.