SO ANGELA CANNINGS is denied the compensation that her wrongful imprisonment cries out for, while Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who convinced a jury that she had smothered her cot-death babies, has still not even been censured by the General Medical Council (GMC). Welcome to 21st-century Britain. The club is intact; the awe of gongs prevails, justice moves at the pace of the oldest member; and the lawyers are looking for the next medical “expert” they can count on to bring in the fees.

It is almost two years since the solicitor Sally Clark was freed by the Court of Appeal, which found Professor Meadow’s evidence to have been “grossly misleading”. It is a year and a half since Trupti Patel was cleared of murdering her three babies, prompting a review of other cases involving Meadow’s notorious diagnosis of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP). A preliminary GMC hearing has grudgingly found that “there is a case to answer”. But it has not yet set a date to consider whether Professor Meadow should be accused of serious professional misconduct. The GMC says that it usually takes between 15 and 18 months to mount such a hearing. Exactly how busy are these people? How long is the backlog of doctors accused of ruining women’s lives?

Home Office bureaucrats seem to think that they do not even owe an explanation of their refusal to compensate a woman who spent 18 months in jail on false charges being treated as the vilest of the vile, who lost her house and almost lost her surviving daughter to the social services. She escaped, like Mrs Clark and Mrs Patel, only through sheer determination. Few mothers can imagine marshalling such strength at a time of such unutterable grief. Mrs Clark looks unlikely ever to recover fully from her ordeal in prison. Yet it was she and her husband who first forced intelligent judges to see what they should have spotted long before: that the science behind Professor Meadow’s claims was ropy to say the least. When challenged to produce his research papers to justify his original findings on MSBP, he claimed to have destroyed them.

Mrs Clark received compensation because she had exhausted all legal remedies by the time she was finally freed. Mrs Cannings was freed on her first appeal, which does not technically merit compensation. Yet it is quite clear that the Home Secretary can make an ex gratia payment in exceptional circumstances and it would be hard to find a more exceptional case.

The fact that a few heroic women and their devoted lawyers have successfully challenged conventional wisdom does not mean that the system is now working fine. If it seems extraordinary that courts were so gullible for so long, it is perhaps because Professor Meadow was suggesting something that they wanted to believe: that they were part of a heroic crusade to jail evil mothers. His credentials as a doctor, a professor and a knight of the realm, also helped to disguise his fatal flaw, which was, as his former wife once put it, that “he found it everywhere. He was over the top. He saw mothers with Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy wherever he looked”. Why did it take a woman to spot it?

Perhaps because the idea that there are thousands of mothers abusing their children remains so dangerously popular. Many still sympathise with Michael Green, the former professor of forensic pathology at Sheffield University and one of the Home Office pathologists in the Sally Clark trial, whose published opinion is that up to 40 per cent of cot deaths may have been murders. Judges seem to believe that Professor Meadow and his former colleague David Southall, who was struck off by the GMC last year, were the only medical experts whose judgment was questionable. Yet as the founder and first president of the Royal College of Paediatrics, Professor Meadow has had huge influence on other paediatricians, even those he has not directly trained. The CBS programme 60 Minutes was bombarded with complaints from American doctors when it ran a critical feature about him last year.

Professor Meadow’s popularity as an expert witness demonstrates the urgent need to end the cult of the inexpert expert. In theory experts have a duty to help the court come to the right decision. In practice they are hired guns paid by lawyers who want to win. Silver-tongued doctors who do not fade in the witness box are bound to command a premium, and Professor Meadow was master of the soundbite. His statement that there was only a 1 in 73 million chance of Mrs Clark losing two babies in sudden and unexplained circumstances prompted the Royal Statistical Society to write to the Lord Chancellor denying any statistical basis for the assertion. But it must have electrified the court. Meadow’s Law — that “one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, and three is murder” — gave juries a formula to hang on to in a turgid discussion. As word got around, solicitor after solicitor signed him up as a “safe pair of hands”.

A recent survey suggests that lawyers are bullying their experts more than ever. Bond Solon, a company that trains experts, found that 63 per cent of its clients, a rising number, say there are firms of solicitors that they will never work with again; 67 per cent say lawyers should not be present at expert discussions. Just over half say no to the question “Do you think lawyers encourage their expert to be a ‘truly independent witness’?”

Until courts demand more of experts, more miscarriages of justice could occur. Many paediatricians have already been put off child protection cases by the adverse publicity, and the failure of the GMC to act conclusively has only made this worse. The Establishment must shake off its torpor, demand that experts are experts and compensate those whom it has victimised. Justice must be seen to be done if mothers are to regain any confidence in the system.

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