Professor Meadow used a wrong calculation of probability in the trial of the solicitor Sally Clark, who was cleared at appeal of killing her two sons. At least five other mothers are serving life sentences for murdering their newborn babies after Professor Meadow gave evidence against them in court.

He is credited with formulating the theory of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy in 1977, whereby parents are deemed to have harmed their children in order to draw attention to themselves. He regularly champions this psychiatric illness in the witness box.

Until now, what is known as Meadow’s law has been used by police as a preliminary test of a mother’s suspected guilt of killing her “cot-death” babies. The rule has been accepted by juries almost without question.

Mrs Patel’s is the only highly publicised case of a mother being cleared at her initial trial of such a crime.

The rule coined by Professor Meadow, a retired paediatric consultant at St James University Hospital in Leeds and an expert in child protection and welfare, states that “unless proven otherwise, one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder”.

In the six years since his retirement his opinion has been overtaken by genetic research, which suggests that cot death could be linked to the Long QT syndrome, which affects the rhythm of the heart and is extremely likely to run in families.

Instead of the probability of two deaths in one family being one in a million, as Professor Meadow told the jury in the case of Donna Anthony in 1998, or even one in 73 million, as he claimed in the case of Sally Clark a year later, it is now believed to be closer to one in 8,500.

Mrs Anthony and Angela Cannings, who was convicted last year of murdering three of her children, are both seeking leave to take their cases to appeal on the basis of the evidence that he gave. A spokesman for the General Medical Council said that it was “looking into whether we need to take action against him”.

Professor Meadow’s evidence was discredited by three appeal judges in the Sally Clark case in January. Two months after her conviction in 1999, the British Medical Journal published an editorial entitled “Conviction by mathematical error?”

Two more sets of parents, who sat in the public gallery at Reading Crown Court during his evidence in Mrs Patel’s trial, claim that they had babies taken from them after Professor Meadow told a court that their first children had died in suspicious circumstances. In one case, there had not even been an inquest into the death of a first baby four years ago. The couple’s second child was taken away by social services hours after birth. Despite a long legal battle, she has been adopted.

Some in the medical profession would rather Professor Meadow did not give evidence at all because of his immense power to sway juries.

The epidemiologist Professor Jean Golding at Bristol University said after Mrs Clark’s appeal: “So many people have doubts about his evidence that it is a very dangerous thing to keep doing. His personality is such that he sways juries.”

There is no doubt that the softly spoken former pupil of Wigan Grammar School and Worcester College, Oxford, is impressive in the witness box. Unlike other experts, Professor Meadow, 70, a twicemarried father of two, talks the jury’s language.

John Batt, a solicitor who led the campaign for Mrs Clark’s release, said of similar cases in Glasgow, Hastings, Nottinghamshire, Worcester, Hull, Cardiff and Winchester: “In each case, there was no previous history of abuse and all the friends and relatives say they were loving parents. They all involved the same group of child abuse experts giving evidence against them.”

Deadly gene

THERE are more than 1,500 medically unexplained child deaths in Britain every year, according to the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, which is appealing for further research in the field (Ben Hoyle writes).

Work on a “cot death gene” at Manchester University suggests that a family that has already lost a child this way is four times more likely to lose a second baby than a family that has not.

During the Trupti Patel trial Professor Michael Patton, consultant in clinical genetics at St George’s Hospital, South London, said he “strongly believed” an inherited disorder, possibly Long QT syndrome, had caused the deaths of Mrs Patel’s babies.

Long QT syndrome is a disorder of the heart’s electrical rhythm that accelerates the heartbeat, causing loss of consciousness and even death.

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