SIR ROY MEADOW expressed his deep sorrow yesterday for giving misleading evidence in Sally Clark’s trial, the first public apology by the paediatrician who has helped to convict three innocent mothers of murdering their babies.

In an unexpected outburst of remorse, six years after the Cheshire solicitor was jailed, he compared his feelings to the regret experienced by a doctor whose mistaken diagnosis brings suffering to a child.

Near by sat Frank Lockyer, Mrs Clark’s father, who fought two appeals to secure her release after she had served three years of a life sentence for smothering her babies.

Mr Lockyer’s complaint to the General Medical Council (GMC) has brought Professor Meadow, 72, before a disciplinary panel charged with serious professional misconduct, which he denies. Asked about the apology, Mr Lockyer told The Times: “It is a significant development.”

The retired expert’s expression of regret came on a day when the credibility of his child-abuse theories was seriously undermined. Under persistent questioning, he admitted that he had no idea of the source of one of his most notorious theories: that “the chance of two cot deaths in a typical family was a million to one”.

He used that maxim in the prosecutions of both Mrs Clark and Donna Anthony, who was released in April after serving seven years of a life sentence for murdering two babies.

The one-in-a-million figure appears as an anonymous quotation in a paper that he published about 81 cases of apparent cot deaths that were later shown to be murders. But Professor Meadow was unable to remember who gave him the quotation, where or when.

He had put an even more sensational statistic before the jury in Mrs Clark’s murder trial in 1999. At the time he claimed that the odds of two cot deaths for an affluent, non-smoking, working mother were 73 million to one. He told the trial that this was equivalent to once in one hundred years, or like an 80-1 horse winning the Grand National four years running: “Very, very, long odds indeed.”

The figure came from a table in an unpublished draft of the world’s biggest study of cot deaths. But Professor Meadow had failed to consult the author of the report, Peter Fleming.

Professor Fleming had told the fitness-to-practice hearing that the statistic was only a mathematical exercise to compare different risk factors in cot death and should never have been used in a court.

“That,” Robert Seabrook, QC, for the GMC, said to Professor Meadow, “must have had a salutary effect on you?” Professor Meadow replied: “I wish I had known that before I had given evidence.”

Mr Seabrook, asked: “Do you accept that your use of this table was misleading and inappropriate?” Professor Meadow said: “It’s self-evident. Misleading and confusing a lot of people, yes.”

Mr Seabrook asked: “Is that something you feel profoundly sorry about, Professor?”

Professor Meadow answered: “Yes I do.”

The hearing continues.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled