THE paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow won his legal fight yesterday to be reinstated as a doctor after a judge ruled that he had made an honest mistake in giving misleading evidence at Sally Clark’s murder trial.

Professor Meadow, 73, was cleared of serious professional misconduct by the High Court after his appeal against the punishment imposed by the General Medical Council (GMC). Mr Justice Collins said that the finding was not only unjustified but also that the GMC had no right to pursue a complaint lodged by Mrs Clark’s father in the first place.

The judge said that expert witnesses who gave evidence to courts must be immune from any disciplinary action — save in exceptional circumstances — so that they were not deterred from coming forward.

Professor Meadow’s testimony helped to convict Mrs Clark of murdering her two children. When the verdict was later quashed in the Court of Appeal, her father complained to the GMC that his evidence amounted to serious professional misconduct.

The judge’s findings were welcomed by the paediatrician, an expert in cot deaths and child protection, and professional bodies. In a rare public statement, Professor Meadow, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: “This is an important decision for paediatricians and all doctors, nurses, teachers and other professionals who may have to express difficult and sometimes unpopular opinions in the course of giving evidence in court. They should be able to do so without the fear of prosecution by the General Medical Council or other professional regulators.”

Frank Lockyer, Mrs Clark’s father, described the ruling as “academic”. He said that his aim of ensuring accountability for what had happened to his daughter had been achieved, despite the ruling, and added that the family did not feel vengeful towards the doctor and wished to get on with their lives.

Professor Meadow was found guilty by the GMC last July after a finding by its Fitness to Practise Panel that his conduct was “fundamentally incompatible with what is expected by the public from a registered medical practitioner”.

Mr Justice Collins said that Professor Meadow had made one mistake in his evidence: he misunderstood and misinterpreted the statistics. “It was a mistake, as the panel accepted, that was easily and widely made,” he said. “It may be proper to have criticised him for not disclosing his lack of expertise but that does not justify a finding of serious professional misconduct.”

He also ruled that all witnesses giving evidence in good faith, although the testimony may be wrong, are protected from civil prosecution and disciplinary action.

Mr Justice Collins said it was quite unnecessary to erase from the medical register someone like Professor Meadow, whom he described as a first-class paediatrician.

Professor Meadow, who was out of the country yesterday, was acclaimed as an expert in the field of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and on how such deaths could be differentiated from children harmed by their parents — the so-called Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.

He gave evidence that the risk of two infants dying naturally of SIDS in a household such as Mrs Clark’s was effectively one in 73 million.

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