Roy Meadow

Roy Meadow

Sir Samuel Roy Meadow (born 1933) is a British paediatrician and professor, who rose to initial fame for his 1977 academic paper on the now controversial Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP). He was knighted for this work. He endorsed the dictum that “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise“ in his book ABC of Child Abuse and this became known as Meadow's Law and at one time was widely adopted by social workers and child protection agencies (such as the NSPCC) in Britain.

He appeared as an expert witness for the prosecution in several trials, in at least one of which his testimony played a crucial part in a wrongful conviction for murder. The British General Medical Council (GMC) struck off Meadow from the British Medical Register after he was found to have offered “erroneous” and “misleading” evidence in the Sally Clark case. Clark was a lawyer wrongly convicted in 1999 of the murder of her two baby sons, largely on the basis of Meadow's evidence; her conviction was quashed in 2003 after she had spent three years in jail. Sally Clark never recovered from the experience, developed a number of serious psychiatric problems including serious alcohol dependency and died in 2007 from alcohol poisoning.

Clark's father, Frank Lockyer, who is a retired senior police officer, complained to the GMC, alleging serious professional misconduct on the part of Meadow. The GMC concluded in July 2005 that Meadow was guilty of serious professional misconduct and ordered that his name be struck from the register. Meadow appealed to the High Court, which ruled in his favour in February 2006. The GMC appealed to the Court of Appeal and in October 2006 by a majority decision, with the Master of the Rolls, Sir Anthony Clarke, dissenting, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the High Court in part ruling that Meadow's misconduct was not sufficiently serious to merit the punishment which he had received.