COMMENTARY: "The Waney Squier case shows that we still need an independent inquiry," by Stephen J. Watkins, Published by the BMJ on March 31, 2016.
GIST: "In the first
BMJ of this century I wrote an editorial criticising the conviction of Sally Clark for murdering her children.
1
That conviction was based on the proposition that highly unusual
coincidences don’t occur by chance—a mathematical fallacy disproved by
every announcement of a lottery winner. It took years to
secure Clark’s release, and her health was so badly damaged in the
meantime that she died soon afterwards. At that time, medical experts on
both sides were united on one point—that the legal system couldn’t deal
properly with scientific controversy. This and other
miscarriages of justice stopped when the expert witness Roy Meadow
refused to give further evidence unless allowed to do so in a proper
scientific way, describing uncertainty and the existence of dissent.
Science doesn’t advance because scientists are right: it advances
because every true scientist has at the core of her soul a passionate
belief that she might be wrong. But the law deals in
certainties. Faced with scientific dissent, it considers the dissenters
to be misguided at best. Why else would people deny what everybody in
their discipline knows to be true? After the miscarriages of justice surrounding cot death, the
BMA called for a public inquiry headed by a doctor or scientist into
the judicial system’s failure to cope with scientific controversy. That
didn’t take place. No lessons were learnt. Sooner or later, more
miscarriages of justice will result. These cases may share a desire to root out the evil of child
murder, as well as a powerful consensus on the interpretation of
evidence that is less certain than is widely believed, a few dissenters
the prosecutors feel obliged to discredit, and a critique based
significantly on knowledge from another discipline. Rather than the
epidemiologists of the miscarriages of justice regarding cot deaths,
shaken baby syndrome has engineers in place who challenge whether the
necessary forces can be generated in the way described. Our society is ever more intolerant of dissent,
diminishingly at ease with itself, and increasingly of the belief that
professional practice is improved by rigorous, unvarying compliance with
evidence based consensus guidelines, which recognise no duty to treat
the exceptional exceptionally. When a system of quality control came to be applied to
expert witnesses, the BMA warned that this might be difficult to apply
in circumstances of scientific dissent. The warning was not heeded, and
so the expert witness Waney Squier—the main dissenter on shaken baby
syndrome—was convicted of professional misconduct. She was apparently less than objective in some of her
evidence. But I would confirm that, when you believe that innocent,
grieving parents are being imprisoned for their bereavement because of
scientific error, it’s not always possible to summon up the dispassion
to which you might professionally aspire. I don’t know whether Squier is correct; nor do I care.
People have a right to be wrong, and without it no other human freedom
is meaningful. The duty of dissent in the face of what you perceive as
injustice cannot be qualified by a need to carry out a risk assessment
as to whether you might lose the debate. The existence of dissent is
something a jury is entitled to know."
The entire abstract can be found at:
http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i1768
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses
several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of
the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this
powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and
myself get more out of the site.
The
Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty
incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the
harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into
pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology
system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent
stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Please
send any comments or information on other cases and issues of
interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
