Shamed
professor 'accused mother of hanging her son'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html
Daily
Mail - 13th November 2006
A shamed
paediatrician had a grieving mother's child taken into care after
falsely accusing her of murdering her ten-year-old son, a disciplinary
panel heard.
Disgraced
consultant Professor David Southall, 58, acted like a "crown
prosecutor," accusing the distraught woman of drugging and
hanging the boy, it was claimed.
The General
Medical Council was told that despite having no medical evidence
to back up his theory, the specialist reported her to social services.
This meant
the younger son was taken into care.
Professor
Southall is the paediatrician who accused the husband of solicitor
Sally Clark of murdering their children, Christopher and Harry.
He called
police after watching a television documentary on the deaths in
2000.
Mrs Clark
was jailed for the murders but freed on appeal in 2003.
Professor
Southall was found guilty of serious professional misconduct by
the GMC in 2004 for his "high-handed intervention" and
was banned from child protection work for three years.
A disciplinary
hearing was told he had pointed the finger of blame at another parent
whose ten-year-old son hanged himself with a belt at home after
allegedly being bullied at school. Richard Tyson, QC, for the GMC
said Professor Southall subjected the mother, an auxiliary nurse,
to a barrage of "aggressive and intimidatory" questions
during an interview in 1998.
The paediatrician
told her that if she did not answer his questions then she must
be guilty of murdering her child, Mr Tyson said.
He said
Professor Southall had told the bereaved mother: "I will tell
you how he died."
"You
drugged him after obtaining drugs from the operating theatre as
he would not allow you to kill him."
"You
waited for him to go to sleep and you then wrapped the belt round
the curtain pole, lifted him up and then buckled the belt around
his neck and then waited until he had died."
After the
interview, Mr Tyson said that the mother, who cannot be named for
legal reasons, was "extremely distressed."
Mr Tyson
said: "In particular she was extremely upset by the accusation
made to her face that she murdered her own child."
Earlier,
Mr Tyson read from the mother's statement after the death of her
eldest.
In it she
said the boy had been bullied at school, a claim reinforced by his
teacher.
On the day
he died she said she saw him in the window and realised something
was wrong.
She ran
to the bedroom to find him "hanging from a wooden curtain rail
from a belt around his neck."
The mother
said the buckle was digging into the right-hand side of his neck
and added: "I realised straight away by his pupils being dilated
that he was dead."
She rang
999 and told the operator: "My 10-year-old son has just hung
himself."
A coroner
recorded an open verdict on the boy's death in June, 3, 1996, after
being unable to determine whether it was a suicide or an accident.
But Professor
Southall was asked by social services to report on the woman's second
son in February 1998 after the boy apparently made suicide threats.
The consultant
at the Royal Brompton and North Staffordshire Hospitals recommended
the second child, then aged ten, should be removed from the family
home in North Staffordshire.
In his report
he suggested that the mother was suffering from Munchausen's Syndrome
by Proxy, where parents harm or fake illness in their children,
concluding: "He was only ten and in my experience, ten-year-olds
do not kill themselves and especially not in this way."
Mr Tyson
added: "Professor Southall put pressure on her to admit that
she had drugged and then murdered him by hanging him and effectively
accused her of committing homicide."
"It
was overwhelmingly likely that he (Professor Southall) was going
almost blindly down one track, namely to suggest that there had
been an unlawful death. He acted as a detective or crown prosecutor."
Now retired,
Professor Southall is also accused of tampering with another child's
medical records, keeping secret medical files and abusing his professional
position in regard to four other children.
He denies
serious professional misconduct but could be struck off if found
guilty of all 18 charges.
Expert
witnesses lose immunity from censure in Meadow case 27th October
2006
