© 2002 Archives of Disease in Childhood
LEADING ARTICLE
Law
The role of the expert witness
Department of Law, The University of Sheffield, Crookesmoor Building, Conduit Road, Sheffield S10 1FL, UK; c.williams@sheffield.ac.uk
Medical practitioners must remain objective
Keywords: child abuse; expert witness
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The ideal expert witness is a person with special training, knowledge, or experience whose role is to aid the court. Re X (Non-Accidental Injury: Expert Evidence)1 is the latest in a series of cases2,3 in which the evidence of an expert witness has been criticised by a judge in a case involving alleged child abuse. The case is important not just because the same individual, Dr Colin Paterson, has been censured, thus calling into question his status as an expert witness in both civil and criminal cases, but also because there are more general lessons to be learned both from the criticisms aimed at the expert and from other more general issues arising from the case.
In Re X the local authority were seeking a care order on a child who had been admitted to hospital, aged 20 weeks, with a number of fractures. Both parents of the child
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