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In many cases of child abuse, the child cannot be counted upon to provide an accurate account of the events due to their age and level of understanding. This is even more pertinent in cases involving very young children and infants, or when involving the subsequent deaths. In these cases medical expert testimony is often the primary contributor to a conviction. Examples of how this can prove to be responsible for serious miscarriages of justice are the cases of Sally Clark and Trupti Patel.

In 1999 Sally Clark was convicted of murdering her two infants largely based on expert testimony provided by Sir Roy Meadow, famously stating that the odds of two infants both dying of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome were "one in 73 million". Mrs Clark was thus sent to prison for two life sentences. However the evidence Sir Roy Meadow based this claim on was severely flawed statistically, and entirely unsubstantiated. Statistics demonstrate that every year fifty families who have previously lost a baby lose a second child to natural causes such as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and the actual statistical likelihood of this happening was in fact 200 to one, rather than 73 million to one as claimed. After serving three years in prison, the conviction against Sally Clark was overturned by the Court of Appeal in January 2003, after flaws in the expert testimony came to light, and the fact that pathologist Alan Williams had not made known vital medical evidence which would have exonerated her. As a result of this serious misconduct Dr Williams was prohibited from undertaking court work for a period of three years.
In May 2003, Trupti Patel appeared in Reading Crown Court, charged with murdering her three infant children between 1997 and 2001. The first had died at 13 weeks old, the other two at 15 days and 22 days old. Despite her protestations of innocence, Sir Roy Meadow as an expert witness for the prosecution stated that multiple cot deaths were so improbable that the only explanation was murder. Sir Roy Meadow had by this time provided expert testimony in many suspected cases of paediatric abuse and murder, resulting in numerous convictions of the parents.
However in the case of Trupti Patel, expert testimony provided in her defence by Professor Fleming on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (cot death) and the lack of any evidence of external physical harm having contributed to the deaths, and accounts of similar patterns of SIDS happening in closely related family members, Ms Patel

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