Medical experts and the criminal courts

doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7397.1037/a

BMJ 2003;326:1037 ( 10 May )

Letters

Medical experts and the criminal courts

Meaningful audit could be difficult to attain

Clinical forensic medicine needs to become part of the syllabus

Meaningful audit could be difficult to attain

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Although I agree with Milroy, I think it unfortunate that he did not extend his editorial to propose a system for theauditing and assessment of quality in medicolegal work.¹ Experienceshows that meaningful audit could be very difficult to attainfor many reasons that include the followingfive.

The first is the legal system. The adversarial system is simply one of winning and not one of finding the truth. This encouragesthe use of "hired guns" and brings pressure on experts from bothsides to provide "favourable" reports in the interests of maintainingclient satisfaction and obtaining further medicolegalwork.

The second is the absence of evidence based forensic medicine. Properly conducted research in the field has been comparativelylimited and many of the forensic "facts" are neither supportedby nor based on controlled research findings but on publishedpersonalviews.

The third is personalities and titles. . . . [Full text of this article]