Decision due on Southall's GMC ban
A High Court judge is due to rule on a legal challenge by controversial paediatrician Dr David Southall against a decision to strike him off the medical register for serious professional misconduct.
The General Medical Council's (GMC) Fitness to Practise Panel decided in December 2007 that he had abused his position by accusing a mother of drugging and murdering her son.
The panel found that Dr Southall's actions added to the distress of the mother - Mrs M, from Shropshire - whose 10-year-old son hanged himself in 1996.
The panel also accused him of having a "deep-seated attitudinal problem".
It was the second time in three years Dr Southall, 60, had been found guilty of serious professional misconduct.
In 2004 he was suspended from child protection work over his role in the case of Sally Clark, wrongly jailed over the death of her two sons.
Dr Southall accused Mrs Clark's husband Steve of murdering the two boys on the basis of a television interview. At the time he was banned from child protection work for three years, a ban which expired last year.
At a recent High Court hearing, Stephen Miller QC, appearing for Dr Southall, said certain findings of fact of the GMC's disciplinary panel in the case of Mrs M should never have been made.
He said one of Dr Southall's concerns was that the disciplinary panel "did not really understand, certainly in its final form, what child protection involved and the part played by doctors like him".
Mr Justice Blake will deliver his judgment at the High Court in London on whether the panel's strike-off decision was unfair or unlawful.
