A PAEDIATRICIAN who gave "erroneous" and "misleading" evidence in the Cheshire solicitor Sally Clark trial faces being struck off the medical register following a disciplinary ruling yesterday.

Professor Sir Roy Meadow, 72, failed in his duty as an expert witness and was wrong to compare the possibility of Mrs Clark's two children dying natural deaths to the odds of horses winning the Grand National, the General Medical Council said.

His overall evidence was misleading and he "erroneously implied" that two deaths in a family would be independent of one another.

Professor Meadow was wrong to imply that the risk of a second cot death in a family was unrelated to common environmental factors or genetics, it said.

Mrs Clark was found guilty in 1999 of murdering her two sons, Christopher and Harry, but had her conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2003.

The retired paediatrician, from Woodgate Lane, Leeds, told the jury at her trial that the chance of two babies dying of cot death within an affluent family was "one in 73 million".

But research has shown that a second child is at greater risk of dying from cot death if one child has already died of the syndrome. The GMC ruled that Professor Meadow did not intend to mislead anyone in evidence he gave at Mrs Clark's trial.

But the panel said he "failed to provide a fair context for the limited relevance" of his findings and relied on erroneous statistics.

He was also in breach of his duties when he said at a hearing at Chester Magistrates' Court that the odds against two infant deaths in a family being natural were "long odds of one-in-a-million" and could be likened to "winning the jackpot".

The GMC will now decide whether Professor Meadow's actions amount to serious professional misconduct and could strike him off if he is found guilty.

Mrs Clark's father Frank Lockyer - who brought the case - said: "No one is in any doubt that the evidence on which my daughter was convicted was seriously flawed.

"This hearing was first and foremost about culpability and accountability which seems to have been well and truly settled."