3

The Hearing Opens

Monday July 16

Inevitably the atmosphere inside the building was quite different from that outside. Inside the glass shell, there was a feeling of being in an underwater bubble. Anyone entering was greeted by an almost entirely black security personnel, attractively dressed young women with fixed smiles and confident young men in casual dress. On the third floor, through two sets of glass doors past a lounge area and the doors to the rooms provided for the press, off a corridor on the right is the entrance to the hearing room. All attendees in the public gallery and members of the press are searched before entering the long room.

About 60 foot long and 40 feet wide, the room is flanked by glass panels down one of its long walls. The atmosphere is one of quiet efficiency. There are between 30 and 40 participants in the hearing. The defendants and the adjudicators sit facing each other, the doctors with their legal teams are down the left hand side and the panel and GMC clerks down the right hand side.

It is difficult to imagine that this long mainly white room, with an oblong of tables in its centre, will be the daily place of work for the three doctor defendants in this case. For the next three months these highly trained doctors will have to defend many of the professional decisions which they have made over the last decade. Things that ‘just happened’ and that carried no particular importance at the time could now, in the light of this room, spell the end to their medical careers.

The room is not really like a court room, there is no central point of authority, although the principal prosecutor for the GMC, Miss Smith, sits at one end of the rectangular tables, she is not sitting higher than anyone else and is sometimes hardly noticeable amidst the books, boxes and reading rests that surround her. Nor are the ‘accused’ sitting together in a dock of any kind but dispersed amongst their lawyers.

Almost everyone in the room, outside the public area, is wearing black, its deadness only interrupted by the silver hair and white shirts of the men and on some women brief touches of ochre or translucent white of arms and legs. There is a round and almost classic clock on the wall at the far end of the room, on its face time passes very slowly.

The first days of any juridical hearings, whether they be at the Old Bailey or the General Medical Council (GMC) are always the worst for defendants. It is in these first days that the complainants or the prosecutors make their case, and knowing that they have a free hand in tarring the accused, prosecutors always over-egg the pudding.

Consequently, defendants find themselves powerlessly listening to an endless litany of their dishonesties and their dishonest nature. Amongst many unfairnesses introduced into the judicial process by the GMC on this first day, was an evidently unrestricted number of charges – Wakefield was faced with some 40 heads each broken down into two or three separate accusations, while Professor Walker-Smith and Professor Simon Murch faced counts in their twenties and thirties. Anyone who has ever had any experience of juries or tribunals knows full well that with so many charges the the adjudicators are inevitably faced with a quandary. As the mud is thrown at the wall some will inevitably stick. ‘Well’, they will say ‘We have found for the defendant on some of the charges, we have to find against them on some’.