Professor Keith Rix

- Forensic Psychiatry Expert of the Year

Profile

For 40 years I have provided expert evidence in personal injury litigation, including clinical negligence cases, the criminal jurisdiction, coroners’ courts, capacity, professional regulatory and employment cases and in capital cases in the Caribbean and Africa.

I am Visiting Professor of Medical Jurisprudence, University of Chester, and Honorary Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. My main interests are the education, training and support of expert witnesses. I am a member of the Membership Committee of the Expert Witness Institute and a member of the Family Justice Council’s Experts in the Family Justice System Committee. I am Expert Witness Lead for the Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine and the Royal College of Physicians.

I have again been involved in organising The Grange Annual Conference for psychiatrists engaged in medicolegal work. This year’s judicial lectures were given by The Hon Mr Justice Peter Charleton, The Supreme Court, Ireland, and Mr Justice Peter Fraser, High Court of England and Wales.

This year has seen publication in BJPsych Advances of ‘Bias in expert witness practice’ co-authored with the late Professor Nigel Eastman. My main academic activity has continued to be as an editor in chief of Cambridge University Press’s Expert Medical Evidence series. The second edition of my Expert Psychiatric Evidence is the lead volume and Expert Musculoskeletal and Orthopaedic Evidence is in press.

My most interesting case this year was United States of America v Assange [2021] EWHC 3313 (Admin) which called for a reconciliation of the conflicting duties of the expert witness with the duties of the doctor. Two matricide cases involving drug misuse required an analysis of the relationships between substance misuse and psychosis, one resulting in the special verdict of insanity and the other resulting in a conviction for diminished responsibility manslaughter.