Dewi Evans has sent a response to journalists following the broadcast of Conviction (AKA Lucy Letby: Murder or Mistake) which I reviewed last week. He says it's free to be shared so here it is for anyone who might be interested...
Danny
Bogado, Rosy Milner and the Channel 4 team took on a challenging
documentary (Murder or Mistake, Channel 4, 29 September 2025). Producing
a 2 hours' documentary from evidence that took Cheshire Police several
years to collect and led to the longest criminal
trial in English legal history is in itself remarkable.
It was a
privilege to be considered the chief prosecution witness in a trial that
has led to the lifelong incarceration of England’s worst female killer.
Her conviction would not have succeeded without Cheshire
Police’s diligence and attention to detail, and the evidence of my
fellow independent witnesses and the numerous nurses and doctors from
the Countess of Chester Hospital. The evidence of all the witnesses was
crucial.
Lucy Letby’s new
barrister has broken new ground in launching an appeal via press and
media, providing of course a very selective version of events.
Mark
McDonald helpfully summarised 6 issues on his agenda; the rota, the
experts, air embolus, insulin, the neonatal unit, and the media.
Despite
his natural thespian skills and his considerable bravado Mr McDonald and
his supporters failed to offer any evidence not disclosed at Letby’s
trial, or would stand scrutiny at a clinical
or scientific presentation or the rigours of cross examination.
The relevance, or
not, of the rota, and Letby’s presence, has been flogged to death.
Peter Elston, statistician and investment manager, just could not
understand the difference between information that
is statistically significant and that which is clinically significant.
Statistics will point you in a certain direction. It does not prove that
something took place. It’s why statistics did not play a part in the
prosecution’s case. Presumably it’s why the
Defence did not seek a statistical explanation either.
Private Eye’s Dr Phil Hammond
claims
credit for exposing the concerns regarding what became the Bristol
Heart Scandal. He conveniently overlooks the fact that the same
magazine took over 10 years to admit it got it wrong in relation to
discredited medic Andrew Wakefield and his flawed MMR / autism claims. His claim that my diagnosis of air embolus was because
I “couldn’t think of anything else” reflects his clinical limitations, not unexpected given he is best known as a comedian who writes for
The Eye.
My
diagnosis of air embolus was supported by my fellow independent
witnesses, belatedly by the Chester paediatricians, and backed up by 18
publications.
Shoo Lee may well
be an eminent epidemiologist. His experience of air embolus is limited
to reporting 3 cases from the 1980s. More tellingly he has no background
of medicolegal matters because “I don’t
do medico-legal cases. I don’t like them”. Bogado's programme did not
have time to include my detailed critique of his 2 published papers. If
his most recent paper (published in December 2024) had been available
before the trial its content would have been
very useful - for the prosecution. His criticisms of my role, disclosed
at the press conference, were all factually incorrect. Summaries from
other members of the Panel were awash with errors, some of the weakest
reports I have seen during my career.
Given the time
constraints it was inevitable that the documentary concentrated on just a
couple of cases. The timing of Baby C’s collapse created confusion. In
my very first report (7 November 2017)
I raised concerns regarding the event late on Saturday 13 June 2015
that led to his collapse and death. Over the next 5 years the dates seem
to have become confused, leading to the prosecution alleging that the
assault took place the previous day. I recognised
the confusion at the Trial, reaffirming my original concern that the
fatal assault was late on 13 June. I believe that Cheshire Police, the
CPS, and the Prosecution team should set the record straight.
Back in 2017,
when I first raised concerns regarding Baby C’s demise, I was unaware of
Letby’s presence on the unit, let alone that she was up close to Baby C
at the time of his collapse. There is nothing
in Baby C’s clinical records to confirm Lucy Letby’s presence.
Baby O’s demise
was given considerable attention, and we were presented with some
extraordinary explanations from British Columbia based neonatologist
Richard Taylor and the Brighton duo of Neil Aiton
and Svilena Dimitrova. According to them Baby O’s death was due to a
cannula inserted into the baby’s abdomen 20 - 30 minutes before he died.
This fails to explain why the baby was moribund, sadly at death’s door,
before the cannula was inserted. For good
measure Aiton claimed that the ventilator pressures used to resuscitate
the baby were too high. This does not explain why the baby required
resuscitation in the first place. He had never required resuscitation
following his birth, and his collapse took place
when in Lucy Letby’s care. The Taylor, Aiton, Dimitrova hypothesis has
been widely condemned by others, including a pathologist who gave his
opinion on a recent Panorama programme. Their opinion should be confined
to the Donald Trump School of Evidential Science.
The controversy
regarding insulin poisoning has been widely explored. Professor John
Gregory recently endorsed (on the same Panorama programme) the opinion
of his fellow paediatric endocrinologist Prof
Peter Hindmarsh, stating that baby F and baby M were both poisoned with
insulin. Insulin poisoning had been accepted by Letby’s Defence team at
the trial, and indeed by Lucy Letby herself.
Criticism of the
neonatal unit building was reasonable, and the unit has long moved to
more suitable premises. Alleging that the department was “failing” or
unsatisfactory is unfair and unreasonable.
Survival rates, the best quality control of any neonatal unit, were as
good in Chester as the ONS [Office of National Statistics] figures for
England & Wales, even for the smallest babies. The Thirlwall Inquiry
confirmed that staffing was similar to other
units in the North West of England.
Mark McDonald and
his team failed to show any new evidence that would justify another
appeal. Unhelpfully for him, this week’s Law Society Gazette article by
Bianca Castro (26 September) states: “Conviction did
not uncover anything new, a potential problem if the CCRC [Criminal
Cases Review Commission] are to refer the case back to the Court of
Appeal.”
The victims in
the Letby Trial are the babies harmed and murdered by Lucy Letby, and
their families. A campaign to release England’s worst female serial
killer is beyond my understanding. It adds to
the hurt and grief the families have suffered for the past decade.
