Max Angel

Why did Letby and her defence team call no expert witnesses? Having read the transcripts, both barristers were very aggressive. Ben Myers did everything he could to destroy the credibility of Dewi Evans on the stand, arguing that he was making up causes of death as he went along without any solid forensic evidence, and changing his mind too. He then tried to get his evidence struck out at half time - before the defence had called witnesses - citing Judge Jackson's warnings of bias in a previous Evans' report, and arguing that venous air embolism in neonates was so rare that experts didn't exist in this area. He even submitted some written reports from his own expert, Dr Mike Hall, which argued for more plausible causes of death than murder in some cases. The prosecution objected and the judge ruled these weren't admissible as Hall had yet to take the stand, and then he rejected the half-time dismissal argument. Myers then had to decide whether to subject Hall - who was far more measured and less dogmatically certain than Evans - to the same aggressive castration he had attempted on Evans. He also had to decide whether it would look better to put one expert up against the six for the prosecution and seven Chester consultants convinced of her guilt, or none. He decided 13-0 was better than 13-1. He left Letby to be ripped to shreds by Nick Johnson. The tactic may have been to get Letby convicted on as many cases as possible, including those which better experts are now strongly arguing were not murder, to get everything over-turned on appeal. But given that there is no new evidence, this makes an appeal much less likely to happen... so quite a risky tactic and only Myers can give the true story. To be fair to him, he did make many of the points about alternative causes and lack of forensic evidence to support murder that experts are making now but because he is barrister, not an expert witness, none of what he said on the stand counted as evidence. Lesson one is clear - if you want expert evidence you need expert witnesses and it is an absolute travesty that neither side could find currently practising neonatal experts to interpret the case-notes and clinical findings. Had this happened independently as soon as the rise in deaths was noted, we wouldn't be in this mess now. Lesson two is that clinicians should not be investigating deaths they may be implicated in. We need a properly funded crash investigation team for the NHS and social care.

The 2015 inquest into the death of baby Noah Robinson in Chester could be highly relevant to the Letby case because it showed that the doctors struggled to intubate very small babies and to spot when the intubation had gone disastrously wrong. Could other intubation and resuscitation difficulties have led to the collapse and deaths of any other babies? In this week’s @PrivateEyeNews, a highly experienced neonatal and paediatric anaesthetist and a paediatric intensive care specialist reviews the transcripts from the original trial and spots some serious intubation difficulties that the expert prosecution witnesses didn’t. Out on Wednesday.