Context
The CCRC application includes independent expert methodology critique addressing Dr Dewi Evans’s role as the Crown’s lead causation expert. This page summarises the principal strands of that critique.
The instructional-route concern
Most expert witnesses in UK criminal proceedings are identified and approached by the prosecuting authority independently. Dr Evans approached Cheshire Police in 2017 offering his services on the case. A self-referring expert is a self-selected expert, and self-selection risks bias in the direction of the hypothesis the investigation is pursuing. This is a specific concern about the Hummingbird investigation’s early scoping decisions.
The decade-out-of-practice concern
Dr Evans had not worked in routine neonatal intensive care for over a decade at the time of his instruction. Modern UK NICU practice, monitoring technology and differential-diagnosis frameworks had evolved substantially during that period. A modern UK NICU consultant active during 2015–2016 — the type of expert now represented on the Shoo Lee Panel — brings a different calibration to the same clinical records.
The family-court concern
In September 2023, in an unrelated family-court matter, a judge described an Evans expert report as “worthless”. The comment was picked up by Private Eye and subsequently referenced in the April 2025 Bar Council letter and the October 2025 CCRC application. It is not itself dispositive but it is material to the general reliability of the methodology he applies.
The methodological concern
Dr Evans’s causation methodology was, on the trial record, forensic-from- hypothesis rather than blinded-differential-diagnosis. Modern UK expert-evidence standards require the latter: the expert examines the clinical record blinded to the prosecution hypothesis, considers the full differential, and eliminates each hypothesis only after positive examination. Dr Evans’s methodology worked in the opposite direction — from the criminal hypothesis toward confirming findings.
The second-opinion-circularity concern
The Crown’s second-opinion expert, Dr Sandie Bohin, worked within the methodological frame Dr Evans had established. Her evidence inherited the methodological limitations of his. This is not independent second-opinion corroboration in any strong sense — it is the same methodology applied by a second clinician.
What the Shoo Lee Panel answers
The Shoo Lee International Expert Panel’s February 2025 case-by-case review is the methodology the prosecution did not commission: fourteen senior international neonatologists, pathologists and specialists applying modern differential-diagnosis methodology to the same casebook. Its conclusion — no medical evidence of deliberate harm — is the direct answer to the Evans methodology under proper expert-instruction standards.
Read alongside
Dr Dewi Evans — biography, Evidence: expert methodology, Evidence: expert instruction standards, Hummingbird scope decisions.