Watch the full press conference
Shoo Lee International Expert Panel — full press conference (3 Feb 2025)
Includes chapters and subtitles. Archived by lucyletbyinnocence.com. This is the single most important video on the case: watch this before forming a view.
Context
On 3 February 2025, at a press conference in London, Dr Shoo K. Lee — Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto and the lead author of the 1989 Archives of Disease in Childhood paper on neonatal air embolism — presented the findings of the International Expert Panel he convened. The panel comprises fourteen senior neonatologists, paediatric pathologists and paediatric specialists from Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, New Zealand, Taiwan and the United States. It reviewed the medical evidence for every count on the Letby indictment.
Key passages
What the Panel set out to do — and what it refused to do. The report records that Dr Lee had testified at the appeal and “was concerned that there were problems with the medical evidence used in her trial and appeal”, and that with all appeal routes exhausted he proposed the exercise to Letby’s solicitors on one condition: “The report would be released regardless of whether the findings were favorable or unfavorable to Lucy.” Its stated objective is a report on causes of death or injury “based on the medical evidence”, and it draws the line explicitly: “There would be no determination about innocence or guilt of the defendant.” That limit matters for how the document can be used, and it is the Panel’s own.
The four conclusions. The report’s concluding page is short enough to give in full. First, “There was no medical evidence to support malfeasance causing death or injury in any of the 17 cases in the trial”. Second, “Death or injury of affected infants were due to natural causes or errors in medical care”. Third and fourth, that there were problems “related to the medical care of patients” and “related to teamwork and inter-disciplinary collaboration” at the unit. The first two are findings about the babies; the second two are findings about the hospital, and they are the ones that overlap with the Thirlwall Inquiry’s terms of reference.
The care findings. The Panel listed fourteen problems it found across the 17 cases, among them “Misdiagnosis of diseases”, “Caring for patients that were beyond their designated level of care”, “Unsafe delays in diagnosis and treatment of acutely ill patients”, “Poor skills at resuscitation and intubation”, and “Failure to protect at risk patients (e.g. haemophilia) from trauma during intubation”. A separate list of general findings, drawn from witness statements, includes “Inadequate staffing”, “IV drugs prepared in corridor”, and plumbing and drainage described as “a potential factor in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia colonization and infection”.
How a case is reasoned. The per-baby sections follow a fixed shape — summary, the conviction alleged, the Panel opinion, then numbered conclusions — and the reasoning is clinical rather than forensic. On one case the Panel relied on research published after the trial showing that “patchy skin discolorations have never been reported in infants with venous air embolism, including IV air injection”, and concluded that the discolouration was caused by disseminated intravascular coagulation, adding the observation that “Coagulation defects do not occur with air embolism”. The conclusions for that baby are that the infant “died of systemic sepsis, pneumonia and disseminated intravascular coagulation” and that “There was no evidence of air embolism.”
The address to the families. The report opens with one, and it is worth reading alongside the criticism the Panel drew: “We understand their stress and anguish, and our work is not meant to cause more distress.” The Panel says its purpose is “to give comfort and assurance in knowing the truth about what really happened”. Nothing in this page should be read as the site adopting the Panel’s conclusions; they are the opinion of an expert group convened at the defence’s instance, published in full, and contested.
Panel members
The fourteen members are listed in full on our Experts page. The Panel report itself, hosted by Ms Letby’s legal representatives, is linked from our Documents library.