May 2026: Thirlwall Inquiry report delayed to at least September 2026 · six-baby inquests relisted to 2027 · CCRC review active · Shoo Lee Panel: no medical evidence of deliberate harm.
The prosecution relied on Dr Dewi Evans as its lead causation expert. Dr Evans was presented to the jury as a retired paediatrician whose evidence was properly instructed and whose methodology was appropriate to the questions he addressed.
Dr Evans's path to instruction has been the subject of sustained scrutiny. He approached Cheshire Police offering his services on the case — an unusual route in which the expert, rather than the instructing side, identifies himself. He had not worked in routine neonatal intensive care for over a decade at the time of instruction. A separate family court judge in an unrelated 2023 matter described an Evans report as 'worthless'. His forensic methodology — working from a criminal-hypothesis frame rather than from a blinded differential-diagnosis frame — is the methodology the Shoo Lee Panel's fourteen international neonatologists now publicly reject. Modern UK expert-instruction standards require blinded review, structured differential diagnosis, and calibrated confidence-expressions. None of these standards was rigorously applied to Dr Evans's methodology.
An expert who approaches the police offering his services on a case, rather than being sought out for his independent expertise, is an expert who has already chosen a side. That is not how an expert witness system is meant to work.
The jury heard Dr Evans's conclusions but was not systematically walked through the instruction history that led to him giving evidence, nor the questions about his methodology that the Panel subsequently raised.
The Panel does not address expert-instruction standards directly but its rejection of Dr Evans's methodology — which produced the bulk of the causation findings at trial — is the operational form of the methodological critique.