Career and specialism
Dr Waney Squier worked as a consultant neuropathologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, specialising in paediatric and perinatal neuropathology — the examination of brain and spinal cord tissue from infants and children. Over the course of her career she became a widely cited expert in cases involving infant death, and in particular in the contested diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), now more commonly described as abusive head trauma. Her published research contributed to a re-examination of the neuropathological diagnostic criteria that had underpinned SBS convictions in English courts for over two decades.
GMC proceedings and the 2018 appeal
In 2016 the General Medical Council found Dr Squier guilty of serious professional misconduct and suspended her from the medical register. The allegations centred on her expert-witness conduct in SBS cases where her opinion — that the post-mortem findings could have explanations other than inflicted trauma — diverged from the mainstream prosecution-expert consensus. In 2018 the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service appeal tribunal quashed the findings and restored her registration, concluding that the original panel had failed to properly engage with the scientific basis of her expert evidence. The appeal outcome is significant because it validated, at a formal regulatory level, the proposition that legitimate scientific disagreement with prosecution-endorsed diagnostic orthodoxy does not constitute misconduct.
The parallel with the Letby case
Dr Squier has drawn a structural parallel between the SBS expert-witness dynamic and the situation in the Letby case. In both contexts, a cluster of infant deaths is assigned to a single cause-mechanism — inflicted trauma in SBS, deliberate harm in Letby — on the basis of clinical signs that prosecution-instructed experts interpret as pathognomonic of that mechanism. Independent specialists who identify alternative explanations for those same signs then find their dissenting views marginalised, dismissed as outlier opinion, or — in Dr Squier’s case — subjected to regulatory action. Her argument is that the Letby prosecution reproduced this structural dynamic: a small group of prosecution experts whose interpretation of the clinical findings was not subjected to the level of independent critical scrutiny that cases of this gravity require.
Relevance to the clinical-finding methodology debate
The neuropathological dimension of Dr Squier’s commentary connects to the broader expert-evidence methodology question in the case. Several infants who died had post-mortem or clinical findings — retinal haemorrhages, subdural collections, abnormal brain imaging — that carry differential diagnoses beyond inflicted or deliberate harm. Dr Squier’s background in interpreting exactly these findings in a contested forensic context gives her commentary a specificity that more general paediatric or pathological commentators cannot match. Her view, consistently expressed, is that the standard of expert-evidence scrutiny in the Letby proceedings did not meet the threshold required in cases where the alternative explanations include natural disease processes.
Read alongside
- Dr Dewi Evans — prosecution expert paediatrician
- Dr Sandie Bohin — defence expert paediatrician
- Analysis: Sally Clark parallel
- Sally Clark
- Lucia de Berk
- Commentary library
Source
Published peer-reviewed research by Dr Waney Squier on paediatric neuropathology and SBS; Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service appeal decision 2018; public statements and interviews; published commentary on the Letby case.