The scary part is that it wasn’t just Evans. There were 6 total expert prosecution witnesses in the court who made reports based on the reports from Evans. The judiciary, who I’ve said before are experienced and knowledgeable in the law, only the law, and certainly not in medicine, quite foolishly call this process ‘peer review’. Judges have spent their lives focused on the law. They usually don’t have even a science A Level. They need to engage humility and acknowledge where they are not experts. This is a massive part of the problem.
This was not a formal, scientific peer review process of the kind used in medical research, nor was it anything like a double-blind independent evaluation, which incidentally Lee’s expert panel was.
Dr Sandie Bohin and the others reviewed Dr Dewi Evans’s reports, not the raw data in its original form. They did not have full, independent access to all original pathology reports, medical notes, or complete clinical records. They knew Evans’s conclusions before reviewing, so their task was effectively to comment on his reasoning rather than independently evaluate the evidence from scratch. There was no blinding to case identities or outcomes.
None of the experts - including Evans - ever saw or examined the babies involved. They relied entirely on retrospective paper/electronic records, years after the events. It was one prosecution-instructed expert reviewing another prosecution-instructed expert’s work. It was not an impartial academic peer review. Using the term “peer review” in court gives an impression of academic rigour that wasn’t actually there. They were also heavily financially motivated to agree with each other.
Truly independent, court-directed experts and direct evidence review, rather than having prosecution-instructed experts “peer review” each other’s conclusions, would be preferable.
There are several different ways that courts in other countries handle experts evidence. Technically expert witnesses work for the courts, but in practice they are heavily motivated (by money) to produce the goods that the side who hired them want.
Dr Evans was paid hundreds of thousands and that’s a conservative estimate. He’s on record bragging about having ‘never lost a case’ which is confirmation that he is not independent and working for the court. He has also bragged about “keeping his daughter in horses and his son in cars”.
Dr Hammond has written about a process called ‘hot tubbing’ - which is a term that conjures all kinds of unpleasant images 😳 - but sounds like a better way for the jury to hear evidence. Hot tubbing is where both sides’ experts appear in court together, answer the same questions from the judge, and respond to each other in real time. I’m not sure that the best way, I lean more towards an expert panel system, where a panel of carefully selected experts discuss evidence collectively, record any disagreements, and ensure that no single interpretation dominates unchecked. There are other options too, none of them perfect because perfection seldom exists in medicine.
The problem is that courts and juries like certainty, but medicine is rarely this clear cut. Regardless of the judiciaries discomfort - public liberty and safety is more important than judicial egos - the system has to change in order to avoid future MoJ.