Lucy Letby trial facing fresh controversy

The chief prosecution witness in the Lucy Letby trial is at the centre of fresh controversy after it emerged that a judge in a previous case had dismissed his evidence as 'worthless'.

The testimony of Dewi Evans was central to the nurse's conviction last year for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others, but the reliability of his evidence has been questioned by a growing number of distinguished experts.

Earlier this month, following a Radio 4 investigation, Dr Evans changed his mind about how Ms Letby supposedly killed one of her victims following the discovery that the nurse was not even at the hospital where the baby died at the time an apparently damning X-ray was taken.

He is no longer claiming that air was forced into the baby's stomach, and is now saying that Letby injected air into the baby's bloodstream.

Last week, judges rejected Letby's request to appeal against her conviction, in a July retrial, on one attempted murder count, in what was the last avenue explored before a new legal team starts work on her case.

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As part of the new moves, Letby's lawyers plan to shine the spotlight on Dr Evans – including the fact that in December 2022, a judge declared his report in a case involving parents' access to their children made 'no effort to provide a balanced opinion'.

Describing his evidence as 'worthless', Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Jackson said: 'He either knows what his professional colleagues have concluded and disregards it or he has not taken steps to inform himself of their views.

'Either approach amounts to a breach of proper professional conduct. No attempt has been made to engage with the full range of medical information or the powerful contradictory indicators. Instead the report has the hallmarks of an exercise in 'working out an explanation' that exculpates the applicants.

'It ends with tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside Dr Evans' professional competence and have no place in a reputable expert report.'

Dr Evans said he was 'more than happy' to stand by his report. He insisted: 'I have prepared dozens of reports for the Family Court.

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'I'm in huge demand for opinions because of my track record as a witness. This is a one-off for me.'

Experts have increasingly questioned how Letby was convicted with only circumstantial evidence and contested statistical probabilities. The prosecution subsequently admitted that door-swipe evidence presented at the trial was not true.

On Friday, the New York Times became the latest global media outlet to raise doubts about the safety of her conviction, after questions had first been raised in a 13,000-word New Yorker article in May.

Since then, dozens of statisticians and medical experts have expressed concerns about the prosecution case.

A total of 24 experts in statistics, forensic science and neonatology have written to the British Government pointing out a series of worrying anomalies, including the fact that a number of baby deaths on the unit when Letby was not present had been excluded from the prosecution's analysis.