In an exclusive episode of the Daily Mail’s Trial podcast, veteran court reporters Liz Hull and Caroline Cheetham interview Dr Sandie Bohin, a neonatologist who acted as a key expert witness during Lucy Letby’s ten-month murder trial in 2022.
Before the trial began, Bohin was tasked by the National Crime Agency to independently review the reports of Dr Dewi Evans, whose findings concluded that babies in the nurse’s care had been deliberately harmed.
Instead of simply reviewing his reports, Dr Bohin went back to the beginning and examined the notes for every baby – thousands and thousands of pages.
Having mostly agreed with Dr Evans’s conclusions, Bohin was called upon by the prosecution during the trial, which ended with Letby receiving 15 whole life orders after being convicted of seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder.
Since Letby’s conviction in 2023, a growing number of high-profile commentators have emerged who believe the nurse is the victim of a massive miscarriage of justice.
These critics have been spurred on by Letby’s new defence team, led by outspoken barrister Mark McDonald, who was appointed in September 2024 and has since waged a very public campaign to have her conviction overturned.
During the podcast, Dr Bohin directly rebutted claims which dispute medical evidence used to convict Letby in court, explaining why she believes many of those who defend her cannot have read the thousands of pages of case notes that led her to conclude babies had been deliberately harmed.
Claim: ‘No evidence the babies were injected with air’
One of the key pieces of medical evidence cited during the trial was a 1989 academic paper by Canadian neonatologist Dr Shoo Lee, which examined how air embolisms present in babies.
After the conviction, Lee claimed his paper had been misrepresented by Bohin and Evans, going on to later appear for the defence at the Court of Appeal.
Despite his evidence being dismissed, Lee has since gone on to tout his theories of Letby’s innocence in multiple documentaries.
In February 2025, Lee chaired a panel of 14 international neonatologists and paediatricians who claimed there was no medical evidence that Letby had deliberately harmed any of the babies in her care.
‘We did not just use the skin changes that were in his paper to diagnose air embolism’, Bohin began.
‘Lee founded his theory on that. But he hadn’t been given all the case notes, so he didn’t know we had used other evidence too.
‘The whole press conference thing, I thought, was beyond dreadful for the parents.
‘I don’t agree with their conclusions. I don’t think they’re informed and I wonder if they had all the notes.
‘Doctors who gave evidence at the trial, said that when they were resuscitating a baby, they noticed some of them had skin changes that they’d never seen before.
‘These doctors would have seen a baby that was hypotensive, septic or in cardio respiratory arrest and that specific colour change, they said they had never seen the like of it before.’
Claim: ‘The babies died because of substandard care’
One of the most repeated claims made in defence of Letby is that the babies in her care were not murdered but died because the neonatal ward at the Countess of Chester Hospital was dangerously understaffed and poorly run.
Dr Lee’s panel ran with this allegation, claiming that their review of case notes linked several deaths attributed to Letby to systemic failures at the hospital.
Weighed against the medical evidence she examined, Bohin said accusations of negligence levelled against the hospital are desperately unfair.
‘I feel incredibly for the staff at the Countess of Chester’, she said.
‘The doctors and nurses have come into a huge amount of criticism for their care of these babies. People saying that they only collapsed because of substandard care.
‘You know, no neonatal unit is perfect. All units are short of nursing staff. At the time, the doctors working on that unit were doing the same sort of work that any other doctor around the country was doing in a unit of that sort.
‘I cannot see anything that was substandard about the way they approached the resuscitation or the care of those babies.’
Claim: ‘The babies were very sick and would have died anyway’
Another often cited argument made by Letby’s defenders is that the babies in her care were extremely premature and sickly, and that their deaths were natural and unfairly attributed to her.
Again, Dr Bohin said this is an oversimplification of the complex medical evidence presented during the trial.
While many of the babies were unwell, she argued, they were medically stable and receiving care and should not have suddenly collapsed.
‘The babies were not all really poorly’, Dr Bohin said.
‘They were stable, if you looked at their heart rate, respiratory rate, saturations – all the parameters we would normally use.
‘You get a trend if a baby is becoming more unwell. These babies did not have that.
‘They were for the most part, doing well. They were stable on a neonatal unit. They certainly were not expected to collapse and die.’
Listen to the full interview with Dr Sandie Bohin by subscribing to The Crime Desk. Subscribe today for access to the Trial+ podcast, ad-free listening and a host of other member benefits.
