Introduced by UK MP Sir David Davis as the “star of the show,” Singapore-born Dr Shoo Lee has become a critical figure in the campaign pushing forward the claimed innocence of convicted baby killer Lucy Letby.
Letby, a former neonatal nurse, was convicted in 2023 of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others at the Countess of Chester Hospital, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole-life order. At a 2024 retrial of the attempted murder of a baby known as “Baby K,” she received a further whole-life order, bringing her to 15 whole-life orders in total, to run concurrently.
For most of his life, Dr Shoo Lee has existed at the highest levels of medicine — far from courtrooms, tabloids, and true crime documentaries (until Netflix’s recent 2026 documentary, The Investigation of Lucy Letby).
A Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, Lee is one of the most influential neonatologists of the past half-century. He has held senior leadership roles across major hospitals and research institutes in Canada, the US, and Europe. His work has shaped how premature and critically ill newborns are treated around the world.
Harvard-trained as a health economist and appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, Lee has advised governments, founded neonatal research networks, and served on international panels that helped standardise care for infants globally. By any measure, his career is the kind most doctors only read about.
Which is why, in the autumn of 2023 — long after his retirement — Lee did not expect a single letter to pull him into one of the most controversial criminal cases in modern British history.
At the time Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven newborns and attempting to murder six more, Dr Lee was harvesting crops on his farm in Alberta, Canada. He knew almost nothing about the case, and had never heard of Letby.
What he didn’t know — because no one had told him — was that a medical paper he had co-authored in 1989 had been cited during the trial. More than three decades old, the research had become central to the prosecution’s theory of how the babies had died.
That paper discussed a rare clinical phenomenon involving air embolism in neonates. In court, prosecutors argued that certain symptoms observed in the infants — including unusual skin discolouration — were evidence that Letby had deliberately injected air into their veins.
The argument helped secure her conviction.
Dr Lee, the surviving author of that research, was stunned.
After learning how his work had been used, Lee began speaking publicly — first to reporters, and later to an international panel of neonatologists — to clarify what his research did not say.
According to Lee, the prosecution’s interpretation fundamentally misunderstood the science. The signs pointed to in court, such as skin mottling or discolouration, do not reliably indicate venous air embolism. More importantly, the type of embolism described in his 1989 paper is a different clinical phenomenon altogether from what was alleged in Letby’s case.
In other words: the medical evidence used to underpin the theory of murder was never designed to support that conclusion.
For Lee, this wasn’t about defending a nurse he didn’t know. It was about the integrity of medical science — and what happens when complex research is simplified, distorted, or overstated in a courtroom.
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Lee’s intervention matters because the Lucy Letby case was built almost entirely on circumstantial and expert medical evidence. There was no clear forensic proof, no witnesses, and no confession. The prosecution’s narrative depended on convincing a jury that certain clinical signs must have resulted from intentional harm.
When the author of the very research used to justify that narrative says it was misapplied, it destabilises the foundation of the verdict.
In the press conference chaired by Sir Davis, which was shown in the Netflix documentary, Lee states, “Our conclusion of this panel, therefore, [is] there was no medical evidence to support malfeasance causing death or injury in any of the 17 cases in the trial.”
“There were serious problems related to medical care of the patients at this hospital,” Lee continues, in reference to the Countess of Chester Hospital. “There were problems related to teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration. In summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murders.”
Lee goes on to further conclude in the documentary, “If there was no murder, then there was no murderer. And so why was Lucy Letby in jail?”
Since speaking out, Lee has become a key figure in the growing movement questioning Letby’s conviction — not as an activist, but as a reluctant expert pulled back into public life by the misuse of his work.
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He didn’t set out to challenge a murder conviction. He didn’t seek attention. He was retired, farming, and done with public debates. But sometimes, even decades-old science has consequences its authors never imagined.
Although Letby remains behind bars, facing her 15 life sentences, a public inquiry was launched by the UK government in October 2023 to examine the events at the hospital and their implications following the trial. Additionally, Cheshire Constabulary has launched an investigation into corporate manslaughter at the hospital.
In 2025, the police also submitted additional evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service affecting nine further babies.
