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Case study: Surgeon on his wrongful conviction
The Guardian
|June 16, 2025
David Sellu knows full well the impact an expert witness can have on a criminal case.
A former surgeon, Sellu spent 15 months in prison after being convicted of gross negligence manslaughter in 2013, following a trial that largely hinged on the evidence of medical expert witnesses.
After an appeal in 2016, Sellu's conviction was quashed and the appeal judge criticised the way the experts' evidence was handled, saying they "asserted gross negligence" when this was "a matter for [the jury] and not the experts".
"I think I can probably say that there are many, many hundreds of people who would not be alive today had it not been for my skills and my treatment," Sellu said. "And yet medicine was deprived of my further input, purely on the back of a case that should never have been brought."
This story is from the June 16, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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