Judges hear senior surgeon’s appeal against manslaughter conviction

A senior surgeon jailed for manslaughter after a delay in operating on a patient with a perforated bowel should not have been convicted of causing or significantly contributing to the patient’s death, three judges at the Court of Appeal were told this week.

The patient, James Hughes, was taking an anticoagulant that could have caused him to bleed to death if David Sellu had operated on him earlier, Mark Ellison QC, for Sellu, told the court in the surgeon’s appeal against his conviction.

Sellu, a senior consultant colorectal surgeon, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in November 2013 for contributing to Hughes’s death in February 2010 at the Clementine Churchill Hospital in Harrow, north London.1 The conviction and sentence, of which Sellu served half in …