Hugh Schofield

They used to raise funds for their own benefit.

They used to raise funds for their own benefit.

In 2017, fellow doctors began to become suspicious.

There was an incident in which a young woman was found to have had emergency procedures required during an operation because something had gone wrong.

What was doubly suspicious was that

Dr. Pesce had moved to another clinic for a time and then come back.

And the pattern of problems like this had followed him.

So they'd been at this one clinic, you know, at a high rate of these troubling events.

They'd stopped.

and then moved to this other clinic where he was at, and then he'd come back and they'd resumed at this first clinic, and then stopped when, in 2017, he was disbarred from acting pending this trial.

of patients, patients who have been looked after, not by him directly, but by fellow anesthetists.

And then he was able to intervene in many of them as the kind of savior.

His prestige was boosted.

That of his fellows was gravely damaged.

And that, the prosecution said, was his motivation.

He protested his innocence.

The defence said there was no tangible proof of any of this.

And obviously, it was quite hard to establish exactly what had happened in cases which were so old.

But the court believed that he was responsible in all these cases, 30 overall, 12 of them resulting in deaths.

And they've given him this very stiff punishment of imprisonment for life, basically.