Do they want to keep Lucy Letby locked up even after she's dead? I find it hard to see any other reason for quizzing her over more alleged killings, writes PETER HITCHENS
Do they want to keep Lucy Letby locked up even after she's dead? I find it hard to see any other reason for quizzing her over more alleged killings, writes PETER HITCHENS
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Do they want to keep Lucy Letby locked up in prison after she is dead? It is hard to see any other practical reason for prosecuting her for more alleged killings.
Her sentence is quite clear. As long as she remains convicted, she must live in captivity until she dies, among people who despise her and may wish to do her harm, without hope of any kind.
There is absolutely no possibility of release. This is pretty tough if she is guilty. If she is not guilty, which growing numbers think possible, it is unthinkably cruel. So why have Cheshire Police sent detectives 200 miles to Bronzefield Prison in Surrey, to interview Ms Letby about more alleged crimes?
I do not know. But permit me to speculate. Do police and prosecutors wish to pile so many heavy rocks on her living tomb that she can never win a final appeal against her sentence?
Or can it be that a new trial would put the brakes on the increasingly powerful effort to have the case reopened, which has been fuelled by media coverage and debate on social media?
A new trial would silence all that, under strict rules designed to prevent media comment influencing the jury. And it might do so for many months.
But there is also a risk for the prosecution that with a new legal team, and the public daily more aware of doubts, Ms Letby might actually be acquitted of such charges. Who can be sure?
The belief in her guilt, among those who have not examined the case carefully, is still very widespread. Yet among many of those who have looked carefully at it, the more they do so, the harder they find it to believe.
Lucy Letby with a babygro in a 2013 staff profile in which she talks about her training at the University of Chester and working on the unit while studying to become a nurse
The case of Lucy Letby is the strangest I think I have ever encountered. There is still no hard objective evidence that she did anything wrong.
There are alternative explanations for the deaths which she is accused of causing, and for the other events she is accused of bringing about for criminal ends. In fact, there is still no hard objective evidence that any crimes took place at all.
Even more troubling, there are important things the jury did not know, about the internal problems, staffing, morale and cleanliness of the hospital where Ms Letby worked, the Countess of Chester.
There is strong evidence that the hospital, at the time of the alleged crimes, was in a pretty bad way. But the jury were barely aware of it.
As John Sweeney pointed out in Saturday’s Daily Mail, the jury also didn’t know of the role of one of the key prosecution witnesses in the accidental death of a baby a year before Ms Letby’s alleged crimes began.
Doubts about several areas of evidence were not explored. The fact that the babies were in hospital at all because they were already unwell seems to have been put to one side. The significance of the dangerous bacteria from the hospital plumbing found in the ward sinks was not explained.
Then there was the astounding fact that door-swipe evidence supposedly showing where Ms Letby and others were in the hospital at important moments turned out after the first trial to have been not merely wrong but actually reversed. It was back to front, the wrong way round.
Weirdly, nobody seems anxious to make a fuss about this (the Crown Prosecution Service said the ‘mislabelled’ door-swipe data had been corrected and was ‘accurate’ in her retrial on one count of attempted murder). But surely if something so important was wrong in the first trial, and yet given in evidence, isn’t doubt cast on the whole prosecution?
Letby's mugshot after she was convicted of seven murders and six attempted murders of babies (later upped to seven) between 2015 and 2016
Strangest of all, Ms Letby’s defence never even called her strongest witness, Dr Mike Hall. After watching almost the entire trial, Dr Hall, a retired consultant neonatologist (an expert in the care of newborns) flatly told the authors of a new book, Unmasking Lucy Letby, that the nurse did not get a fair hearing.
Authors Judith Moritz and Jonathan Coffey – clearly impressed by his integrity and rigour – say Dr Hall remains dogged in his view that each of the babies had medical complications that pointed to other explanations for their collapse or death.
He has also written to the Thirlwall Inquiry – of which more later – saying that ‘important elements’ of the medical evidence presented by the prosecution were flawed or misleading.
We shouldn’t waste time worrying about why his evidence wasn’t called. We should demand that it should at last be heard.
The only pro-Letby witnesses the jury heard were the nurse herself, and the hospital plumber, whose evidence of the sometimes filthy state of some sinks in the hospital was worrying, but, without context, failed to have much effect. What would be lost by reopening the matter?
And yet there is an immense Establishment force of some kind that sustains Ms Letby’s conviction and resists any efforts to allow a full appeal.
Letby is arrested at her house in 2018. She is serving 15 whole-life terms, so will remain in prison until the day she dies
At the time of her conviction in August 2023, the then Prime Minister himself, Rishi Sunak, felt moved to comment, though traditionally in this country ministers have left justice to the courts. He said she had committed ‘one of the most despicable, horrific crimes in our history’. This political interest is bipartisan.
The following year, Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting went out of his way to condemn those who feared there had been a miscarriage of justice. He said their behaviour was crass and insensitive.
Lady Justice Thirlwall’s government-backed inquiry into the case refuses even to consider the possibility that the convictions might have been wrong. She dismissed those raising doubts as ‘noise’.
She later refused to let Ms Letby’s new barrister, Mark McDonald, represent her interests at the inquiry where she is daily denounced as a wicked killer. In normal conditions, I think most of us would see this as an amazing denial of natural justice. But these are not normal conditions, and there is no fuss. It is in this inquiry that the seeds of the new questioning of Ms Letby may have been sown.
Richard Baker KC, representing the families of the babies who died or were allegedly harmed, presented the findings of an audit at Liverpool Women’s Hospital while Ms Letby was working there as a trainee. He said this found that breathing tubes became dislodged during 40 per cent of the shifts Letby worked, despite this usually happening on less than 1 per cent of shifts.
Statistical experts regard this suggestion as nonsense, and one has written to Mr Baker, in pretty sharp terms, to tell him so.
Plenty of such expertise is now available to anyone who wants it. A team of 30 experts – medical, statistical and legal – has been assembled to press for the case to be reopened.
No doubt they will be more than happy to answer questions from Lady Justice Thirlwall, Cheshire Constabulary, the CPS, Rishi Sunak and Wes Streeting. Let us hope they ask them.
Personally, I think it is about time the Establishment began to accept the possibility, at the very least, that they may be mistaken, and to listen with more generosity to those who think so.
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