Lucy Letby: review the conviction

Neonatal nurse Lucy Letby was convicted in 2023 of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of seven more babies between 2015 and 2016 at the Countess of Chester Hospital, after a ten-month trial. A jury sat across from Letby day after day, hearing evidence.

So we should be dubious of some of the tons of “Lucy Letby is innocent” material out there that is so sure of Letby's innocence, based on listening to podcasts. Still more should we be dubious of some of the right wing political grifters who have seized upon the case.

However there is serious, credible, and mounting evidence that the conviction may be unsafe and there should be a retrial.

Many of the key elements of the prosecution case have been called into question. The use of statistics to "prove" a correlation between Letby’s shifts and deaths and serious medical collapses of babies has been criticised by the Royal Statistical Society. No statistical experts were involved in the trial.

The prosecution's expert clinical witness, Dewi Evans, has been criticised for inconsistency in his evidence and has since changed his position on how some of the babies died from what he presented in court.

Prosecution assertions that the infants were clinically stable before their collapses has been challenged, with it recently coming to light that the obstetric reports of the babies had not been shared with the defence or reviewed by the prosecution.

Alternative explanations were excluded during the trial and since we have seen mounting evidence pointing towards negligent care, unsafe clinical practices and cover ups by management in the Countess of Chester hospital. The jury were not fully aware of this context and possible plausible alternative explanations for the deaths and medical collapses.

All of the original post‑mortem reports for the infants - most of whom underwent autopsy - did not identify suspicious or unnatural causes of death. The prosecution was based on later theories of a range of methods of harm that were hard to spot.

The prosecution has been criticised by one of the authors of the clinical paper on air embolisms that the prosecution used as evidence for misrepresenting the papers findings.

In the cases of the babies that were found by the trial to be killed by insulin it has since come to the light that the laboratory that ran these tests did not follow their own policy of using a more accurate test to follow up and confirm the initial test. A quality‑control check conducted by the laboratory around the same period produced a falsely elevated insulin reading; something the jury were not informed of.

A panel of fourteen very senior medical people reviewed the case and they did not find evidence of Letby causing harm. Another panel of seven experts found similar.

Now the case sits with the Criminal Cases Review Commission. They have the power to send the case for back to appeal court.

They should do this to consider if the conviction was unsafe given the mounting evidence and could order a retrial.

I would not presume to know if Lucy Letby is innocent but I think there is a strong case to say the jury in the original trial did not have the accurate and full information laid before them to make the conviction safe.