She might be getting lucky here I get the sense. Probably more in terms of her reputation.
To me, the most damning evidence is the equivalent 600 point doctor with no reason to lie. The 600 point Doctor is also probably among the most cynical of professionals.
Child is going wrong, she is standing over child. She doesn’t know he is there, the alarm is off, nothing. He crosses closer but she still doesn’t know he’s there, still nothing. He comes up really close and then duty or the appearance of duty takes over. Why then?
English hospitals are probably nowhere near as good as what they think.
You’d have to question how this case has been handled, removing those statements looks very odd indeed.
It looks to like they basically made up ways of killing babies to suit the causes of death.
This isn’t going away any time soon.
Letby mixed up her killing method a lot. Very rare for a serial killer
She was a generalist. Extremely versatile. Like a utility player. Could play in any position and she’d do a job for you. The Paul Madeley of baby murder.
She could even get them with insulin overdoses which were given while she wasn’t even on duty.
I think the accompanying Christmas photo of LL with the cats is rather telling of dynamics in place.
David Davis is so thick that he has made no effort to comment on his prior calls for reintroduction of death penalty. If that blowhard had got his way, LL would now have been executed.
One of that Telegraph piece’s co-authors is a former girlfriend of mine. Spoke to her last night. She says she is “99%” convinced of LL’s innocence. We happily agreed to disagree.
Correct by you, in my thinking.
Also, C-peptide levels are a huge difficulty for LL’s supposed innocence. Her newly found advocates keep skating over this issue.
I’m anti-death penalty but pro-murdering Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Stephen Miller.
I’m a general well wisher of Luigi Mangione. I don’t think I approved of that health insurance guy being murdered but if one of those opinion polls asked me whether I had a positive, negative neutral or don’t know opinion of Luigi Mangione, I’d probably go for “positive”.
I’m very happy with that hypocrisy.
Fair enough.
A piece from last week:
Consultant paediatrician Ravi Jayaram enters the intensive care unit in the early hours of 17 February and finds Letby standing next to the incubator of a premature baby who is struggling to breathe. Letby is doing nothing to help.
Nearly all the babies have died during night shifts. Letby is put on to day shifts. The pattern of emergencies also moves from night to day.
Letby is finally taken off nursing duties and given clerical work. Baby collapses and deaths stop.
Jonathan Sumption: Why I believe Lucy Letby is probably innocent
The former Supreme Court judge says the nurse was found guilty on circumstantial evidence, but fears our legal system means her conviction will never be overturned
Jonathan Sumption
Sunday March 30 2025, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
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Why do so many people feel uncomfortable about the case of Lucy Letby?
Letby was a neonatal nurse convicted of murdering seven babies in her care and attempting to murder six more while on duty at the Countess of Chester Hospital. The jury failed to agree on an attempted murder charge against a seventh baby, but she was convicted of that in a second trial some months later. She was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order on each count. As matters stand, she will never be released.
Like, I suspect, most people, I was initially appalled by the story and convinced by the verdict. Both trials were perfectly regular. In each case the judge’s summing up was impeccable. The Court of Appeal meticulously examined the evidence and concluded that an appeal was not even arguable. As I looked more closely at the facts, however, doubt set in. Was the evidence really strong enough to convict beyond reasonable doubt? Was it even plausible?
Those who question the verdicts now include many lawyers and scientists. They are too numerous and too well qualified to be dismissed as troublemakers. Their reasoning is too cogent to be brushed aside. On the material presently available, I believe that Lucy Letby was probably innocent. The families understandably want a definitive answer, but the reality is that in spite of the jury verdicts they will not get one until the serious anomalies in this case have been addressed.
The basic problem is that there was no direct evidence against Letby. The prosecution case was entirely based on inferences from circumstantial evidence. In summary, they alleged that there had been an unusual spike in the number of infant deaths in the hospital, from two to four in a typical year to 17 over a 13-month period in 2015 and 2016. Letby’s victims were said to have been stable and healthy until they suffered a sudden and extraordinary collapse which could not be explained by any natural cause.
By process of elimination, it was said, since there was no evidence of death by natural causes, foul play was the only possible answer. And since Letby was the only nurse on duty on every occasion, it must have been her. The prosecution pointed to some incoherent notes written by Letby after the shock of the first accusations. Some of them were said to amount to a confession (“I am evil”). Some look more like anguish at not having done more to save them (“Why me? I haven’t done anything wrong”). Others could be read more directly (“I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough to care for them”).
A note found in Letby’s house by police
CPS/PA
The judge told the jury (correctly on the case law) that if they were sure that Letby deliberately harmed the babies, they did not have to be satisfied of the precise method. But of course the jury was unlikely to find that Letby deliberately harmed them unless there was some explanation of how the harm came about.
The prosecution accused Letby of using one or other of five methods. In the largest category of cases (six out of fourteen) she was said to have injected air into their veins, causing an air embolism that was usually fatal. In three cases she was said to have forced air into their stomachs through a nasogastric tube. In two cases she was said to have poisoned them by adding insulin to the bags of fluid being administered intravenously. She was said to have tried twice to kill one baby by overfeeding with milk (unsuccessfully); another baby by a deliberately inflicted throat trauma (again unsuccessfully); and a third baby by dislodging a feeding tube (also unsuccessfully).
All of this seems very speculative. No one saw Letby doing any of these things. But the prosecution’s inferences were supported by independent paediatricians who gave expert evidence at the trials. Their evidence, broadly summarised, was that the symptoms observed were consistent with the theories of the prosecution and that there was no other plausible explanation.
In a case so heavily dependent on disputable inferences, a good place to start is the inherent probabilities. A sudden spike of infant deaths in special or intensive care units is not in fact that unusual, especially in hospitals with poor standards of neonatal care. Death is often unexplained in these cases, without people resorting to theories about foul play. The babies in the Letby case were particularly fragile. They were very premature, in some cases weighing less than three pounds at birth.
The case notes show that, contrary to the prosecution’s case, most of the babies were not healthy and stable before their collapse but very weak with respiratory problems or other serious health issues. Compared with the risk of sudden collapse from natural causes or human error, the likelihood of a professional nurse with no history of psychiatric problems and no discernible motive turning out to be a mass murderer is vanishingly small.
• How strong is the case against Lucy Letby?
The prosecution case depended on eliminating any realistic possibility of an innocent explanation. Yet in six of the seven cases in which Letby was convicted of murder, a thorough post-mortem examination had been carried out shortly after death by experienced pathologists at Alder Hey Hospital. They found that death was due to natural causes in five cases and was unexplained in the sixth.
The Countess of Chester had a particularly poor record. The neonatal unit was downgraded in 2016 so that it could no longer accept babies delivered at less than 32 weeks or in need of intensive care. In the same year, the Royal College of Paediatrics carried out a review into the spike in infant deaths and blamed the unacceptable standards of neonatal care in the unit over a substantial period. It was understaffed and under-resourced, had too few experienced practitioners and was too crowded for effective infection control.
The apparently damning chart showing that Letby was on duty on each occasion when the babies collapsed was presented to the jury as a trump card that made her guilt (in the prosecutor’s words) “self-evidently obvious”. Yet it appears to have been based on a statistical fallacy. The chart showed only those collapses of which Letby was accused. Others were omitted from the chart, although it was never clear what distinguished their pathology from the ones blamed on Letby.
The consensus of the statisticians that have commented on the chart is that it was statistically worthless. The courts are bad at handling statistical evidence. The case of Sally Clark, who was wrongly convicted of murdering her two children on the basis that two cot deaths was too many to be a coincidence, is a notorious example in this country. The cases of Lucia de Berk in the Netherlands and Daniela Poggiali in Italy, nurses convicted of serial murders of babies and palliative care patients respectively and later exonerated, bear a striking resemblance to the Letby case.
The prosecution’s case on air embolisms was based mainly on a 1989 study co-authored by the Canadian paediatrician Dr Shoo Lee, which found that a specific kind of skin discoloration was symptomatic of air embolism. Lee was dismayed to learn after the trial about the use made of his research, because the kind of discoloration described by the prosecution witnesses was quite different. What they saw could not be used to diagnose air embolism and there appeared to be no other evidence of it.
Dr Shoo Lee in London in January
JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
• Dr Shoo Lee: My research was misused to convict Lucy Letby — so I did my own inquiry
No tests were carried out on the fluid bags which Letby is said to have contaminated with insulin. Instead the prosecution relied on blood samples showing high levels of insulin. In one case this was ascertained at a time when Letby was not on the ward, so the prosecution suggested that she must have contaminated a fluid bag in the fridge which another nurse then took out for use. The whole hypothesis of insulin poisoning has been undermined by specialists. Insulin is generated naturally by the body, and the laboratory tests used to analyse the blood samples were not capable of reliably distinguishing between natural and synthetic insulin.
Recently, an international panel assembled by Lee, comprising 14 of the world’s most experienced specialists, examined the evidence given at her trials, together with the hospital case notes. The panel’s procedure was rigorous. Each case was independently examined by two panellists, and if they disagreed was referred to a third. Their conclusion was that the deaths were attributable to natural causes arising from problems recorded in the notes. They included thrombosis, sepsis, naturally occurring blood clots, infection, pneumonia and respiratory complications.
Human error was sometimes an important contributory factor. In one case the panel found that a tube was improperly inserted into the trachea. In another case, where excessive air was found in the stomach, the cause appeared to have been a doctor’s attempt at resuscitation, aggravated by the puncturing of the baby’s liver when he tried to release the air by inserting a needle into the abdomen. In a second case of excessive air in the stomach Letby was not even in the hospital at the relevant time. In summary, the panel found “no medical evidence supporting malfeasance causing death or injury”, but a good deal of evidence of failure to carry out basic medical procedures properly.
The legal problem is that all of this material could have been obtained by the defence for use at Letby’s trials, but none of it was. Neither side called any statistical evidence, and the only expert medical evidence was called by the prosecution. The defence did not even call the expert that they had retained. This may have been a miscalculation or legitimate tactical decision, but we cannot know why and they are professionally disabled from telling us.
Letby responding to questions from her barrister Ben Myers during her trial in May 2023
ELIZABETH COOK/PA
Whatever the reason, in hindsight the result was unfortunate. In some jurisdictions, such as France and Italy, an appeal is a whole new trial. In most jurisdictions of the United States the rules about fresh evidence on appeal are very liberal. In England, however, the power of the Court of Appeal is essentially limited to reviewing what took place in the trial court. Fresh evidence is not normally allowed if it could have been obtained before.
Letby’s only hope now is the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The commission’s job is to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and refer them to the Court of Appeal. The court must then quash the conviction if they consider it “unsafe”, in which case they will usually order a retrial. They do not have to be satisfied that Letby was innocent, but only that the jury might well not have found her guilty beyond reasonable doubt if it had seen the whole picture.
Unfortunately, the commission has a poor record. Notoriously, it refused to refer the case of Andrew Malkinson after he had served many years in jail, when DNA evidence conclusively proved his innocence. It refers fewer than 3 per cent of the cases that it reviews. The main reason is that it can only refer a case if there is a “real possibility” that the Court of Appeal will overturn the conviction.
The Court of Appeal is extraordinarily reluctant to overturn convictions entered at a regular trial. It is afraid of allowing criminal trials to become a mere “dry run”, with another chance later. It has power to receive fresh evidence that could have been obtained for the trial, but normally requires a “reasonable explanation” for the failure to produce it first time round. It takes a narrow view of what explanations are reasonable, especially in the case of expert evidence. The Court of Appeal has already refused once to admit new evidence in Letby’s case and the danger is that they may do it again. However compelling the scientific criticisms of the prosecution case at trial, there is no guarantee that they will even be considered.
We can only hope that the Letby case will not be added to the long and depressing list of uncorrected miscarriages of justice in the English courts. These injustices destroy lives and discredit the whole system of criminal justice. A whole life order is a terrible thing. If Letby was wrongly convicted, and there is now a serious case that she was, it is horrifying to contemplate that this young woman of 35 may be locked up without hope until she dies, perhaps half a century hence, simply because our system is too rigid to allow a proper review of her case.