On Tuesday morning a giddy media pack filed into the Smeaton Room, an oak-panelled banqueting suite near Birdcage Walk in Westminster. The frisson seemed almost inappropriate. Journalists had been invited into the century-old grand room to hear from a panel of experts who had reviewed medical evidence from the deaths of seven newborn babies and the injuring of seven more.
Yet this was the latest instalment of what has become the Lucy Letby show, the real-life crime mystery playing out in front of Britons’ eyes about the former neonatal nurse who 18 months ago was condemned as the worst child serial killer in their nation’s modern history.
Letby, who is serving 15 whole-life terms after being convicted of carrying out attacks on babies in her care at Countess of Chester hospital, has always maintained her innocence.
She is now at the centre of one of the biggest alleged miscarriage of justice campaigns in British history. Like a Netflix show in real time her case has gone global, and looms like a cloud over Britain’s legal system. Politicians, journalists and now doctors are weighing in behind her.
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“We did not find any murder,” said Dr Shoo Lee, the eminent retired neonatal expert from Canada who chaired the independent committee of 14 global experts who reviewed the medical evidence in painstaking detail. “In all cases death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.”
In the meantime the babies’ families who were trying to rebuild shattered lives must now do so in the shadow of the legal, political and media circus around the woman who was convicted – her supporters say wrongly – for harming them.
Tuesday’s press conference was chaired by veteran Tory MP David Davis, who has taken up Letby’s case in parliament. Alongside him was Letby’s new barrister Mark McDonald and Neena Modi, a neonatal expert from Imperial College in London who was among those to review the evidence.
But, as Davis said, Lee was the “star of the show”. He spoke for an hour and 10 minutes uninterrupted as he laid out in forensic detail the rationale behind the panel’s conclusion that the evidence used to convict Letby was all wrong. The initial frisson was soon dampened by what felt like a college science lecture.
A medical paper Lee wrote years ago was originally used by the prosecution during Letby’s trial as they sought to prove she had killed some of the babies by injecting them with tiny bubbles of air. Others, it was alleged, had been poisoned with insulin. Lee believed his paper was used incorrectly.
He subsequently approached Letby’s legal team and testified at her failed appeal. When she ran out of legal options he offered to convene a global panel of independent experts who, without exception, concluded that the medical evidence they saw was deeply flawed.
Lee went through the cases. Baby 1, the prosecution argued, died after being injected with air. The panel concluded she actually died of natural causes – thrombosis. Baby 4 was also said to have been injected with air. The experts said the child had instead died of “systemic sepsis and pneumonia”, which should have been spotted and and the mother given antibiotics.
On and on Lee went in relentless detail. When the time finally came for questions he was asked if this case could have happened in Canada. If the Countess of Chester was in his country, he said, it “would have been shut down” as he criticised its standards of care.
The panel’s final report will be shared at the end of this month with Britain’s Criminal Cases Review Commission, which could take years to decide whether to send the case back to appeal courts as a potential miscarriage of justice.
“I find it very hard to understand why they would not do that,” said Davis. “Our principle aim is the pursuit of justice.”
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