The new lawyer for serial killer Lucy Letby has sent an application to the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission) to have the case resubmitted to the Court of Appeal. His claim is that the new evidence of a chair of ‘medical experts’ means the case is ‘demolished’. ‘If the experts are correct, no crime was committed’. This, however, is a massive non sequitur. The expert’s submission amounts to one ‘aspect’ of the case against Letby and, even if correct, does not lead to the innocent conclusion. Not the whole picture. It is disingenuous in the extreme by the human rights lawyer, Mark McDonald. The real truth behind the case has little to do with the beneficence of a human rights lawyer, or miscarriages of justice, but is far more sinister.
The CCRC responded to the submission with the telling ‘We are aware there has been a great deal of speculation and commentary surrounding Lucy Letby’s case, much of it from parties with only a partial view of the evidence’. And there’s the rub. The claims of the new defence efforts are based around some evidence (re: embolisms- blockages due to air bubbles) disputed by the team of experts. The expert neonatal Professor Shoo Lee, at the front of the new claims of innocence, concluded ‘we did not find any murders’ and ‘death or injury was due to natural causes or just bad medical care’. The case against Letby was that she had injected the babies with insulin, air or force feeding by milk. Lee maintained, however, that embolism is a rare condition and the skin markings found on the seven babies, were not proof with that condition. Yet he does not offer any explanation for the skin discolouration’s found on all the babies. When questioned previously at the Court of Appeal he said that the only known signs of embolism were pink blood vessels on top of a pink/blue body. He had not studied the victims medical records at the time or witnessed any of the testimonies by other medical staff which indicated the strange rashes on the babies. Dr Dewi Evans, however, an expert prosecution witness, concluded the evidence with the damning ‘Babies don’t suddenly drop dead‘.
The discolouration’s, again, were only one part of the prosecution case. The medical teams in the hospital had never seen these colourings before, which coincided with Letby’s shifts on the ward. They had never seen babies not responding to resuscitation. Air was found in the babies blood stream. The defence maintained at the time that the babies, despite the statements of family and staff, were ‘not well’. All of them were not well. Another coincidence. This claim, put forward by retired consultant, Dr Mike Hall, was that there is no ‘proof’ that the air in their bloodstreams was administered by Letby. Yet Hall admitted he had not seen the evidence to back his illness hypothesis up, even though he was advising the defence team at the original trial. Dr Dewi Evans said that ‘the people making these claims have not seen the clinical evidence or that they are unaware of what constitutes well being in a premature baby.’ Hall never testified in court. Yet this is a bizarre twist. He had been expected to be called to testify for the defence- but it was Letby herself who didn’t call him to the witness box.
Another defence argument was that the tests measuring Insulin levels in two of the babies were suspect. The defence disputed the findings claiming the standard test for this, the ‘Immunoassaay’ test, is inaccurate. The BBC investigators spent months analysing this argument, consulting experts and concluded that:
‘Immunoassay is usually accurate and the circumstances in which interference might occur are extremely unlikely.’
The insulin evidence is quite clear and does not form part of the new case brought by Mark McDonald. To demand a new Court of Appeal hearing based on a small part of the evidence refuses to listen to the big picture. Of course, the other circumstantial evidence against Letby is more than damning. At the Thirlwall enquiry her past colleagues all testified to the view that Letby is guilty. Letby was on duty at the ward between June 2015 and June 2016 , during the deaths of 12 out of 13 of the babies. Her handwritten notes confessed to the killings. She spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the details of the babies parents online. She was caught by Dr Ravi Jayaraam watching and not acting as Baby K’s blood oxygen was at life threatening levels. The alarm on the incubator was ‘not working’. She had been also associated with other strange incidents at the hospital.
Even now, in Chester, the police are working through the details of 4000 babies under Letby’s care whilst she was a nurse.
The clue to the entire affair, and the new claims, lies in the fact that the MP David Davis is, with Mark McDonald, at the heart of the matter. The well-respected MP has been involved in several investigative causes, for example opposing the extradition of Julian Assange in 2021. He also was against the Johnson government plans to privatise NHS data. In The Daily Telegraph he espoused reform of the National Health Service and the introduction of a social insurance based system. He said the NHS was “plagued by ineffective bureaucracy” and that structural reform did not mean that the principles of the NHS being universal and free at the point of delivery needed to be abandoned. The perception in the UK, in fact anyone who has anecdotal evidence of it, is a system which appears to be more driven by covering up wrong doing than solving negligence and abuse. Hence it is no surprise that Davis is involved.
The behemoth that is the NHS is allergic to corporate liability. Fear of prosecution and negligence runs riot in the system. Yet the British legal system works as a form of enriching symbiosis; on the one side an avalanche of state funded personal injury lawyers, on the other the NHS defence of it. Squashed in the middle somewhere is that old chestnut ‘truth’. Hence there is logic to the claims of some that Letby has been thrown under the bus, to take the hit and bird time. It is for legal expertise to gather all the evidence, not only medical. Letby, on the balance of evidence, is more than likely guilty. But there is a bigger picture here. The NHS is akin to a rotten borough before reform. The whole case resembles a Greek tragedy, a ‘deus ex machina’, when the god or goddess is lowered to the stage, arriving from Olympus, a contrived scapegoat. Someone must take the blame. Yet this tragedy still has no denouement.
(Photograph: Calleamanecer, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as ‘The Spectator’ ‘The Times’, ‘Takimag’, ‘The American Spectator’, ‘Asian Affairs’, ‘Deliberatio’, ‘L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica’, ’The National Interest’, ‘GeoPolitical Monitor’, ‘Merion West’, ‘Voegelin View’, ‘The Montreal Review’, ’The European Conservative’, ‘Visegrad Insight’, The Hungarian Review’ ,’The Salisbury Review’, ‘New English Review’, , ‘American Thinker’, ‘Indian Strategic Studies’, ‘Philosophy News’. His new book- ‘Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century’ is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.
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A poorly researched article, continuing to ignore much of the key evidence that the original trial overlooked.
Yawn… another lazy, poorly researched article from someone who neither knows or understands the medical issues but thinks he has some kind of intellectual superiority over those who have deep knowledge of this subject. If Brian Bolger is taken in by Dr Dewi Evans statement that ‘babies don’t suddenly drop dead’ he must be very gullible. First Dr Evans evidence gives the impression that babies are small versions of adults. They are not, but Evans would have us think they are if one reads the court transcripts. The reasons these babies are in a NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT is because they are sick or on danger of becoming suddenly very sick….the clue is in the name. If Dr Evans thinks babies ‘do not suddenly drop dead’ we must wonder where he has worked in the past as they DO suddenly deteriorate and they DO suddenly die and they do this most often where doctors in charge of them are insufficiently experienced to properly recognise that a baby is deteriorating or where they fail to undertake timely monitoring of the parameters which illustrate this. Of course Dr Evans had no recent practical experience probably last doing any clinical work before 2010 so as he demonstrated when he failed to recognise a piece of equipment shown to him in court he doesn’t seem to be very current with neonatal medicine.
As for all the other fluff about rashes which to a significant extent seems to have relied on recovered memory by various actors in this tragedy it is a fact that there are all sorts of skin manifestations visible when babies are dying and their interpretation as sinister may have been simply a reflection of the lack of experience of the witnesses….certainly some events were so mysterious and unusual that they were not even recorded in the notes or mentioned to the coroner.
So what counts here is the medical evidence…it shows clearly that there was a good cause of either sickness or poor management which explains the demise of the babies in and although it is uncomfortable for some to have the national religion of the NHS questioned better that we use this opportunity to do so, so that change can be made which will protect future patients and protect the staff such as Lucy Letby from such scandalous accusations. At the same time major reforms of policing and the work of the DPP and the CPS need to be undertaken given the light that this case has shone on them. Finally complete reform of the way in which medical and technical evidence is dealt with in the courts is needed and urgently with an end to the system which allows ‘experts’ who are unlicenced and at the periphery of their subject to be allowed to be paid for their evidence.
There is a lot of detail to argue about, but it is simpler that. Mr Bolger has fallen into a medieval logic trap that works well with superstition and conspiracy theories. You cannot be guilty of a crime that didn’t happen.
The decision that there were murders going on at the hospital was based upon a combination of seemingly baffling medical events (not seen as murders) and the seeming pattern (statistical) of how frequently those baffling events occurred.
Long ago the statistics were blown out of the water. The “pattern” was nonsense. Then the witch hunters abandoned that and did a fast reverse ferret and told us it was never about the statistics but the medicine.
Over the last few weeks the baffling (to some) medical phenomena were explained. They were sadly explicable events that passed post mortem but had been resuscitated in a spirit of paranoia. So it wasn’t a murder. Or a set of murders. Nor a pattern of murders.
But Mr Bolger still thinks she did “it”. There wasn’t an “it” to be done. It’s the logic of the ducking stool.
The whole case has attracted distasteful speculation by those who (99.9% of us) lack the specialist knowledge to even properly understand the various ins and outs. Many will disagree, but because it’s an emotive issue involving babies common sense is sidetracked. Unlike in other areas of national concern where it’s obvious the ‘experts’ are liars/bought, these types of cases surely cry out for an independent inquiry as courts are not suitable to judge on the evidence alone presented to them.
There seems to be (perhaps there always was?) a tendency to convict based on assumptions of likelihood rather than indisputable evidence, but the public and other vested interests prefer revenge until a convenient about turn if new evidence emerges.
The Lucy Letby case just does not ring right to me. Means? Maybe. Opportunity? Maybe. But motive? The laThe Lucy Letby case just does not ring right to me. Means? Maybe. Opportunity? Maybe. But motive? The lawyers speculated that it was boredom, that she was a thrill-seeker, that she had a crush on a colleague, or that she enjoyed playing God. The delightful Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu has opined that she only got away with it so long because she was white. These days, of course, whiteness has to be a factor in all crimes and misfortunes.
None seem convincing motives to me, however, and there has been no suggestion of Munchausen’s by Proxy as in the Beverley Allitt case, or monetary reward as in the cases of Harold Shipman and Bodkin Adams. Nor am I convinced by the supposed ‘written ‘confession,’ which was arguably just a means of catharsis, her working out on paper her feelings of guilt and inadequacy at being unable to prevent babies’ deaths. I personally know people who psychiatrists have advised to write out their feelings about situations with which they are unhappy. I did the same myself 35 years ago when I had my lifetime’s worst job at a Leeds fitted bedroom firm, on the urging of a female colleague with a psychology degree who was as depressed as me by the job’s utter awfulness. It was indeed cathartic, and it prompted me to update my CV and recirculate it to every recruiter in Leeds.
There is an unpleasant side of human nature that wants to find somebody to blame when something terrible happens. To cast doubt on Letby’s supposed guilt online invites mobbing by deranged and unpleasant misogynists calling her a whore, as if for a young woman to be sexually active is somehow abnormal and criminal of itself. The same mindset 400 years ago imagined witches and hanged or burned them. Now though, we know the ‘witches’ were innocent, and their accusers often had ulterior motives to do with land and property.
I get the feeling that our adversarial justice system does not work with cases like this, but I’m not sure a purely inquisitorial process would either. Maybe there’s a case for mixing the two systems, with a third legal team to reinforce the judge. You’d have prosecution and defence as now, and then you’d have the third team examining both and being able to ask anyone, including the defence and prosecution lawyers, the accused, and all witnesses, any questions they wanted without restriction. The simple aim would be to have justice done and reduce the chance one side or the other winning by technicalities, by legal sleight-of-hand and verbal trickery, or because one side or the other was less than completely competent, as in the Stefan Kiszko case. (But I’m not a lawyer!)
If Letby did what’s alleged, then her behaviour was so insanely risky as to make detection and her accusation certain. If Lucy Letby is not insane though, and had nothing to gain and everything to lose, why would she do it? Why would she enter a caring profession in the first place? There are still far more questions than answers.
Lucy Letby is either evil beyond our comprehension or there has been a grave injustice, the righting of which will be difficult thanks to a system that propagates the myth of its own infallibility. Either way, we need to know. The questions need answers. Motive most of all.
Dewi Evans said he knew there had been murder committed within 15 minutes of seeing the evidence. He’s also boasts about the number of people he’s “put away” and he offered his services even though his expertise is not in neonatal care. I believe he’s also been involved in various other dubious convictions. Professor Norman Fenton has also looked at the statistical evidence and has concluded that it doesn’t stack up. There was also evidence of leaking sewage pipes in the ward which may have caused some of the deaths. To me the whole thing stinks of a cover up . The least that should happen is a re trial.
Sadly for LL it’s still all speculation by the NHS, the legal profession and a gawping public who enjoy the drama as though it was just another soap opera plot. Being ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’ and other convenient (for the police and courts) circumstantial evidence helps clear up cases that otherwise would remain unsolved, but justice might be better served by this rather than unsafe convictions and false imprisonment? I can think of other cases where cover ups are highly likely.
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A potentially interesting article and some valid points made by commenters. Clearly there are many aspects of the case that may well need urgent re-examination – but it is all very hard for a non-medical person to try to follow as the subject is so recondite and specialist. Certainly inflammatory reporting by a heavily-prurient and sensationalist tabloid press does not make it any easier.