Is Lucy Letby guilty or suffering a shocking miscarriage of justice?

In the 18 months since her conviction, the debate over Lucy Letby’s guilt has burned more fiercely — and become ever more perplexing — with every passing day.

We lay out the timeline of court cases, claims and counter-claims which on Tuesday culminated in a panel of medical experts announcing that they had uncovered “one of the major injustices of modern times”.

AUGUST 2023 TRIAL

Lucy Letby’s ten-month trial at Manchester Crown Court finally concluded after 110 hours of deliberation by the jury.

She was found guilty of murdering seven newborn babies and attempting to murder six more.

She attacked her victims “in plain sight” — injecting air into their bloodstreams or feeding tubes, causing them to collapse and die.

She also poisoned them with insulin, overfed them milk and rammed hard plastic tubes or medical instruments down their throats, the court had heard.

In what the victims’ families described as “one final act of wickedness”, Letby refused to attend the sentencing hearing at which she was told she would die behind bars.

But within days of her conviction, a fundraising campaign to help the nurse clear her name had been launched.

It claimed her conviction “may represent the greatest miscarriage of justice that the UK has witnessed” and appealed for help from scientists, statisticians and medical professionals to prove her innocence.

SEPTEMBER 2023 RE-TRIAL ANNOUNCED

At her original trial, Letby was cleared of two attempted murder charges and there were six other charges on which jurors could not decide.

In September 2023, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it would pursue a re-trial in the case of Baby K, a girl born in February 2016.

In the same month, Letby’s legal team announced that it would seek leave to appeal her convictions.

Criticisms of key aspects of the trial were also beginning to emerge, with particular focus on an eye-catching chart that had been presented to the jury.

It detailed all 25 “suspicious events” involving newborn infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit over a 13-month period starting in June 2015.

These included seven deaths and a number of sudden “collapses”.

These incidents were plotted against the shift patterns of all 39 nurses employed there.

The table revealed that Letby was on duty every single time one had occurred.

The nurse at the second highest number of collapses had been on duty at seven of the 25.

Barrister Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, argued Letby was the “one constant presence” when babies were taken ill.

And after she was taken off the ward, he noted, deaths stopped.

But critics, including a number of eminent mathematicians, have warned that because the chart covered a relatively short period and omitted several deaths and collapses which occurred during the timeframe, it was statistically invalid and potentially very misleading.

MAY 2024 APPEAL REFUSED

After considering the case documents, a judge refused Letby permission to appeal in January 2024.

But, as was her right, she then took the case before a panel of three further judges to ask them to allow the case to be heard by the Court of Appeal.

In May, the judges again refused permission.

But because of the risk of prejudicing Letby’s forthcoming re-trial, they delayed publishing their reasons for the decision.

In May, a 13,000-word article in The New Yorker was also published in America, raising more questions about the prosecution.

Readers in the UK were barred from accessing it online, an act the Tory MP David Davis claimed in Parliament was “in defiance of open justice”.

But its publication in the UK was also restricted because of the pending re-trial.

JULY 2024 GUILTY AGAIN

Following a three-week trial at Manchester Crown Court, Letby was found guilty of the attempted murder of a two-hour-old girl on the ward where she had killed seven other babies.

The infant was born 15 weeks premature and weighed little more than a bag of sugar when Letby was alleged to have tampered with her breathing tube, causing a “life-threatening” deterioration.

The newborn died three days later.

Letby was initially charged with her murder, but prosecutors later decided there was insufficient evidence that her actions caused the baby’s death.

As Letby was sentenced to a 15th whole life order, she dramatically turned to the judge and announced: “I’m innocent.”

With the conclusion of the trial, the reasons behind her failed appeal could also be published.

Barrister Benjamin Myers KC, defending Letby, had questioned the inclusion of evidence by Dewi Evans, a doctor and the prosecution’s lead witness, saying it should have been disallowed as he had been “hostile and emotive, dogmatic and biased”.

Dr Evans has become a focus of criticism for Letby’s supporters.

They have questioned his experience — he retired as a consultant paediatrician in 2009 — and the “very informal” way in which Cheshire Police selected him.

Working as an expert witness, in May 2017, he read about the investigation and emailed a contact at the National Crime Agency.

“If the Chester police have no one in mind, I’d be interested to help,” he wrote.

“Sounds like my kind of case.”

But the appeal judges rejected the defence’s criticism of Dr Evans, ruling that he did not lack impartiality, was well-qualified, and it was up to the jury to assess the quality of his evidence.

Mr Myers also argued that medical evidence behind Letby’s convictions for fatally injecting air into babies’ bloodstreams, producing what is known as an air embolism, was “very weak” and could not be relied upon.

Evidence was given to the court of work by Dr Shoo Lee, a Canadian neonatologist and academic, who researched air embolism in babies in 1989 and whose research had been relied upon by Dr Evans.

His paper was referred to because it suggested infants with air in the blood had rashes like those seen on the children who had been harmed by Letby.

In their 59-page ruling, the appeal judges found that none of the four legal challenges advanced by Letby were “arguable” and they did not consider that the criteria for the admission of fresh evidence had been met.

AUGUST 2024 DODGY DOOR SWIPE DATA

The CPS acknowledged that evidence presented at Letby’s first trial, showing which staff came in and out of the baby unit she worked on, was incorrect.

During the retrial, Mr Johnson, prosecuting, said that door-swipe data showing which nurses and doctors entered and exited the intensive care unit, had been “mislabelled”.

Accurate data was provided for the retrial.

At the first trial, prosecutors said that consultant nurse Dr Ravi Jayaram had found Letby standing over the deteriorating Baby K at 3.50am on February 17, 2016, and that the infant’s breath NG tube had been dislodged.

They had argued that the door-swipe data showed that Baby K’s designated nurse left the unit at 3.47am.

However, the amended data at the retrial showed the nurse had returned at that time.

The revelation prompted MP Mr Davis to call for urgent clarification, saying: “The door-swipe data is clearly vital to knowing which nurse was where at one point in time and this, in turn, was vital to the prosecution’s case in the first trial. It is, therefore, essential that the CPS makes it plain whether those errors occurred throughout any of the evidence of the first trial.”

SEPTEMBER 2024 NEW BARRISTER

It was revealed that Letby had replaced her legal team and was planning a fresh appeal.

New barrister Mark McDonald said that he planned to take her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to apply for it to be sent back to the Court of Appeal.

“I knew almost from the start, following this trial, that there is a strong case that she is innocent,” he said.

“The fact is juries get it wrong. And yes, so do the Court of Appeal. History teaches us that.”

SEPTEMBER 2024 CONFESSION . . . OR COUNSELLING

It is claimed that scribbled notes by Letby, which prosecutors said amounted to murder confessions, were only made after she was encouraged to write down her feelings to deal with stress.

The handwritten notes which police found on scraps of paper at Letby’s home read: “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them,” and “I am evil I did this”.

But sources told The Guardian that the notes and others like them were a counselling strategy to help her deal with extreme stress.

In her evidence to court, Letby claimed that, in the notes, she had been “blaming myself but not because I’d done something, because of the way people were making me feel”.

She did not mention any other background to the notes, such as the counselling.

SEPTEMBER 2024 ‘SHAME ON YOU ALL’

Amid growing speculation about a ‘miscarriage of justice’, the parents of two of Letby’s victims spoke out, saying that campaigners who doubted the convictions made them “question humanity”.

“We would like to say, ‘shame on you all’,” said the mother and father of twin boys — one of whom was murdered by Letby, the other attacked.

Days later, the public inquiry looking into what happened at the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit began.

Opening the hearings, Lady Justice Thirlwall said that doubts cast on Letby’s convictions had come “entirely from people who were not at the trial” and had created a “noise that caused an enormous amount of stress” for the parents of the victims.

OCTOBER 2024 INSULIN

At her first trial, Letby was found guilty of attempting to murder two babies — referred to in court as Baby F and Baby L — by injecting synthetic insulin into intravenous feeding bags.

Prosecutors said both babies had been doing well until Letby attacked them.

In court, Letby agreed that “someone” had “unlawfully” given insulin to the two babies by tampering with the bags — but denied it was her.

But in October, experts questioned the reliability of the blood tests which were presented in court that showed the presence of artificial insulin.

Dr Adel Ismail, a world-leading expert in such tests, told the BBC: ”In my research, I found the error rate is one in 200.”

He added that a second, confirmatory test in such cases was “absolutely vital”.

In the case of Baby F and Baby L, follow-up tests were not carried out by the lab.

DECEMBER 2024 MORE BABIES?

The Daily Mail revealed that Letby had been interviewed under caution while in prison over the alleged murders of more babies.

These involved the unexpected deaths and collapses of infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital and — for the first time — at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, where Letby trained as a student.

The development came as part of a review by Cheshire Police of all 4000 babies she had cared for during her career, dating back to January 2012.

It included her two training placements at the hospital in Liverpool.

The Thirlwall inquiry also heard that babies’ breathing tubes were dislodged at an unusual rate during her placements in Liverpool.

Sources told the Mail that any charges, if there were any, would not be brought until “well into the new year”.

DECEMBER 2024 UNPRECEDENTED PRESS CONFERENCE

In a highly unusual move, Letby’s barrister Mr McDonald held a press conference to announce that he was seeking a fresh appeal based on the “unreliability” of Dr Evans.

He claimed that the prosecution’s expert witness had “now changed his mind on the cause of death of three babies” and was “not a reliable witness”.

“I have never known, in 26 years of being a barrister, an expert to change their mind a year after the convictions on the cause of death or what they said to the jury,” Mr McDonald said.

“That, to me, is astonishing.”

He also gave details from new reports — produced for Letby’s defence team — by two consultant neonatologists who had looked into the deaths of Baby O and Baby C and had found ‘no evidence of deliberate harm’.

Mr McDonald said he would immediately seek permission from the Court of Appeal to take the “exceptional, but necessary, decision” to apply to reopen Letby’s case.

He said he would also attempt to have her case considered by the CCRC.

The day after the press conference, Dr Evans accused Letby’s legal team of making “unsubstantiated, unfounded, inaccurate” claims about him.

Dr Evans reiterated his view that Letby murdered the babies, adding that the Appeal Court judges who had reviewed his evidence were supportive of it.

“I cannot recall any King’s Counsel advocating on behalf of a client via a press conference, especially a case of such sensitivity,” he said.

“If required, I would be pleased to give evidence in the usual way — on oath, subject to cross-examination, and where my evidence is placed in the public domain. I would expect any other participant to agree to the same principles.”

FEBRUARY 2025 FINAL BID FOR FREEDOM?

On Monday, the Daily Mail revealed that the CCRC was preparing to examine claims that Letby was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Letby’s legal team had made a preliminary application which it had begun to assess.

The CCRC will now determine if there is new evidence which presents a reasonable chance of a conviction being overturned.

At a press conference yesterday, held by Letby’s legal team and attended by former MP and Mail columnist Nadine Dorries, Dr Lee presented the findings of a panel of 14 expert neonatologists.

They concluded that the babies Letby had been convicted of murdering were the victims of “bad medical care” or had deteriorated because of natural causes.

“If you’re looking for the truth, you don’t have to look any further,” he said.

“In summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murders.”

Dr Lee said he had updated his research and found no cases of skin discoloration linked to air embolism.

He said the expert witness at the trial had misinterpreted his research, which he had recently updated and had found no cases of skin discoloration linked to air embolism by the venous system.

“So let’s do away with that theory,” he said.

Ms Dorries believes that the evidence Dr Lee has presented “will turbocharge the dismantling of the prosecution’s case against the former neonatal nurse”.

She wrote: “I believe Letby’s conviction should be overturned, and she should walk free”.

As for Letby, Mr McDonald said that she would be following developments closely from her prison cell at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey and was “very much engaged with everything that is going on”.

He said she maintained her innocence, adding: “This international panel is her final hope to show that what she has been saying all along is right.”