Police body cam footage shows Lucy Letby's arrest on July 3, 2018 in Chester, England. Photo / Cheshire Constabulary via Getty Images
The defence team for Lucy Letby, a British nurse found guilty of murdering babies in her care, says it will ask the Court of Appeal to review all of her convictions, because the lead prosecution expert has changed his mind about how three of the babies died.
The development shines a critical spotlight on Letby’s convictions for the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of seven others at a hospital in northern England between 2015 and 2016. The case shocked Britain but has increasingly been viewed by some experts as a possible miscarriage of justice.
Dr Dewi Evans, a retired pediatrician, was the prosecution’s lead expert witness and had testified in court that air had been injected down the nasal gastric tube of three babies in Letby’s care, leading to their deaths.
“Remarkably, Dr Evans has now changed his mind on the cause of death of three of the babies,” Mark McDonald, a defence attorney for Letby, said during a news briefing in London on Monday (Tuesday NZT).
“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 in what they said to the jury,” McDonald later added. “That is astonishing.”
He said that Evans had given a new report to police a few months ago, in which he said that he had revised his opinion on the death of one of the babies, known as Baby C. Evans has also given public statements since the trial, in which he offered differing accounts of the deaths of two other babies.
“Despite numerous requests, the prosecution have yet to give this report to the defence,” McDonald said, citing the filing to the police.
The defence plans to argue to the Court of Appeal that Evans was “not a reliable expert” and given that he was the prosecution’s lead expert in the cause of death for all the babies, all of Letby’s convictions were therefore in question.
“This type of application is rarely used, and a judge now must decide if the Court of Appeal will reopen the case,” McDonald added. He said both the appeal application and an application for a broader review of Letby’s criminal case would be filed before the end of the week.
Lawyers also introduced a report by two doctors who had consulted hospital notes, postmortems, Evans’ testimony and other statements, and said that two babies who died in Letby’s care were not well and had died for “identifiable medical reasons”.
The two doctors, Neil Aiton and Svilena Dimitrova, are neonatologists who specialise in the care of premature babies.
They concluded that one baby, known as Baby O in court documents, died as a result of issues related to resuscitation; and the other, Baby C, died after problems with the placenta at the end of pregnancy.
In a written statement provided during the briefing, Aiton and Dimitrova said that the babies “could not reasonably be described as ‘well’ or ‘stable’, and neither should their deteriorations be described as ‘unexplained’”.
Evans could not immediately be reached for comment.
“Two juries and three appeal court judges have reviewed a multitude of different strands of evidence against Lucy Letby,” a representative for the Crown Prosecution Service, the body responsible for prosecuting Letby, said in a statement. “She has been convicted on 15 separate counts following two separate jury trials,” the statement added, noting that the Court of Appeal had rejected an earlier effort by her team to argue that expert prosecution evidence was flawed.
During two trials last year and this year, the prosecution told jury members that Letby had harmed babies in a neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital through a macabre range of attacks: injecting them with air, overfeeding them with milk, infusing air into their gastrointestinal tracts and poisoning them with insulin.
Letby has always maintained her innocence, and at trial, her lawyer argued that she was being scapegoated for “serial failures of care” resulting from chronic understaffing at the hospital where she worked.
The former nurse was handed 15 mandatory life sentences and her attempts to appeal her convictions have so far been denied.
But a growing number of experts have raised concerns about the reliability of the evidence used to convict her. Significant questions about the case were first raised in a New Yorker article in May, and since then, dozens of statisticians and medical experts have highlighted flaws in the evidence used in court.
No one ever witnessed Letby harming a baby. A Court of Appeal ruling published in July noted that the case was “circumstantial”, relying on expert medical witnesses, Letby’s shift patterns and hospital treatment records to prove her guilt.
A number of medical experts have noted the unreliability of the tests used as evidence of insulin poisoning, and challenged whether the prosecution’s own expert witnesses had accurately determined the causes of death of some babies. Statisticians have criticised the way that staffing shift patterns were presented in court, arguing that they presented a skewed sense of Letby’s presumed guilt and did not include all the shifts when babies died in the unit.
Myriad problems plagued the neonatal unit where Letby worked, including “inadequate” staffing levels and problems with infection control, which were both noted in an official 2016 report.
In September, Letby appointed McDonald as her new defence lawyer, and he said then that he planned to apply to Britain’s Criminal Cases Review Commission, which is responsible for investigating claims of miscarriages of justice. That application will also be submitted this week, McDonald said on Monday.
More than 50 independent experts in neonatology, statistics and pathology had offered to help the defence team reexamine what they saw as flawed evidence against Letby, according to McDonald.
Three of those specialists accompanied the defence team during Monday’s briefing, including Roger Norwich, a retired pediatric doctor and expert in medical legal issues, who said the problematic nature of the evidence against Letby prompted him to get involved.
“This is what has been so astounding to many doctors and experts who have seen the evidence and who do not know Lucy Letby,” Norwich said. They had come together to defend her, he said, “on the basis of what we regard as appalling and absolutely unsustainable medical evidence.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Megan Specia
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