More than 20 experts have called on the British Government to delay a public inquiry into the case of former neonatal nurse and convicted baby killer Lucy Letby because of growing concerns about the evidence.
The public inquiry has come under fire from scientific and medical experts who want it to be delayed or broadened to consider whether the deaths could have been caused by other factors, reports The New York Times.
The inquiry, due to start on 10 September, will cast a fresh spotlight on the case in which Letby (34) was found guilty of killing seven infants, and trying to kill seven others, in a British public hospital in 2015 and 2016.
She was sentenced to life in prison last year and her requests for appeals have so far been denied. But questions about the handling of the investigation and the evidence used to convict her have grown harder to ignore, with prominent experts in statistics and neonatal medicine arguing that both were gravely flawed.
Under the terms of its mandate, the inquiry will not scrutinise those questions. Instead it will hold hearings to probe the experiences of the families of the babies who died and the conduct of nurses, doctors, and other health workers at the Countess of Chester Hospital, in Liverpool.
Led by Kate Thirlwall, an appeals court justice, the inquiry aims to determine “whether suspicions should have been raised earlier, whether Lucy Letby should have been suspended earlier, and whether the police or other external bodies should have been informed sooner about suspicions about her”.
The thornier question – whether she might have been wrongfully convicted – falls beyond the scope of the inquiry, which was announced in 2023 by the Health Secretary in the last government.
The inquiry’s narrow scope prompted 24 experts, who had no connection to Letby or her family, to send a letter last month to the new Health Secretary Wes Streeting, and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
In excerpts provided to The New York Times by a representative of the signatories, they wrote: “While we acknowledge the gravity of the convictions … our focus is on the broader implications for patient safety, healthcare management and the potential for miscarriages of justice in complex medical cases.
“Possible negligent deaths that were presumed to be murders could result in an incomplete investigation of the management response to the crisis,” they added, in a letter first reported by The Guardian. “Our goal is not to re-litigate the Letby case, but to ensure that the Thirlwall inquiry is positioned to conduct the most thorough and beneficial investigation possible for the future of neonatal care in the UK.”
Among the signatories are Peter Elston, a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and Gillian Tully, an expert in forensic science at Kings College London who served as the forensic science regulator for England and Wales. The signatories declined to release the full letter, saying it was intended to be private.
Medical experts have argued that other factors, including staff shortages, crowded conditions in the ward, poor equipment, or management problems, could have contributed to the abnormally high number of babies dying or becoming seriously ill in the unit where Letby worked.
The NHS was under acute pressure during this period, after years of constrained budgets and understaffing.
Statisticians have criticised the investigation for concluding that because Letby was on duty during a cluster of these incidents, she must have been responsible for them.
The case hinged on her being held responsible for administering an overdose of insulin to two babies, but both survived, and several medical experts said the test results used to suggest insulin had been artificially administered were not reliable as evidence of a crime.
There were no witnesses to Letby killing or mistreating babies under her care, and she has denied murdering anyone. While her lawyers tried to discredit the prosecution’s evidence, they did not present their own evidence.
Phil Hammond, a retired doctor in the NHS who has written about the case, pointed out that the defence only appointed one expert and never called him. “Unsurprisingly, the evidence was very one-sided,” he said. The prosecution, he added, “was shooting at an open goal.”
Hammond has signed a separate open letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which calls for a “full forensic review of the evidence” used in the case.
He said he was not sure whether Letby did what she was convicted of, but he does not believe she got a fair trial, a position held by a number of other people involved in the case. That could pose a challenge to an inquiry that was created on the basis that she was guilty.
Letby has been convicted twice: in August 2023, on seven counts of murder and six counts of attempted murder; and last July, on a single count of attempted murder, in a retrial after the jury did not reach a verdict on that charge in the first trial.
News coverage of the case included sensational details like her anguished handwritten notes. She wrote, “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”, and in capital letters, “I AM EVIL I DID THIS”.
Yet on the same piece of paper she had also scrawled: “I haven’t done anything wrong”, “I feel very alone + scared”, and “slander discrimination”.
Reporting on the case was cut off at critical junctures because of restrictions under English law on news that could prejudice a jury. Last September, the restrictions were reimposed after the public prosecutor for England and Wales announced it would seek to retry the attempted murder charge. They have since been lifted.
In May, The New Yorker published a highly critical 13 000-word investigation of the case. The magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast, blocked access to online readers in Britain for fear of being held in contempt – which can be punished with a fine or prison sentence – although the magazine was available in print and on the magazine’s app.
British papers have since run articles questioning the evidence, as have broadcasters.
For all the concerns being raised, however, some doubt the new government will delay or expand the scope of the inquiry.
“There isn’t a political energy or head space to do it,” Hammond said. “It would be so embarrassing if the biggest baby-killer case in British history were found to be unsound.”
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Killer nurse to spend life in prison for baby murders
UK nurse accused of killing babies claims innocence
UK nurse pleads not guilty to murder of 8 babies and attempted murder of 10 more