Fresh doubt over Lucy Letby’s guilt as unearthed documents reveal the convicted baby killed may have been absent for some of the infant deaths which she was found guilty for. One top doctor has also claimed his expertise were used incorrectly at her murder trial.
The shamed former neo-natal nurse Letby was found guilty of the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of eight more between June 2015 and June 2016 at The Countess of Chester Hospital, reports the Mirror.
She is currently serving 15 life sentences in prison for the heinous crimes. However, a growing number of people have questioned her guilt, with her legal team set to announce “new medical evidence” from a panel of international experts next week.
Newly released documents reportedly obtained by the Mail on Sunday show she could have been absent for a third of the 28 cases. At the trial the jury was informed that Letby was the “one common denominator” in the deaths of the tiny babies
Prosecutors presented a paper by Dr Shoo Lee to back their case which suggested Letby murdered the babies by injecting them with air. However, Dr Lee himself will join the panel of experts this week to cast doubt on the use of his own findings in Letby’s conviction.
The retitred neonatologist is expected to reveal new analysis at a press conference on Tuesday. Dr Lee was the top paediatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Canada for more than a decade, and founded the Canadian Neonatal Network, which includes 27 hospitals and 16 universities.
He told the Sunday Times: “I don’t usually do medical legal cases, I just don’t enjoy them, so I don’t do them. But this one got me interested because they had used my paper.
“They asked me whether I would look at the evidence for them … and wanted to know if [the paper] was correctly interpreted. I looked at [the court transcripts] and I wasn’t very happy, because what they were interpreting wasn’t exactly what I said.
“What I can say is we looked at the cases in great detail and we came to very definite conclusions about what happened in every case. What we have done is to remove all the emotion and conjecture to basically just look at the evidence.”
Last month, Letby’s legal team said it would make a fresh bid to challenge her convictions on the grounds that the lead prosecution medical expert at her trial was “not reliable”.
A public inquiry studying events at the hospital following Letby’s multiple convictions was launched, and the findings by chairwoman Lady Justice Thirwill are expected this autumn.
In January, former Tory minister Sit David Davis demanded for a retrial. He claimed she will be cleared due to no “hard evidence” implicating the former nurse and the case against her was “built on a poor understanding of probabilities”.
Sir David told MPs: “If, as I believe it will, a retrial clears Lucy Letby she shall be released in her 30s, not in her 50s.” There was no hard evidence against Letby, nobody saw her do anything untoward.
“The doctor’s gut feeling was based on a coincidence – she was on shift for a number of deaths, and this is important, although far from all of them, far from all of them. It was built on a poor understanding of probabilities, which could translate later into an influential but spectacularly flawed piece of evidence.”
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