Conservative former minister Sir David Davis has called for a retrial of child serial killer Lucy Letby.
Letby, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims. The incidents happened between June 2015 and June 2016 at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
During an adjournment debate in the Commons Sir David told MPs: “There is case in justice, in my view, for a retrial. But there is a problem: one of the problems we face is that much of the evidence was available at the time.
“What I have described is an expert analysis of the case notes, which were there at the time, but it was simply not presented to the jury. This means the Court of Appeal can dismiss it, basically saying the defence should have presented it at the initial trial.
“It is in essence saying, ‘if your defence team weren’t good enough to present this evidence, hard luck, you stay banged-up for life’. Now that may be judicially convenient, but it’s not justice.”
Sir David said earlier in the debate: “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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