“No murders at all” in Lucy Letby case

It has been a while since I’ve written about Lucy Letby and the terrible miscarriage of justice she has endured but I think about the case often. In my last post about it in July 2024 I likened it to the imprisonment, torture and execution of an innocent Scottish woman called Agnes Sampson in 1591 who was tried and convicted for the crime of causing bad weather. It’s almost just as absurd to convict a nurse for murdering a newborn by feeding it too much milk. Yes, there were supposedly other murderous methods used by Letby but in one example the court was presented with “force feeding milk” as the weapon.

Yesterday a panel of experts in neonatology from around the world presented their findings after examining the medical notes pro bono. They found there were no murders at all but rather the babies died because they were very ill or they received poor medical care. The chair of the panel, Dr Shoo Lee, said their investigation found there was misdiagnosis of diseases, the hospital was caring for babies beyond their ability, there were unsafe delays in diagnosis and treatment, there were poor skills at resuscitation and intubation, poor supervision of junior doctors, a lack of understanding of basic things like respiratory physiology and mechanical ventilation, poor management of common neonatal conditions like hypoglycemia, and a lack of teamwork and trust among other issues. This is not an exhaustive list. I’ve included a video of the full press conference at the bottom if you want to see it. Dr Lee even went so far as to say that had this been a hospital in Canada it would have been shut down. Their findings are a damning indictment of the hospital, its management and the doctors.

In parallel to this we have the Thirwall Inquiry which is currently investigating how a serial killer was able to commit murder on an NHS hospital ward. Even before the inquiry began people were questioning the verdict and pleaded for the inquiry terms of reference to be broadened to include whether or not there was any murder at all but that didn’t happen and the farcical inquiry is ploughing full-speed ahead on a fool’s errand at tax-payer expense.

At the beginning of the inquiry Lady Justice Thirwall tried to silence these questioning voices,

In the months since the Court of Appeal handed down
its judgment, there has been a huge outpouring of
comment from a variety of quarters on the validity of
the convictions. So far as I’m aware, it has come
entirely from people who were not at the trial. Parts
of the evidence have been selected and criticised, as
has the conduct of the defence at trial, about which
those defence lawyers can say nothing.
All of this noise has caused enormous additional
distress to the parents who have already suffered far
too much.

The possibility of causing more distress to parents can never be an excuse to imprison an innocent woman and if I were one of the parents I would want to know the truth. Without the truth we can’t learn any lessons to prevent it from happening again which serves no-one and especially not the memories of the babies lost.