When a leading witness in a huge, famous criminal case says he got a key piece of evidence wrong, you’d think the news would appear in fiery letters near the top of every television bulletin.
However, last week passed without even a whisper. You may have even missed it. Here’s what you need to know.
When the powerful Court of Appeal refused to even hear Lucy Letby’s appeal against her multiple murder convictions, it listed the crimes she was believed to have committed.
One of these is the murder of ‘Baby C’, who died at the Countess of Chester Hospital around midnight on June 13-14, 2016. He describes the method of murder as ‘air through a nasogastric tube’, the injection of air into your stomach. Well, that will now have to be reviewed.
Lucy Letby was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others
The prosecution’s main expert witness in Letby’s trial, Dr Dewi Evans, now says that is not how Baby C died. His surprising change of course came after a Radio 4 programme, Lucy Letby: The Killer questions , part of the File On 4 series, broadcast on the BBC last Tuesday but still available through BBC Sounds. I recommend it.
In it, several highly qualified experts cast doubt on this and much of the evidence accepted by the jury at Ms. Letby’s first trial.
During that trial, Dr. Evans said an X-ray of Baby C showed an unusual amount of air in the child’s stomach, which could have been caused by deliberately pumping air into his feeding tube. This aroused his suspicions.
But the Radio 4 program points out that Letby was not actually in hospital on June 12 when the x-ray was taken. I hadn’t even met Baby C at the time.
The stomach bubble, which had absolutely nothing to do with Lucy Letby, therefore did not cause the baby’s death.
But Dr Evans now says: “His death occurred the following day, around midnight (when Mrs Letby was on duty), and due to air in his bloodstream.” That!? If it was physically impossible for Letby to have killed the baby in the manner initially alleged, at the alleged time, then can she simply say she did it by another method on a different day? And that’s okay? Well, yes, it can. Forks.
In this very strange trial, his change from one method of murder to another makes no legal difference to the outcome. The jury was told that they did not need to know how the theoretical murders had been committed, only to believe that the babies had been murdered. Judge Goss told them that if they decided that Letby had deliberately harmed the babies in one way, they could also conclude that he had deliberately inflicted harm on others, even if they were unsure of his methods.
So, despite the leaks emerging from all sides, Letby’s conviction remains – surprisingly – technically sound. Look at all their problems. The door-knocking evidence at the first trial, crucial to determining who was where and at what time, turned out to be confusing. It showed that people were present when they were absent and absent when they were present. This is not only serious in itself. If such a mistake can be made and garbage presented as fact in court, it raises questions about the quality of all the evidence.
The theoretical attempts to murder babies F and L with insulin are highly doubtful, as experts consider the tests used to detect the presence of insulin to be wholly inadequate as evidence. These are vital as the insulin cases were the first in which the jury decided to convict and they were unanimous. It can be said that they paved the way for all other convictions.
Leading statisticians have cut up a graph that supposedly shows Ms Letby present at all the deaths (and which was highlighted in all the trial coverage).
An alleged confession (“I’m evil. I did this”) now appears to have been written as a form of therapy, following the advice of professionals, as a way to deal with extreme stress.
It would be very difficult to argue (although some do) that the record and the “confession” had no influence on the verdict, compared to the thousands of pages of detailed medical evidence the jury had to deal with.
All falsely accused people know that once suspicion is aroused against you, everything you have done and said can appear to be evidence of your guilt.
They also discover that the authorities are not impartially seeking the truth about them, but rather things that condemn them. This is important because there seem to be a lot of false accusations circulating at the moment: from the legions of subpostmasters wrongly accused of stealing, humiliated, bankrupt and sometimes imprisoned, to Andrew Malkinson who spent 17 years in prison for a rape. he didn’t commit at all. His appeal was denied and repeated attempts to have his conviction reviewed were roundly rejected.
So yes, there can be smoke without fire. The mantra in favor of the verdict, that Letby was convicted by two juries and rejected by three Court of Appeal judges, so she must be guilty, means nothing. Juries make mistakes. The judges are wrong.
So it’s no use assuming that Britain is so fair that this will never happen to you.
And if this can happen to you, you should be vigilant about protesting (or at least keeping an open mind) even when it seems like it’s happening to someone else.
It is not necessary to be certain that Lucy Letby is innocent to believe that this case deserves a serious and thorough re-examination by the courts.
If, like me, you are a British patriot and believe that this country is, even now, on the whole, fairer than any other, you have a special duty to be alert when that reputation is in doubt.