It’s been 370 days since Lucy Letby was sentenced to death in prison. Should we really be happy with such a brutal sentence based on such questionable evidence?
Last week, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) admitted that incorrect information about the case had been provided during Letby’s first marathon trial. These were card-swipe access logs, which were very useful for keeping track of who was where during crucial events.
The prosecution said: “We are confident that it had no significant impact on the prosecution case, which included multiple lines of evidence.” But I was not reassured.
The prosecution is one side in a bitter struggle between adversaries. How can they be the best judges of the significance of their own mistakes? This was a case carefully prepared over many months. If the jury could be given mislabeled information once, how could we be sure of the quality of the rest? A single oversight is bad in itself. It also makes one wonder about the entire prosecution.
Above all, if the jury at the first trial had been misled in some important way, how safe would the verdict have been? I couldn’t say. I was not present at the trial and I have been told informally this week that a transcript of the whole proceedings would probably cost a whopping £8,000. The second trial would, of course, cost more. So others must find out.
Anyway, I put a number of questions to the prosecution on Tuesday. I’ll post them all next week on Peter Hitchens’ blog. But I think the police discovered the mistake. They then informed the prosecution. A week later, the prosecution told Letby’s legal team. This was in early March. That’s about six weeks before the Court of Appeal heard and rejected Letby’s application for leave to appeal, at the end of April.
Last week, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) admitted that incorrect information had been provided about card-swipe access logs during Lucy Letby’s marathon first trial.
It was decided, I don’t know who, that the error “only” had a “material impact” on count 14, the attempted murder of Baby K. Only? This was the count on which the jury at the first trial could not reach a verdict. This was the count that the prosecution considered so important that it initiated a new trial.
This was done despite the fact that Letby had already been sentenced to death in prison. This was the allegation on which it was alleged in court on 11 June (during the second trial) that a doctor had caught Letby “practically red-handed”.
This was one of the most widely publicized moments of the entire second trial.
At that second trial, the prosecution claimed that Letby had “deliberately displaced” the newborn’s breathing tube when the nurse designated for Baby K (not Letby) had briefly left her side. In reality, no one saw Letby do this. How was the time of this alleged event established? Could it have been through door-access records?
It is very rare for the same crime to be tried twice. It would be interesting to compare the accounts of this event given in each court before and after the mislabeling of the door burglary was discovered.
Ms Letby was found guilty of murdering seven very young babies and attempting to murder seven others.
Ms Letby was duly convicted of the attempted murder of Baby K at the second trial, but by then everyone in the Kingdom knew that she had recently been sent to die in prison for mass murder of babies, so I find it hard to understand how she could have had a fair trial.
I am also not sure whether the Court of Appeal knew about the card reader problem before it decided to refuse permission to appeal.
How can a small business thrive?
Not long ago, a cute little coffee stand, a little blue van, started selling pretty good coffee in the square in front of Oxford Station in my hometown.
Last week I asked the barista how his business was going. Pretty good, he said, but it would be much better if he didn’t have to pay the council nearly £9,000 a year for the freedom to ply his trade. Without that tax, he thought, perhaps he could set up another stall and hire more staff.
Stunned by the council’s greed, I checked the figure. They eventually admitted that they did indeed charge him £8,715 a year to park his van. Looking for a glimmer of hope, I asked whether they also squeezed the locally approved e-scooter rental company into allowing them to have three ugly orange rental stations in the same windswept square.
The electric scooter company involved is a multinational giant based in Sweden with a turnover of hundreds of millions a year. But no, they do not require “consent for street vending”.
I don’t understand why not, and I don’t really care.
How can a small business thrive under such conditions? What has gone wrong with our local government?
The owner of Oxford’s Little Blue Van, where Peter enjoys buying coffee in his hometown, must pay £8,715 a year to park outside the train station.
It will soon be harder to get out of this country than to get in. As fleets of boats manned by criminals bring thousands of illegal immigrants to our southern shores, Her Majesty’s law-abiding subjects will have to queue for hours to cross in the other direction.
Unlike lawless immigrants, we will probably have to submit to intrusive fingerprint checks and face scans. In some parts of Kent, we will pass each other in opposite directions. It is impossible to know exactly when the EU’s catastrophic new border control system will come into force. But it is coming. You will hate it.
The only way to lose weight is to eat less
Most of us, when given a weight in foreign kilograms, cannot determine whether the object or person in question weighs as much as a baby elephant or as little as a large tomato. There is no longer any need for this country to use these tedious, cold, bureaucratic measures. That is why I was upset when Davina McCall announced last week that “I am a 5’5″ woman who weighs 130 pounds.”
I think he means 42 kilos.
And I was even more upset when he claimed that he had achieved his slimness by exercising, not by dieting. I find it hard to believe him. I have never lost an ounce by exercising (and I do a lot, cycling dozens of kilometres every week). The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to eat less. I tried, but it wasn’t fun. That’s why I weigh so much.
But I won’t tell you how much, especially not in kilograms.
Come on, Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, agree to debate me on the war in Ukraine. The country needs to hear both sides, clearly expressed, before it all gets worse.