A new audit of baby deaths at Lucy Letby’s hospital has found many of the most rapid deteriorations occurred when she was off duty, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The mortality data, which has been compiled from multiple sources including Freedom of Information requests, is understood to show a broader increase in deaths during the period the police investigation focused on, reinforcing Letby’s argument that the deaths were caused by broader failures in care. at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
A new legal team, led by Mark McDonald KC, has been instructed to take Letby’s case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates possible miscarriages of justice and can refer cases to the Court of Appeal for consideration.
Letby is serving 15 life sentences after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill seven more between 2015 and 2016. But several respected experts have come forward to express concerns about the reliability of the evidence.
McDonald, who says the case could be “the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history”, also focuses on the role of Dr Dewi Evans, the prosecution’s star witness, whose evidence was instrumental in Letby’s conviction. .
A new audit of baby deaths at the Countess of Chester found many of the most rapid deteriorations occurred while Lucy Letby was off duty.
Letby is serving 15 life sentences after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill seven more between 2015 and 2016.
The new findings reinforce Letby’s argument that the deaths were caused by wider failings in care at the Countess of Chester Hospital (pictured).
Last month, following a Radio 4 investigation, Dr Evans changed his mind about how Letby is said to have killed one of his victims, after it emerged the nurse was not even at the hospital where the baby died in the moment of a seemingly damning incident. An x-ray was taken.
Last week, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a judge in a previous case had dismissed Dr Evans’ evidence as “useless”.
And more questions have been raised about Dr Evans after an expert cited by him at trial questioned Evans’ interpretation of his work.
Dr Evans had referenced a 1989 academic paper by Dr Shoo Lee on air embolism into the bloodstream of babies, a central part of the prosecution’s case that Letby had killed by injecting them with air. The article described skin discoloration indicating an air embolism in babies caused by ventilation at high pressure, not normal pressure, as Letby is said to have done.
Dr. Lee, who recently retired from his career as one of Canada’s top neonatologists, was not called by Letby’s original defense team at trial, but said in Letby’s appeal that none of the descriptions of the Discolorations of the babies’ skin matched the type that characterized air embolism.
He said none of the babies in the trial should have been diagnosed with air embolism because it was “a very rare and specific condition and should not be diagnosed by excluding other causes of death or collapse and concluding that it must be a case of air embolism.” Plunger because nothing else could be found.”
Letby worked as a nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital in January 2012.
Screenshot taken from body camera footage issued by Cheshire Police of the arrest of Lucy Letby.
However, appeals court judges said his evidence was not admissible because his defense did not summon him to trial.
“No good reason has been shown why the applicant should now be allowed to present evidence that could have been obtained and given at the appropriate time,” they said.
A total of 24 experts in statistics, forensic sciences and neonatology wrote to the Government pointing out a number of worrying anomalies in the case, including the fact that several baby deaths at the unit when Letby was not present had been excluded from the list. analysis by the prosecution, something that his new defense team will seek to remedy with mortality data.
Dr. Evans says doubts were raised about the convictions because the case was “too shocking to accept, and of course one of the ways to deal with shocking news is to deny it.”