London — A panel of experts has disputed the medical evidence used to convict British nurse Lucy Letby of murdering seven newborns and trying to kill seven others, a doctor who led the examination said Tuesday. Dr. Shoo Lee, a retired neonatologist from Canada, said the group of 14 doctors concluded the newborns either died of natural causes or from bad medical care.
“In summary then, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find murders,” Lee said at a London news conference.
Letby, 35, is serving multiple life sentences with no chance of release after being convicted of murder and attempted murder while working as a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwestern England between June 2015 and June 2016.
Defense lawyer Mark McDonald said there was now “overwhelming evidence” that Letby was wrongly convicted.
It was the second news conference held in part by McDonald to challenge the conclusions of Dr. Dewi Evans, who was the prosecution’s key expert witness.
Prosecutors said Letby left little trace when she killed babies and in some cases had injected air into their bloodstreams or stomach, causing an embolism. But Lee said Evans had misinterpreted his 1989 academic paper on embolism.
Lee said he assembled a prestigious group of international medical experts who volunteered to review the records of 17 babies Letby was accused of injuring or killing.
Evans diagnosed the babies with air embolism in the absence of finding another cause of death, Lee said. But Lee said embolism is very rare and the skin discoloration described at trial was not consistent with what is seen when there is an embolism.
“The notion that these babies can be diagnosed with air embolism because they collapsed and had these skin discolorations has no evidence in fact,” Lee said.
Letby has already lost two bids for an appeal. Her lawyer submitted an application on Monday to get the Criminal Case Review Commission to examine her conviction, which could lead to another shot at an appeal.
Elizabeth Cook/AP
A separate public inquiry into failures at the hospital that led babies to repeatedly be harmed is due to conclude next month. That probe is not examining evidence used to convict Letby but is aimed at accountability of hospital staff and management and looking at how parents were treated.
During her trial, Senior Prosecutor Nicola Wyn Williams alleged that Letby had removed one baby’s breathing support and that a doctor found her standing by doing nothing as the child struggled,
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Williams alleged that Letby then removed the breathing tube two more times over the next few hours, “in an attempt to cover her tracks and suggest that the first dislodgment was accidental.”
Dr. Ravi Jayaram, a pediatrician at the hospital, told jurors he saw “no evidence” that Letby had done anything to help the baby when he walked in and saw her standing next to the newborn’s incubator.
Letby told the jury in that case that she had no recollection of any such event, and she has always denied committing any of the offenses she had been convicted of.
