Lucy Letby is serving 15 life sentences for seven baby deaths at neonatal units between 2015 and 2016.
The case of a British nurse sentenced to life imprisonment for killing seven newborn babies is being reviewed as medical experts argued there was no evidence to support her conviction for murder.
Lucy Letby is serving 15 life sentences for the deaths of babies at neonatal units in the northwest of England where she worked between 2015-16.
Letby was convicted of murdering seven infants and attempting to kill seven others at the Countess of Chester Hospital neonatal unit, making her the United Kingdom’s most prolific serial killer of children in modern history.
But her defence team on Tuesday applied to the independent Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to probe whether there had been a possible miscarriage of justice in her two trials in 2023-24.
Letby, 35, who maintains her innocence, was accused of attacking the babies by various means, including injecting air into their bloodstreams that caused an air embolism that blocked the blood supply.
But Dr Shoo Lee – a retired Canadian physician who co-authored a 1989 academic paper on air embolism in babies that featured in Letby’s 10-month trial – told a London news conference that Letby had exhausted all her appeals “and yet it remains that the evidence was wrong”.
“The evidence that was used to convict her was wrong and for me that is a problem,” he said, presenting the findings of an international panel of 14 independent experts in the care of young babies.
Lee said the panel’s conclusion was the evidence “does not support murder in any of these cases”.
The group of paediatric specialists concluded natural causes or bad medical care led to the deaths of each of the newborns, Lee added.
Letby is “sitting in prison for the rest of her life for a crime that just never happened”, her lawyer Mark McDonald said.
“The reason why Lucy Letby was convicted was because of the medical evidence presented to the jury. That today has been demolished.”
A spokesperson for the CCRC said, “We have received a preliminary application in relation to Ms Letby’s case and work has begun to assess the application.”
The commission has the power to refer cases back to the Court of Appeal if it determines there may have been a miscarriage of justice.
