Lucy Letby is guilty – get over it

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Is it time to free Lucy Letby? Admittedly, she may have been found guilty of murdering seven newborn babies and the attempted murder of seven more. Yes, she was handed a whole-life sentence in prison for her crimes. But these years of trials, of careful deliberation by juries of complex medical evidence, have now been rendered obsolete, apparently. Because some journalists – in Britain and abroad – have decided she could be innocent after all.

In November 2020, the former neonatal nurse was charged with the murders and attempted murders of several newborn babies at her workplace, the Countess of Chester Hospital in Cheshire. After an initial trial concluded in August last year, Letby was found guilty of murdering seven newborns and attempting to murder six more. Just last week, she was convicted of a seventh attempted murder in a retrial, after the first jury failed to reach a verdict on that particular crime. She was sentenced to yet another whole-life order.

All this hasn’t been enough to convince some in the media. The first major outlet to doubt her guilt was the New Yorker, which published a long piece in May as Letby faced her retrial. The initial verdict was a ‘rush to judgement’, it claimed, and ‘serious questions about the evidence were ignored’. Due to contempt-of-court law, the article was embargoed in the UK until the retrial concluded, but it has widely circulated online.

Now that the final attempted murder trial is closed, speculation has well and truly reached fever pitch. This week, the Guardian published a piece questioning whether the evidence that led to Letby’s conviction was mere ‘coincidence’. The Telegraph published a similar article on the same day, raising the possibility that Letby’s conviction could be a ‘miscarriage of justice’.

These mainstream-media outlets have essentially joined the growing Lucy Letby ‘truther’ movement, which was previously made up of armchair detectives who spend too much time online. The ‘evidence’ they put forward is shaky, to say the least. Claims of Letby’s innocence often seem motivated by the fact that she doesn’t look like the kind of person who would murder multiple babies. She is young, blonde, has a ‘guileless smile’ and is ‘unassumingly pretty’, in the words of that New Yorker article.

One main truther claim is that the case against Letby was based on a series of coincidences – that when police investigated the babies’ deaths, Letby just so happened to be on shift at the time. Supposedly, with the hospital higher-ups needing to explain away the deaths, the blame was pinned on Letby. The justice system then ‘rushed’ to convict her – albeit in what is believed to be the longest murder trial in UK history.

The truthers also point to the fact that wrongful convictions have arisen in the past as a result of statistical evidence. Most infamously, Dutch paediatric nurse Lucia de Berk was wrongfully convicted of murdering patients in her care in the 2000s.

It is true that Letby’s trial partly turned on statistics that linked the times when she was on shift to the times that babies on the ward fell ill. But she also faced a very strong circumstantial case, which went way beyond statistics alone. In both trials, the prosecution adduced evidence that two of the babies had been poisoned with insulin. They did this by producing what are known as immunoassay test results, which are used to diagnose hypoglycaemia. Experts in both trials said there was no doubt that the babies were poisoned with insulin. There were other witnesses who said that the tests used were working well and there was no reason to doubt the accuracy of the results. The notion that the babies just dropped dead and then the deaths were pinned on Letby doesn’t make any sense.

The Guardian article claims that ‘several experts challenged the use of results from this type of immunoassay test as evidence of crime’. But this is the extent of the doubt that anyone can raise about the insulin evidence. No one has proven that the tests used to convict Letby were wrong or inaccurate. In fact, the article concedes that the Court of Appeal considered the same points raised by those experts and found them ‘inadmissible’.

At trial, Letby’s lawyers, and even Letby herself, accepted that the babies had been poisoned. If you believe the Letby truthers, the defence lawyers must have been extremely negligent not to challenge this. Perhaps they should have done more research. Most likely, they contacted their own experts who agreed that the babies were poisoned and advised that it would be difficult to prove otherwise. In court, Letby’s lawyers argued that the babies had indeed been poisoned, just not by her. She suggested it must have been someone else on the ward.

This just doesn’t stand up when you look at the rest of the evidence. Consider the confidential medical notes she took home with her, or the patient records she allegedly tried to forge to cover her tracks. She was also caught researching the families of the deceased babies on Facebook. Most damningly, she left behind handwritten notes saying ‘I’m evil I did this’. It’s not hard to understand how the juries reached their verdicts.

The Letby truther movement says something worrying about our culture. Two juries listened to months and months of evidence about Letby’s crimes, across two trials. They convicted her in both instances. They reached careful verdicts, having meticulously weighed every detail of the case. This endless whataboutery regarding Letby’s case goes far beyond healthy scepticism. It represents corrosive distrust of our fellow citizens’ capacity to make important decisions. The truthers simply do not trust juries to get it right.

Maybe one day there will be an important revelation about the evidence used to convict Letby that will demand her case be looked at again. Until that day, we should recognise and respect the verdict of the two juries. Lucy Letby is guilty. Get over it.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.