IT IS HARD to know which is more shocking. Is it the murder of seven babies and attempted killing of seven others at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England, for which Lucy Letby, who was a nurse there, is in prison for life? Or is it the possibility that Ms Letby is the victim of a miscarriage of justice? It looks increasingly likely that her convictions, in 2023 and 2024, were questionable. An international panel of experts has raised serious doubts about the medical evidence—and about whether the babies’ deaths were even murder. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), an independent body that probes potential wrongful convictions, may refer the case back to the Court of Appeal. Whether or not Ms Letby is guilty, her saga exposes deep failures, as well as an overarching malaise afflicting Britain.
One area of failure is the justice system. British courts are not alone in finding it hard to interpret statistics (how likely was the spike in baby deaths at the Countess of Chester to have arisen by chance?) or to know what weight to put on the testimony of expert witnesses, especially when the evidence is entirely circumstantial, as in the Letby case. In America examples of dodgy science leading to the imprisonment of innocent people are all too common: deceptive forensic evidence and expert testimony played a part in 44 of the 223 exonerations officially recorded there in 2022. But Britain seems to be adept at suppressing doubts about verdicts. It took an article in the New Yorker and international health specialists to prompt more British voices, including this newspaper, to question Ms Letby’s conviction.
It increasingly looks as if Lucy Letby’s conviction was unsafe
The CCRC is part of the problem. In 2021 a cross-party inquiry concluded that it was “too deferential to the Court of Appeal”. Critics say its budget is too small, its approach too cautious and, crucially, its mandate too restrictive (it can refer cases for appeal only if it sees a “real possibility” that a conviction will not be upheld). The commission was set up in 1997 after a series of high-profile blunders to restore faith in the justice system. It is not succeeding.
A second failure is in the use of public inquiries. These often drag on interminably—such as those into the covid-19 pandemic or the Post Office scandal—only to produce recommendations that are largely ignored. An inquiry chaired by Dame Kate Thirlwall has been looking into what went wrong at the Countess of Chester hospital. But its remit does not include the Letby verdict, so risks being pointless.
The third, and craziest, failure relates to the National Health Service. The Letby case has highlighted its dismal state. In some years the NHS spends more on the costs of harm in the area of maternity than it does on maternity care itself. At the Countess of Chester, the spike in baby deaths led to a search for a culprit before it triggered an alert to the regulator, the Care Quality Commission. But it may be that the culprit was the system. It is possible that what were thought to have been the crimes of a killer nurse were the result of shoddy care within the NHS that is far from unique.
In all this a common thread is that poor standards have set in to the point that perceptions become dulled. Hence the overarching malaise. In worrying ways Britain is blind. The public is slow to see that evidence is questionable. The fog around an inquiry may be so dense that people cannot spot fatal flaws. Vision in the health service may be too blurred to distinguish between systemic failure and murder. Yes, justice should be blind. But the Letby case shows that Britons need to keep their eyes wide open. ■
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