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7 hours ago
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Former bosses at the hospital where Lucy Letby worked have been accused of “opportunistically” calling for the public inquiry into her crimes to be halted to hide their “catastrophic” failures.
The former executives at the Countess of Chester hospital said for the first time on Tuesday they believed there was a “real likelihood” Letby was innocent, as they called for the probe to be paused.
However, families of the jailed nurse’s victims said the senior managers were attempting to evade responsibility for their “many failures”.
“The applications to stop the inquiry are, on Letby’s part, an attempt to control the narrative, and on the part of the executives to avoid criticism,” said Richard Baker KC, representing the parents of 12 of the babies.
Letby, 35, is serving 15 whole-life prison terms after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another seven at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England. The former nurse, who has always protested her innocence, has lost two attempts to overturn her convictions at the court of appeal.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, is examining fresh material submitted by a range of experts on behalf of Letby last month.
The inquiry chair, Lady Justice Thirlwall, is due to publish her final report in the autumn after receiving evidence from hundreds of witnesses.
Lawyers for Letby and the former executives have argued it would be wrong for the judge to continue with her report after an international panel of experts found no evidence she had murdered or harmed any of the infants she was accused of attacking.
Kate Blackwell KC, the barrister for the former leaders, said concerns about Letby’s guilt had been “dismissed as noise” by the Thirlwall inquiry but must now be addressed.
She said the judge must “consider carefully before producing a report based upon the bedrock of Lucy Letby’s convictions”, adding: “The increasing concerns expressed by world-class experts are in real danger of dissolving that bedrock into a beach of shifting sands.”
The former bosses – who include the hospital’s ex-chief executive Tony Chambers and former medical director Ian Harvey – are expected to face criticism from Thirlwall over their handling of the case.
In a closing statement published on Tuesday – the penultimate day of hearings – the former executives said there appeared to be a “real likelihood” that there were “alternative explanations” for the deaths and that the judge’s final report should be paused, or significantly reduced, until the outcome of Letby’s appeal.
Baker, for the families, said this was a “naked attempt by the executives to avoid criticism” and should be dismissed.
He said Letby’s new defence team had mounted a “slick media campaign” to promote her claims of innocence. The parents of babies who died, he said, did not want their lives to be a “sideshow within a ghoulish media circus”.
“For all the bells and whistles that might be attached to a press conference, there is nothing remarkable or new about the evidence being presented,” Baker added. “The theories may have altered but this could hardly be said to be new evidence.”
Peter Skelton KC, for the families of seven of the babies, said the executives had “catastrophically” failed to ensure patient safety and were now “attempting opportunistically to suspend the inquiry’s work”.
“What has been presented with great fanfare as new and incontrovertible evidence turns out to be old and full of analytical flaws,” he told the inquiry, describing the new medical hypothesis as based on “fragile towers of speculation”.
Blackwell, for the executives, denied that their attempt to halt the inquiry represented an “evasion of accountability”.
Even if Letby was innocent of harming the babies, she said, that would “not necessarily exonerate” the former bosses. “There were significant issues affecting the Countess of Chester hospital at the relevant time, which led to the deaths of babies on the neonatal unit, which should not have happened,” she said.
“If Lucy Letby’s convictions are ultimately quashed, questions will of course remain for the senior managers. But these questions will then be based on a wholly different factual scenario.”
She said the former executives accepted that they should have contacted police nearly a year earlier, and that “they should have been more open, they should have been more candid” with the families of the babies.
