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15 hours ago
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Fundamental flaws in the criminal trial system led to the former nurse Lucy Letby being convicted of murder in a “clear miscarriage of justice”, David Davis has said in parliament.
In a parliamentary debate, the former cabinet minister detailed the mounting concerns of leading experts about the convictions and said there should quickly be a retrial. He said he believed Letby would be cleared in it.
Letby was convicted in two trials of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more in 2015 and 2016 when she worked as a nurse in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester hospital. The court of appeal refused her permission to appeal against the convictions, and a public inquiry led by Lady Justice Thirlwall is taking place on the basis that Letby is guilty.
However, Davis said he had formed the view that justice had not been done after he was approached by many experts expressing concerns, including a past president of the Royal Statistical Society and a past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. They were, he said, “more knowledgable than the purported experts whose evidence convicted Lucy Letby”.
Davis criticised the opinion given in the trial by the prosecution’s lead medical expert witness, Dr Dewi Evans, that Letby had harmed the babies by injecting air either into their veins – causing air embolism, a lethal condition – or down their nasal feeding tubes into their stomachs. “This supposed evidence is hugely controversial,” Davis said. The medical evidence was crucial to the prosecution case.
The backbench MP pointed to reports produced by two consultant neonatologists for Letby’s defence on babies anonymised as O and C. They found that a consultant who “was one of the principal accusers of Lucy Letby” had wrongly inserted a needle into Baby O’s liver, “a serious error”. Baby C was born “profoundly unwell”, the neonatologists found, and “died of natural causes compounded by suboptimal medical care”.
Calling for the Criminal Cases Review Commission to consider the new expert diagnoses and quickly order a retrial, Davis described the trial as “a clear miscarriage of justice by a judicial system that could not manage admittedly difficult statistical and medical scientific evidence”.
Davis referred to a severely critical judgment of Evans’s opinion in another case, issued by a senior judge, Lord Justice Jackson. Davis said Jackson had sent his findings to the Letby trial judge, “clearly indicating how unsuitable Evans was as an expert witness”.
He said Evans had “changed his opinion on several key issues during the trial” and that Letby’s new lawyer Mark McDonald had accused Evans of changing his opinion again since the trials, now saying that injecting air down nasal feeding tubes did not cause babies’ deaths but only destabilised them. Evans has disputed that he has changed his opinion.
“Questions have also been raised about the second expert witness for the prosecution, Dr Sandie Bohin,” Davis said. “Eight families are currently filing formal complaints against her over their children’s care, which are being considered by the General Medical Council.”
The hospital’s neonatal unit was “not up to caring for these fragile children”, Davis said, adding that much of the important medical evidence about the babies’ deaths had been available at the time of the trial but “simply not presented to the jury”. That meant the court of appeal could dismiss it by saying Letby’s defence should have presented it at the trial.
“That may be judicially convenient,” Davis said, “but it is not justice.”
He also pointed to recommendations for improving the handling of expert evidence made in 2011 by the Law Commission, which have never been introduced.
Responding to Davis, justice minister Alex Davies-Jones emphasised the suffering of the parents whose babies died, and said the government does not intervene in justice processes. “Miss Letby, as with any other convicted person who maintains their innocence following a refusal to appeal, is able to apply to the CCRC,” she said.
