The convictions of Lucy Letby: should they be overturned?
When the former nurse was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others, a 1980s research paper was key to the prosecution’s case. But the author of the paper himself believes there has been a miscarriage of justice – and so too do other doctors
The convictions are unsafe and should be overturned as soon as possible
Dr Shoo Lee
On 4 February 2025, Lucy Letby’s barrister, Mark McDonald, convened a press conference at the grand baroque Westminster venue One Great George Street. It became a landmark moment, the culmination of months in which a number of distinguished experts had spoken out to question the former nurse’s convictions.
The media were addressed for an hour by a Canadian medical professor, Dr Shoo Lee. He said that a panel of international experts disputed the prosecution case that had led to Letby being found guilty in two trials of murdering seven babies at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2015 and 2016, and attempting to murder seven others. She was sentenced to 15 whole-life orders, and the court of appeal unanimously refused her permission to appeal.
“We did not find any murders,” Lee said. “In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.”
Lee is one of the world’s leading neonatologists – doctors who specialise in the medical science and care of premature babies. Before his retirement from clinical practice in 2021, he held senior leadership positions in Canada, headed up international collaborations and conducted extensive research. His journey to becoming so involved in a criminal process pursued in the provinces of north-west England is a remarkable feature of the Letby case. It springs from Lee being told, after Letby was convicted, that a medical research paper he authored more than 30 years ago had been used as a basis for one of the prosecution’s central allegations – that Letby killed babies by injecting air into their veins.
Lee was dismayed, he told the Guardian, adding that the use of his paper was “incorrect” and a “categorical error”, and he was concerned Letby may have been wrongly convicted. He agreed to give evidence to the court of appeal but the judges dismissed it as “irrelevant” when they refused Letby’s application. He then committed to assembling a world-class panel who would fully assess the evidence. Lee’s eminence meant that the peers he could call on comprised leading specialists in Canada, the US, Japan and Europe, including two distinguished UK-based consultants, Dr Neena Modi, a pre-eminent neonatologist, and the renowned perinatal pathologist Dr Marta Cohen. Lee flew across the Atlantic at his own expense to present their findings at that bombshell press conference.
He explained the acute medical problems some of the premature babies had suffered, and said the panel found “no medical evidence to support malfeasance” or deliberate harm. But they had identified “so many problems” with the babies’ care, in a unit that had “inadequate numbers of appropriately trained” staff.
“If this had happened at a hospital in Canada,” Lee said bluntly, “it would have been shut down.”
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Article is long and very detailed, continues at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/14/the-convictions-of-lucy-letby-should-they-be-overturned
