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Details about Lucy Letby instructing a new lawyer to take her controversial case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), has highlighted renewed questions about police actions, and the high-profile role of Wales.
The lead prosecution expert in the case was Dewi Evans from Carmarthen, and there is growing pressure now to refer the case back to the court of appeal.
He was supported in his conclusion by work from another Welshman, a leading toxicologist called Alan Wayne Jones.
Dr Jones was born in Pontypridd, but worked for most of his career in Sweden, and his information was very important for Dr Evans and others.
There are also mounting questions about a senior doctor involved in the affair. Dr John Gibbs (who said he regrets failing to protect babies from Letby) who was a consultant at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital where she worked, and has declared that he sympathises with her as well as admitting that he had experienced a “bad run”.
Critics may even turn to the example of South Wales Police (SWP) for a representation of how NOT to do things.
The force was responsible for an incredible number of miscarriages of justice in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s, which include: The Cardiff Three (Five), The Cardiff Newsagent Three, The Darvell Brothers, Jonathan Jones (The Tooze Murders), as well as Annette Hewins, and the calls are increasing to hold a Public Inquiry into what went wrong.
For example, Peter Hitchens has recently written in The Spectator: “Is this justice? The Crown Prosecution Service has actually admitted that key door-swipe evidence, supposedly fixing the location of significant persons at important times, was wrong. I suspect that this astounding error, so far a tiny smudge on the radar screen, will grow and grow in importance. The prosecution knew throughout that they had no objective proof of their case, large or small”.
Sir David Davis, MP, has told ITV’s Good Morning that it is “highly probable” Letby is innocent, based on expert opinions he has heard, and campaigns protesting her innocence appear to be growing.
The Guardian has printed a letter to the UK health and justice secretaries, asking for a pause in preparations for the inquiry into what happened, to allow “a broader examination of potential factors contributing to the increased neonatal deaths, without the presumption of criminal intent”, and 19 nurses have written another letter to Sir Keir Starmer countersigned by 250 past and present NHS staff calling for “a scientifically independent review”.
A hard-hitting documentary about the case on Channel Five which was transmitted on Sunday on terrestrial television, and called ‘Lucy Letby: The New Evidence’, questioned the guilt of the former neonatal nurse.
Letby was convicted of murdering seven infants and attempting the murder of seven others between June 2015 and June 2016.
She had come under suspicion because a high number of infant deaths had occurred at the Cheshire hospital shortly after she began working with children in the intensive care unit.
However after looking at the evidence some statisticians have joined protesters in casting doubt on the conviction.
During their investigation Cheshire Police (CP) had turned to Dr Evans for his expertise in dissecting the medical evidence and shedding light on activities behind the deaths, although he had long since retired.
Yet it was posted on reddit: “…this expert seems to have a pretty bad rep. It sounds like letbys lawyer tried to get his evidence thrown out (and one of her grounds of appeal is to do with his evidence allegedly)
“I noticed during closing speeches, the prosecutor tried to minimise dewi evans evidence, instead focusing on…other experts”.
Dr Evans had analysed over 30 cases of babies who died or suffered collapses, and has described the events as a tragedy of unparalleled proportions, possibly ranking as the most shocking occurrence within an NHS hospital in the past 75 years.
He has been subject to enormous abuse on social media because of his central role, but Dr Evans says those people are out to destroy his reputation.
“It’s such a shocking thing to come to terms with and of course one of the ways of dealing with shocking news is to go into denial and shoot the messenger”, Dr Evans said.
He said it was “very, very difficult” to accept the fact these murders were “not caused by an old individual but by a young, white, English nurse from a respectable background. How on earth can you stomach that? And one of the ways of dealing with it is to deny that it happened.”
Despite this assertion, there are serious questions about the Letby case which have been amplified by the protesters, and by the television programme.
Letby was retried over the attempted murder of Baby K and found guilty on July 2 of deliberately dislodging her Endotrachial (breathing) Tube (ET).
However an alternative plausible explanation according to experts other than Dr Evans is that there was “accidental dislodgement of the ET possibly compounded by incorrect positioning and/or inadequate securing”.
There have also been previous controversies concerning the unit where these sorts of issues were central.
After the death of baby Noah Robinson doctors were severely criticised, when his breathing tube was wrongly placed into the oesophagus. There were FIVE warning signs from X-Rays and clinical equipment, but they were not picked up.
Dr Evans found backing in the Letby case from the efforts of Dr Jones, who, although born in Wales, had practised mostly in Scandinavia.
For instance Dr Evans has proclaimed disturbingly: “I didn’t know about measuring insulin until I read the comments from Wayne Jones”.
There may well be further points to ponder now after Letby has appointed a new barrister to take her case forward to the CCRC…
The memories of a further Welshman, our Editor Phil Parry’s, astonishing decades long award-winning career in journalism as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow-the real meaning behind words has always been crucial for Phil during 23 years at The BBC and 41 years in journalism, with this now stressed by use on continental Europe of the word ‘remigration’, which actually means sending immigrants back.
