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‘Explosive’ ‘bombshell’ new evidence which casts further doubt on the safety of Lucy Letby’s conviction has once again highlighted renewed questions about police actions, the enormously important role of Wales, as well as the journalistic background of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, who has raised concerns about the behaviour of officers on many occasions.
A revelatory email, which emerged on Saturday, appears to cast doubt over events surrounding the nurse’s actions in the lead up to one baby’s death.
Dr Ravi Jayaram (the only medical witness to give evidence at both of Letby’s trials) testified that she was seen standing over Baby K’s cot as the infant’s condition deteriorated. Taking the stand, the doctor said Letby failed to call for help as the newborn’s condition continued to deteriorate, insisting the nurse had virtually been caught ‘red handed’.
The new email, sent on May 4, 2017, to colleagues at the Countess of Chester Hospital, seems to query that order of events.
However these details only serve to underline growing questions about the whole case.
Letby is serving 15 whole life sentences for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others between 2015 and 2016, and has already lost two bids to appeal against her convictions.
Yet nobody saw her attack the seven babies she was convicted of murdering, nor did anyone witness the attempted murder of seven others. Instead, prosecutors had to draw on technical medical evidence – along with statistical data and other troubling details about Letby’s life – in order to prove their case.
Fourteen senior clinicians from around the world have analysed the medical evidence against Letby, including Professor Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH).
This expert panel was assembled by Dr Shoo Lee, a retired Canadian doctor based at the University of Toronto (UT) who specialises in the treatment of young children. As a result more serious questions have been raised about the Letby case.
The lead prosecution expert at the time was Dr 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 is also mounting concern 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 CCH, 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.
Meanwhile Peter Hitchens has written in The Spectator about the Letby case: “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 an 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”.
Headlines have been made, and a hard-hitting documentary about the case on Channel Five called ‘Lucy Letby: The New Evidence’, questioned the guilt of the former neonatal nurse.
Letby 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 CC 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 appalling 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 has said.
Despite this assertion, there are serious questions about the Letby case which have been amplified by the protesters, by the assembling of experts, and now by the ‘bombshell’ email evidence.
Letby was retried over the attempted murder of Baby K and found guilty of deliberately dislodging her Endotrachial (breathing) Tube (ET).
But 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 one baby, 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. He has proclaimed worryingly: “I didn’t know about measuring insulin until I read the comments from Wayne Jones”.
However we DO know that there is major concern about this whole case and the ‘explosive’ new evidence questioning the order of events has put them centre stage (along with shining the spotlight on Welsh specialists), as well as highlighting the criticism of Phil for examining earlier convictions.
The memories of Phil’s astonishing decades long award-winning career in journalism (when he often questioned police actions), 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.
Also on The Eye – how during 23 years with the BBC, and 41 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, sports stories rarely featured as governing bodies resented his direct journalistic questions, but now this could be about to change with news that another organisation is being set up to remedy a situation of money being meagre in one sport – athletics – which may open it up to proper scrutiny by the media.
A HAPPY EASTER TO ALL OUR READERS – PASG HAPUS!
