The Truth about the Letby Case: Politics and Corporate Liability

The new lawyer for serial killer Lucy Letby has sent an application to the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission) to have the case resubmitted to the Court of Appeal. His claim is that the new evidence of a chair of 'medical experts' means the case is 'demolished'. 'If the experts are correct, no crime was committed'. 

This, however, is a massive 'Non Sequitur'. The expert's submission amounts to one 'aspect' of the case against Letby and, even if correct, does not lead to the innocent conclusion. Not the whole picture. It is disingenuous in the extreme by the Human Rights Lawyer, Mark McDonald. The real truth behind the case has little to do with the beneficence of a Human Rights Lawyer, or miscarriages of justice, but is far more sinister.

The CCRC responded to the submission with the telling 'We are aware there has been a great deal of speculation and commentary surrounding Lucy Letby's case, much of it from parties with only a partial view of the evidence'. And there’s the rub. The claims of the new defence efforts are based around some evidence (re: embolisms-blockages due to air bubbles) disputed by the team of experts. The expert neonatal Professor Shoo Lee, at the front of the new claims of innocence, concluded 'we did not find any murders' and 'death or injury was due to natural causes or just bad medical care'. The case against Letby was that she had injected the babies with insulin, air or force feeding by milk. 

Lee maintained, however, that embolism is a rare condition and the skin markings found on the seven babies, were not proof with that condition. Yet he does not offer any explanation for the skin discolouration’s found on all the babies. When questioned previously at the Court of Appeal he said that the only known signs of embolism were pink blood vessels on top of a pink/blue body. He had not studied the victims' medical records at the time or witnessed any of the testimonies by other medical staff which indicated the strange rashes on the babies. Dr Dewi Evans, however, an expert prosecution witness, concluded the evidence with the damning 'Babies don't suddenly drop dead'.

The discolouration’s, again, were only one part of the prosecution case. The medical teams in the hospital had never seen these colourings before, which coincided with Letby's shifts on the ward. They had never seen babies not responding to resuscitation. Air was found in the babies' blood stream. The defence maintained at the time that the babies, despite the statements of family and staff, were 'not well'. All of them were not well. Another coincidence. This claim, put forward by retired consultant, Dr Mike Hall, was that there is no 'proof' that the air in their bloodstreams was administered by Letby. Yet Hall admitted he had not seen the evidence to back his illness hypothesis up, even though he was advising the defence team at the original trial. 

Dr Dewi Evans said that 'the people making these claims have not seen the clinical evidence or that they are unaware of what constitutes wellbeing in a premature baby.' Hall never testified in court. Yet this is a bizarre twist. He had been expected to be called to testify for the defence - but it was Letby herself who didn't call him to the witness box.

Another defence argument was that the tests measuring Insulin levels in two of the babies were suspect. The defence disputed the findings claiming the standard test for this, the 'Immunoassaay' Test, is inaccurate. The BBC investigators spent months analysing this argument, consulting experts and concluded that:

'Immunoassay is usually accurate and the circumstances in which interference might occur are extremely unlikely.'

The Insulin evidence is quite clear and does not form part of the new case brought by Mark McDonald. To demand a new Court of Appeal hearing based on a small part of the evidence refuses to listen to the big picture. Of course, the other circumstantial evidence against Letby is more than damning. At the Thirlwall enquiry her past colleagues all testified to the view that Letby is guilty. Letby was on duty at the ward between June 2015 and June 2016, during the deaths of 12 out of 13 of the babies. Her handwritten notes confessed to the killings. She spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the details of the babies' parents online. She was caught by Dr Ravi Jayaraam watching and not acting as Baby K's blood oxygen was at life threatening levels. The alarm on the incubator was 'not working'. She had been also associated with other strange incidents at the hospital.

Even now, in Chester, the Police are working through the details of 4000 babies under Letby's care whilst she was a nurse.

The clue to the entire affair, and the new claims, lies in the fact that the ex MP David Davis is, with Mark McDonald, at the heart of the affair. The well respected MP has been involved in several investigative causes, for example opposing the extradition of Julius Assange in 2021. He also was against the Johnson government plans to privatise NHS data. In The Daily Telegraph he espoused reform of the National Health Service and the introduction of a social insurance based system. He said the NHS was "plagued by ineffective bureaucracy" and that structural reform did not mean that the principles of the NHS being universal and free at the point of delivery needed to be abandoned. The perception in the UK, in fact anyone who has anecdotal evidence of it, is a system which appears to be more driven by covering up wrong doing than solving negligence and abuse. Hence it is no surprise that Davis is involved.

The behemoth that is the NHS is allergic to Corporate Liability. Fear of prosecution and negligence runs riot in the system. Yet the British legal system works as a form of enriching symbiosis; on the one side an avalanche of state funded Personal Injury Lawyers, on the other the NHS defence of it. Squashed in the middle somewhere is that old chestnut 'Truth'. Hence there is logic to the claims of some that Letby has been thrown under the bus, to take the hit and bird time. It is for legal expertise to gather all the evidence, not only medical. Letby, on the balance of evidence, is more than likely guilty. But there is a bigger picture here. The NHS is akin to a Rotten Borough before reform. The whole case resembles a Greek Tragedy, a 'Deux ex Machina', when the god or goddess is lowered to the stage, arriving from Olympus, a contrived scapegoat. Someone must take the blame. Yet this tragedy still has no denouement.