A conviction is a legal fact, and it stays one until a court says otherwise. It can also be a question. In the cases below, a verdict from a jury or a bench of judges was followed by years of argument from people who know the field: pediatricians and other doctors, forensic psychiatrists, defense lawyers, a researcher working with the Innocence Project and, in one Italian case, the family of a convicted man. The courts have answered some of them directly. Others are waiting for an answer. Nothing here is a judgment on who is right. Where a doubt appears, it belongs to the person who raised it, and the answer given by the court or the review body is set beside it.
Lucy Letby was a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital in the north west of England. In August 2023 a jury at Manchester Crown Court convicted her of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others on the hospital’s neonatal unit between June 2015 and June 2016. A second jury convicted her in July 2024 of the attempted murder of another baby girl. The first jury could not agree on six counts, and it acquitted her on two counts of attempted murder, one concerning the baby known as Child G and one concerning Child H. Only the count concerning Child K was retried. All the babies are known by letter under court orders. Mr. Justice Goss sentenced her on August 21, 2023, to a whole life order on each of 14 counts, in her absence, and a 15th order followed on July 5, 2024. The Nursing and Midwifery Council struck her from the register on December 12, 2023.
She denies every charge. The Court of Appeal refused her leave to appeal on May 24, 2024, and again on October 24, 2024. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body that investigates possible miscarriages of justice in England and Wales, stated on February 13, 2026, that a review of her convictions is under way. The convictions stand.
The prosecution case, as the courts have described it, was circumstantial. The trial opened on October 4, 2022, before Mr. Justice Goss, with Nicholas Johnson KC for the Crown and Benjamin Myers KC for the defense. The Crown relied on expert evidence that the babies had been deliberately harmed, on the timing of the collapses, and on staffing and door-swipe records that, it said, placed Letby on duty at every deterioration and death. Prosecutors called her a "constant malevolent presence" on the unit, CBS News reported. The medical case was led by Dr. Dewi Evans, a retired consultant pediatrician who, the Court of Appeal recorded, had reviewed some 60 cases for the police. Another pediatrician, Dr. Bohin, peer reviewed his work, and Professor Arthurs gave radiology evidence. The Crown also relied on handwritten notes. The Court of Appeal records that one, recovered on July 3, 2018, ended with the words "I am evil, I did this." CBS News reported that a Post-it note shown in court read, in part, "I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them."
The doubts come mainly from the medical side. After the trials, her new legal team assembled a panel of doctors and scientists who dispute the medical evidence on which she was convicted. ITV News Granada reported on February 4, 2025, that the panel was to present what it called new medical evidence, and the Associated Press reported the same day that medical experts disputed the evidence used to convict her. In December 2024 the Associated Press had reported her lawyer’s statement that new evidence was grounds for appeal, and the Press Association reported that a doctor rejected claims that he had changed his mind over the cause of death of babies in the case. On September 15, 2026, ITV News reported that experts had quit her defense team over what its headline called "unresolvable problems," and ITV News Granada reported that her lawyer insisted the case had not been undermined. The Commission’s review was under way as of its latest statement.
One thing should not be confused with another. A statutory public inquiry led by Lady Justice Thirlwall examined how the hospital responded to the deaths and collapses, and published its report on September 15, 2026. It did not reexamine the convictions. It concluded that senior nurses "never accepted" that the consultants' concerns were, or might be, justified, and that the consultants who raised them were themselves investigated during a grievance Letby brought, with three told to apologize to her. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which had reviewed the unit, accepted at the inquiry that its review could not answer the doctors' concerns and should never have been undertaken. In a separate decision, the Crown Prosecution Service announced in January 2026 that it would not charge Letby over further babies at the Countess of Chester and Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and said in August 2026, on review, that the decision was upheld.
Colin Norris, known since at least 2025 as Colin Campbell, was a newly qualified staff nurse when five elderly women with hip fractures on orthopedic wards in Leeds fell into deep, unexplained hypoglycemia, a dangerous drop in blood sugar, in 2002. None of the women had diabetes. Four of them died. After a trial of about five months at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court, with 132 live witnesses, 20 of them experts, a jury convicted him on March 3, 2008, by a majority of 11 to 1 of murdering Doris Ludlam, Bridget Bourke, Irene Crookes and Ethel Hall and of attempting to murder Vera Wilby. On March 4 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 30 years. He has denied the offenses throughout.
The Crown’s case was that no natural explanation existed for any of the five collapses, that each woman had been given a substance from outside her body that lowered her blood sugar, and that Norris was the "common denominator," the only nurse who had cared for all five and on duty when three of them were recorded in that state. The Court of Appeal’s 2009 judgment records Professor Ferner telling the jury that five natural cases would be "outside the bounds of possibility," and Dr. Kroker saying that he knew of no syndrome that fitted the cases. The Crown also pointed to the failure of injected glucose to correct the low blood sugar in any of the cases. For Ethel Hall, 86, the evidence was strongest: a blood test ordered after she collapsed returned a reading about 12 times the normal level of the hormone that lowers blood sugar, and the Criminal Cases Review Commission later wrote that there was no dispute that she had been murdered.
The argument has been about the other four. At the time none of those collapses was investigated as deliberate harm. Blood was not taken at a point that could show whether the cause had come from outside the body, the Court of Appeal noted in 2025, and the cases were examined again only after Hall’s. The dispute that followed is a dispute over medicine: whether severe hypoglycemia in frail, elderly hospital patients is as rare as the experts at his trial said it was.
The Court of Appeal dismissed his first appeal on December 21, 2009. The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the case back to the court, with a decision dated February 12, 2021, on fresh expert evidence. Doubts had been aired for years. The Courier of Dundee reported in October 2011 that a professor said new evidence made the convictions unsafe, and in May 2013 that new evidence was being claimed, and the Yorkshire Evening Post reported in 2016 that Norris was hopeful about it. The appeal hearing began in May 2025. On June 26, 2025, three appeal judges, having heard the new evidence, said they had no doubt that any of the five convictions was safe, and dismissed his appeals. On September 23, 2025, they refused to certify a point of law for the Supreme Court. The convictions stand.
Raymond Leslie Morris was convicted of one murder, that of seven-year-old Christine Darby of Walsall, who died in August 1967. The jury at Stafford Assizes returned its verdict on February 18, 1969, before Mr. Justice Ashworth, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in November 1969. He was never charged with the deaths of two younger girls, Margaret Reynolds, 6, of Aston, and Diane Tift, 5, of Bloxwich, whose deaths date from 1965. The Express & Star of Wolverhampton has repeatedly called him the prime suspect in those two deaths, and both cases remain on file. No court has ruled on who caused them.
Morris denied everything to the end. His legal team spent seven years reviewing the 1969 conviction, and his solicitors argued that police officers had behaved improperly, in particular that interview notes had been tampered with. At trial he said he had been beaten by police; the jury convicted him. In June 2010 the Criminal Cases Review Commission refused to refer his case to the Court of Appeal. In November 2010 his solicitor, Amy-Jo Cutts, said she had permission to seek a judicial review, and told the Express & Star that "it has been quite a battle for Ray, who has always maintained his innocence." Had the conviction been quashed, the paper noted, it would have been the longest-running miscarriage of justice in British history. At the December hearing in the Administrative Court, John McGuinness QC told the court that the claim was bound to fail. On February 7, 2011, at the Royal Courts of Justice, Mr. Justice Simon dismissed it. In April 2011 a spokeswoman for his solicitors confirmed that a plan to go to the European Court of Human Rights had been dropped. Morris died at HMP Preston on March 11, 2014, aged 84, after almost 45 years in custody.
Pat Molloy, by then retired, had always said he had no doubt of Morris’s guilt. "I would describe him as cold, cruel, lustful and just plain wicked," he said, and after the death he said he was "quite happy that he is a guilty man and that he is a killer."
Between 1986 and 1994 about 22 boys died on the Cape Flats, the sprawling working-class districts east of central Cape Town. In 1994 police arrested Norman Afzal Simons, a teacher at a primary school in Mitchells Plain. In June 1995 Judge Wally van Deventer sentenced him to 25 years for the murder of Elroy van Rooyen, 10, of Strand, and 10 years for kidnapping him, to run concurrently, Reuters reported. Simons appealed. His sentence was later raised to life imprisonment after the appeal failed, a point that Lawrence Venter, the Western Cape regional head of the Department of Correctional Services, confirmed in 2023. He has never been charged with any of the other deaths.
For nearly three decades much of Cape Town treated him as the man behind the whole series, a label no court has tested. The doubts about his single conviction were voiced early. The Mail & Guardian noted in March 1995 that the arrest had come at a time of intense pressure on the police, and suggested that pressure might help the defense. The conviction, Tredoux and others later said, rested on eyewitness evidence, an identity parade and a confession that Simons retracted. In 2022 the Weekend Argus reported Tredoux’s view that the eyewitness evidence was "questionable and not reliable." In 2023 he told the Saturday Star, after researching the case with the Innocence Project in the United States, that "both the eyewitness identification and the confession(s) have flaws in the Simons case."
Others went further. In December 2009 the Cape Argus reviewed what was known, reporting that some items had never been tested because police lacked the technology at the time, and that biological samples from one of the other cases had been typed as coming from a person whose blood group shows in his body fluids, which Simons, the paper reported, is not. Koos Louw had asked for untested evidence to be sent to police laboratories, without success. Louw said Simons had given him a detailed account of his movements on the day in question, including meetings and telephone calls that could be checked. In 2022 Michael Jacobs, a former chair of the Mitchells Plain Community Police Forum, told the Weekend Argus that the man fitting the profile owned a car, while Simons used public transport, that the identity parade was inconclusive and that there was no DNA evidence. He said he believed someone else was involved. DNA from several of the other deaths, tested in later years, did not match Simons.
None of this has overturned the conviction. No court ruling on the DNA results is reported, and Simons was never charged with the cases they concern. Not everyone doubts. Elroy’s cousin, who identified Simons in the parade, has said that his release reopened old wounds, and the aunt of another boy in the series, Jeremy Smith, said she still believed Simons killed him, although the DNA reported from that case did not match.
In September 2022 the Weekend Argus reported a campaign for his release by prison rights activists and the Reverend Chris Nissen of the South African Human Rights Commission, who said Simons had served his punishment. He was released on life parole on July 20, 2023, to live with relatives in Parow. "This person needs to do 25 years, he’s now done already 28 years," Venter said before the release. "I know this is quite an emotive issue, but the minister only has the one conviction legally that he can consider."
Between August 1968 and September 1985 eight couples were killed in the countryside around Florence. Sixteen people died. The Italian press called the unidentified person responsible Il Mostro di Firenze. Only three men have been finally convicted for any of it. Stefano Mele, the husband of one of the 1968 victims, was convicted of that double killing alone, and the Florence judgment, a parliamentary report records, firmly excluded the presence of accomplices. Mario Vanni, who received a life sentence, and Giancarlo Lotti, who received 26 years, were convicted in 2000 of taking part in the four double killings of 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985. No court has named the person who carried out the killings.
The doubts attach to the verdicts in turn. The later trials concluded that the physical link between the eight double killings, the same item in every case, had changed hands, La Nazione reported. Sky TG24 notes that Mele was in prison when the later killings took place.
The case against Vanni and Lotti came by a route that has never stopped drawing questions. In 1993 a farmer, identified by the initials P.P., was arrested and charged with the double killings, and he was convicted at first instance in 1994 of seven of them. The appeal court acquitted him in February 1996 on the ground that he had not committed the acts, Panorama reported, after 1,100 days in jail. On December 12, 1996, the Court of Cassation annulled the acquittal for a procedural defect and ordered a new appeal hearing. P.P. died on February 22, 1998, before it could take place, and in law he died unconvicted. While his appeal was still under way, a new inquiry turned to his friends. Vanni was arrested on February 12, 1996. Lotti confessed to taking part in the last killings and became a cooperating witness under state protection, naming P.P. and Vanni, and another man testified against Vanni and Lotti, saying he had seen two of the eight killings, Il Post reports. The judgment against the two states that someone ordered the killings, La Nazione wrote in 2017. Prosecutors identified a pharmacist from San Casciano, F.C., as the "doctor" in the statements, but he was acquitted in an abbreviated trial in 2008 and the prosecution did not appeal.
In 2025 Vanni’s family went to court. A request to reopen his conviction, which La Nazione reported in January and a hearing postponed in May, was declared inadmissible by the Genoa Court of Appeal, Fanpage.it reported on July 28, 2025. Vanni’s lawyers said they would appeal to the Court of Cassation; the outcome was not reported as of January 2026. One argument concerns the date of the last double killing. The judgments fixed it as the night of September 8, 1985. Experts working for Vanni’s family have argued from insect evidence that the couple died up to two nights earlier, La Nazione reported in September 2024. Vanni’s sentence was suspended for health reasons in 2004 and he died in 2009.
Other questions are not about Vanni at all. Fanpage.it reported in August 2017 that DNA had been identified on two items; in August 2024 the news agency AFP reported that DNA was spurring new questions, and La Nazione wrote of an unknown profile. Families asked in March 2022 for the case to be reopened. The convictions of Vanni and Lotti stand, and the question of who carried out the killings is open.
Gertraud Arzberger, a bookkeeper in Graz, Austria, hid four pregnancies. In 2005 four newborn children were reported to have died in Graz shortly after birth. Prosecutors charged her with five killings, the fifth resting on neighbors who said they had seen her pregnant one more time; no fifth child was identified, and she denied it. She pleaded guilty to four counts. On March 31, 2006, a jury at the Graz regional court convicted her of three murders and sentenced her to life imprisonment. The Associated Press reported that she was convicted on three counts rather than four because experts could not say whether one of the children had been stillborn. Her partner, Johannes Genser, was sentenced to 15 years as an accessory; the jurors did not believe his account that he had noticed nothing.
The disputes were psychiatric. The court’s expert, Friedrich Rous, told the trial that diminished responsibility was possible at the time of the first death but that after it a process of learning had set in. On Genser’s claim, he said everyday experience made it hard to imagine that a partner in an intact relationship could miss four pregnancies over more than three years. profil, writing in 2010, described the jury’s reasoning this way: the jurors concluded that she had been in an exceptional state of mind at the first death, for which the law provides one to five years, and that the other three deaths were intentional murders.
Claudia Klier, a specialist in neonaticide at the university clinic for child and adolescent neuropsychiatry in Vienna, was dismayed by what she saw in the Graz courtroom. She contacted Matthias Lammel, a German forensic psychiatrist who had worked on the major infant-killing cases in Germany, and he examined first Arzberger and then Genser. Arzberger’s lawyer, Andreas Berchtold, and Genser’s lawyer, Gerald Ruhri, used his report to apply for the case to be reopened. Prosecutors opposed the application, arguing that a privately commissioned report was not evidence. The court appointed its own psychiatrist, Reinhard Haller, whose wording was gentler but who too concluded that an exceptional emotional state was possible in all four deaths. Haller saw no sign that she had been in thrall to her partner; he noted problematic personality traits in her and concluded that the acts came from her own thoughts and feelings rather than from him. Lammel argued that Genser should not have been convicted.
In January 2010 the Graz regional court ruled that there were no new findings, a conclusion Berchtold called simply wrong. The higher regional court rejected the lawyers' appeal. In October 2010 profil reported that the lawyers planned a last step, a request to the Generalprokuratur, the office of the prosecutor general, to bring a plea of nullity for the preservation of the law. NEWS magazine later reported that the couple had spent years seeking a retrial without success. The convictions stand.
Charles Ebo Quansah is the man Ghana’s police held responsible for a series of killings of women that frightened Accra and Kumasi through the late 1990s and into 2000. By the time he was arrested in 2001 the number of women was put at more than 30, and in later years the figure usually given was 34. Police said he confessed on May 8, 2001, to eight of them, a number later reported as nine. He was tried for one: the death of Akua Serwaa, 24, in Kumasi on January 19, 1996. On August 7, 2002, a jury in the High Court in Accra convicted him, and Justice Agnes Dordzie sentenced him to death. "I am innocent," Quansah told the court.
The defense attacked how the police evidence had been obtained. Quansah says his statements were taken by force. The Enquirer reported in 2005 that his lawyer, Amui, had a subpoena issued on July 9, 2002, ordering the CID Commissioner, Patrick K. Acheampong, to appear before the judge with a lie detector, earlier statements and a tape recording of the confession; Acheampong did not appear and the judge did not hold him in contempt. Acheampong, by then Inspector General, later told the paper he did not recall the subpoena, and a police spokesman said the CID did not have a lie detector. The CID chief said, according to The Herald (Ghana) in 2010, that the confession was neither videotaped nor recorded. Quansah’s account, given through prison sources, was that he had been blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten by a team that he said was led by the former CID director, David Asante-Apeatu, and that he had told police he killed nine women, not 34. No court ruling on his torture allegations is reported.
On September 6, 2002, Amui filed a notice of appeal, arguing that the conviction was wrong in law, that the judge had misdirected the jury on the defense case and had wrongly told the jury to disregard the evidence of a defense witness, and that the result was "a grave miscarriage of justice." The trial court had held that the date the witness gave for his time in the police cells contradicted the rest of the evidence. In November 2010 The Herald reported that the docket and trial record could not be located in either the High Court or the Court of Appeal, and that without them the appeal could not be heard. The Chief Registrar of the High Court, S. P. Otoo, would not confirm that the papers were missing. The registrar of the Court of Appeal’s criminal section, Jude Mensah, said nothing had reached him. Justice Dordzie, the paper noted, was by then serving as a judge in The Gambia.
The politics of the series ran alongside. In September 2007 the Minority Leader in Parliament, Alban Bagbin, called a police documentary on the case "erroneous and deceptive" and noted that Quansah had been convicted of one killing, not of the more than 30 women who died. In November 2010 President John Atta Mills directed the Inspector General of Police to reopen the investigation, and a deputy minister, Dr. Omane Boamah, said the government believed Quansah was not the only person behind the killings. Nana Obiri Boahene called the order a "dangerous precedence," and the editor Kweku Baako Jnr called it a wild goose chase. The conviction stands as of the last report in 2010, with the appeal unheard.
Set side by side, the courts' answers differ more than the doubts do. Norris is the clearest: the evidence was referred, heard and rejected, with the judges saying they had no doubt. Morris is a second kind: a review body and a High Court judge declined. For Arzberger and for Vanni the answer so far has been procedural, a ruling that nothing new had been shown or that a request was inadmissible, and in each case the lawyers have said they would go on. Letby’s review was under way at the Commission’s latest statement. Quansah’s appeal had not been heard in 2010 because the trial record could not be located. For Simons a court decided one count, and the doubts concern the wider series, which no court has ruled on. In none of these cases is an order setting aside a conviction reported.
• August 1967: Christine Darby dies in Walsall; February 18, 1969: Raymond Morris is convicted; November 1969: his appeal is dismissed.
• August 1968 to September 1985: eight couples are killed around Florence.
• 1994: Norman Afzal Simons is arrested; June 1995: he is sentenced; 1998: the sentence is raised to life on appeal.
• 2000: the Vanni and Lotti convictions become final.
• August 7, 2002: Quansah is convicted; September 6, 2002: notice of appeal filed.
• March 31, 2006: Arzberger is convicted and sentenced to life.
• March 3 and 4, 2008: Norris is convicted and sentenced; December 21, 2009: his appeal is dismissed.
• January 2010: the Graz court rules there are no new findings in Arzberger’s case; June 2010: the Commission declines to refer Morris’s case; November 2010: Quansah’s trial record is reported missing.
• February 7, 2011: Morris’s judicial review is dismissed; March 11, 2014: Morris dies.
• February 12, 2021: the Commission refers Norris’s case back to the Court of Appeal.
• July 20, 2023: Simons is released on life parole; August 2023: Letby is convicted; May 24, 2024: leave to appeal refused; July 2024: second jury convicts her; October 24, 2024: leave to appeal refused again.
• June 26, 2025: Norris’s appeals are dismissed; July 28, 2025: Genoa court declares the Vanni request inadmissible; September 23, 2025: no point of law certified for Norris.
• February 13, 2026: Commission statement that the Letby review is under way; September 15, 2026: Thirlwall Inquiry report published.