Lucy Letby Is Convicted at Retrial of Trying to Murder a Premature Baby Girl in 2016
The first jury could not agree on the Baby K count. A second jury in Manchester found the former nurse guilty, on evidence that rested largely on one consultant.
Published
A second jury at Manchester Crown Court found Lucy Letby guilty on Tuesday, July 2, 2024, of trying to murder a premature baby girl at the Countess of Chester Hospital in February 2016. The jury at her first trial, which ended in August 2023 with her convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others, had been unable to agree on this count. The new jury of six women and six men deliberated for about three and a half hours. Letby, 34, showed no emotion as the verdict was read. The baby's parents gasped and cried.
The child is known only as Baby K, or Child K; a court order protects the identities of the babies in the case. She was extremely premature and had been put on a ventilator when she arrived on the neonatal unit. Shortly afterward, in the early hours of February 17, 2016, the consultant pediatrician Dr. Ravi Jayaram came into the room and found Letby standing by the cot. The monitor showed the baby's blood oxygen falling to a dangerous level because the breathing tube had come out of place. Letby was doing nothing to help, he told the jury, neither giving oxygen nor calling for anyone. The prosecution said she had dislodged the tube herself and then dislodged it twice more over the next few hours, "in an attempt to cover her tracks and suggest that the first dislodgment was accidental," as Senior Prosecutor Nicola Wyn Williams put it. "These were the actions of a cold-blooded, calculated killer," Wyn Williams said.
Letby told the jury she had no memory of any such event. She denied harming the baby, and she testified that she had not committed any of the offenses she had already been convicted of.
Unlike the first trial, which turned on a mass of contested medical and scientific evidence, the retrial rested almost entirely on Jayaram. The Court of Appeal later observed that "legitimate criticism could be made of his evidence": he had said nothing at the time, or for many months afterward, about believing Letby had deliberately dislodged the tube, and his account was inconsistent with the hospital's own records of that night. The jury also heard, as evidence, that Letby had been convicted of 14 offenses of murder and attempted murder, with the judge's direction that they must not convict her wholly or mainly because of them.
The retrial had opened on June 10 before Mr. Justice Goss, the judge who had presided over the first trial. On its first day her barrister, Benjamin Myers KC, asked him to halt the case as an abuse of process, arguing that the volume and tone of the publicity after the 2023 verdicts meant she could not be tried fairly. Goss refused. On July 5 he sentenced her to life imprisonment with a whole life order, her 15th.
She then sought permission to appeal on that single point. On October 24, 2024, three Court of Appeal judges refused it, finding that Goss had been right to let the trial go ahead. The judges said they were deciding a narrow legal question, and that nothing they said could contribute to the wider debate about the case against her.
Letby has always denied every charge. Since her first trial, her convictions have been questioned in public by critics of the medical and scientific evidence, a fact the Court of Appeal noted while declining to address it; this story reports the retrial and its aftermath as of October 2024 and does not cover later developments.
Sources
- R v Letby [2024] EWCA Crim 1278 (Court of Appeal judgment refusing leave to appeal), Court of Appeal (Criminal Division), Courts and Tribunals Judiciary
- British nurse Lucy Letby, convicted of killing 7 babies, found guilty of another attempted murder, CBS News / The Associated Press