Former Government minister joins the Telegraph, Guardian, and Vision News Online in questioning the conviction of Lucy Letby.
Following her conviction for attempted murder last week, some experts are worried about the way the evidence was presented at her trials the Telegraph reports:
Several former Cabinet ministers have expressed concern over the conviction of Lucy Letby, the former nurse, with the issue likely to be raised in Parliament, The Telegraph understands.
The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) has also announced it will “convene a meeting” in the wake of the verdicts, stating that it was aware of “concerns” from RSS members and the wider community regarding the use of statistical evidence in the case.
In August 2023, Letby was convicted of the murders of seven newborns and the attempted murders of six other infants. A retrial which ended last week also found her guilty of the attempted murder of another child.
Vision News Online was the first media outlet to question the Letby case following her conviction last year, and reported again on the case when the retrial happened. We were joined by both the Guardian and The Telegraph who have also begun arriving at conclusions we reached a year ago.
The Telegraph now reports that several former Cabinet ministers are troubled by the conviction and are hoping to take the matter further. One former Cabinet minister with a legal background told The Telegraph that several convictions based on scientific or medical evidence in recent years had troubled him.
Speaking specifically about the Letby trial, he said: “There is an increasing trend towards convictions being secured on the basis of medical evidence. “Where there is no direct evidence of a person’s guilt, one can understand why there may be some people who are concerned about it.”
Other former ministers described the verdicts as “unsafe” and have questioned how statistics and scientific evidence was presented to the jury.The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) has previously warned of a lack of knowledge in the legal profession over the interpretation of statistical evidence and in 2022 released a report specifically setting out how best to deal with cases of medical serial killers.
However, none of the recommendations were followed in the Letby trial.
Experts from several British universities have questioned shift pattern data used in the trial which showed Letby was present at every death and attempted murder.
Dr Alexander Coward, a former lecturer at Oxford and the University of California Berkeley, said that it was possible to take an identical number of nurses and incident rate at a hospital with 170 shifts and place any nurse at the same number of events as Letby, simply through randomness. The RSS said it was hoping to see more collaboration between statisticians and lawyers in future.
A spokesman for the RSS said: “We’re aware of concerns raised by some RSS members and the wider statistical community around the statistical aspects of the Lucy Letby case.
“Our 2022 report highlighted the challenges of interpreting statistical evidence in medical murder cases, and it proposed several recommendations for best practice." “We will be convening a meeting to explore how best these recommendations can be put into practice.”
Edmund Bulmer, the former chairman of the Herefordshire Health Authority, and ex-MP for Kidderminster said he had contacted Rishi Sunak personally about the matter after Letby was first convicted last year.
He said that he believed Letby was “the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice”.
Francis Hoar, a public law barrister, described the Telegraph investigation as “deeply troubling” and said he felt “uneasy” about the trial.
“The statistical evidence was not questioned in the way that statisticians suggested it should have been,” he wrote on X. “Were an appeal brought on the basis of new evidence, after a successful application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the result may well be different.”
The Criminal Cases Review Commission has not yet said whether it will be looking into Letby’s case, meanwhile the former nurse languishes in prison, the victim of a Witch Hunt that has all the hallmarks of a miscarriage of justice.
Related:
Lucy Letby is Innocent and Here's Why
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