Lucy Letby was not present when a baby she was convicted of killing was harmed, a BBC investigation has found. The Telegraph reports.
Letby was found guilty of killing a boy known as Baby C by injecting air into his system at the Countess of Chester Hospital in June 2016.
During the trial, prosecution experts said an X-ray of the baby showed a “marked gaseous distention of the stomach”, which they suggested was due to a deliberate pumping of gas into his feeding tube.
However, the X-ray was taken on June 12th, when Letby was not working and had not been on shift since the morning of June 10th, BBC’s File on 4 programme reported.
Commenting on the BBC report, James Phillips, a former Government science advisor for Boris Johnson, said: “Serious doubts have emerged about whether there was ever a crime at all.
“Pivotal evidence for one of the Lucy Letby murder convictions is deeply flawed, as she appears to have never met the baby at the time it was obtained.
“She had never been on shift. This, quite obviously, calls into question whether the conviction it underpins is safe.”
Baby C later collapsed and died when Letby was on the night shift on June 13-14th, with the prosecution implying that the baby had finally been killed by another injection of air causing his stomach to balloon, crushing his lungs so he could not breathe.
In his opening argument, prosecution barrister Nicholas Johnson KC said: “Baby C was killed by air inserted into his stomach via the nasogastric tube, not into his bloodstream. It was a variation or refinement of a theme Lucy Letby had started [with earlier babies].”
During the trial, defence barrister Ben Myers KC highlighted that Letby had not been on shift when the X-ray was taken, but in summing up the judge did not remind the jury that she was not present and pointed to the radiologist’s evidence that there was a “massive gaseous dilation in the stomach”.
Worth reading in full.
The BBC investigation report can be read here.
Other areas of concern raised by the experts who spoke to File on 4 concerned allegations of insulin poisoning and liver damage.
According to the BBC, Professor Geoff Chase from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand said that, based on his and his colleague’s modelling, “significantly higher quantities of insulin would be needed to harm babies F and L, and to generate insulin levels seen in their test results. In the case of Baby L they calculated it could be as much as 20-80 times more”.
On the liver damage, a leading senior perinatal pathologist (who asked not to be identified because of the controversial nature of the case) said she “agrees with the original post-mortem on Baby O – that his liver injury and death were by natural causes”. She said “she has seen this kind of liver damage at least three times in her career. Each time there were natural causes”.
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