Senior Tory MP Sir David Davis calls for Lucy Letby retrial

8 January 2025, 22:30 | Updated: 8 January 2025, 23:14

A senior Conservative has called for a retrial for Lucy Letby, the nurse jailed for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others.

Former minister Sir David Davis has said he believes a retrial will "clear" her, as her conviction was "built on a poor understanding of probabilities" and lacked "hard evidence".

He told MPs on Wednesday "there is case in justice" for a retrial, but admitted there was a problem.

Much of the expert analysis of the case notes he was referring to, was available at the time but not presented to the jury, he said.

That meant the Court of Appeal can dismiss it, "basically saying the defence should have presented it at the initial trial".

In effect, he said, the court can say: "'If your defence team weren't good enough to present this evidence, hard luck you stay banged up for life'."

Such an outcome "may be judicially convenient, but it's not justice," he said.

He said earlier: "There was no hard evidence against Letby, nobody saw her do anything untoward. The doctor's gut feeling was based on a coincidence - she was on shift for a number of deaths, and this is important, although far from all of them, far from all of them.

"It was built on a poor understanding of probabilities, which could translate later into an influential but spectacularly flawed piece of evidence."

Sir David said Letby's case "horrified the nation" and that it "seemed clear a nurse had turned into a serial killer".

"Now I initially accepted the tabloid characterisation of Letby as an evil monster, but then I was approached by many experts, leading statisticians, neonatal specialists, forensic scientists, legal experts and those who had served at Chester Hospital who were afraid to come forward," he added.

These experts convinced Sir David that "false analyses and diagnoses" had been used to "persuade a lay jury" to find Letby guilty.

Responding to Sir David, Justice Minister Alex Davies-Jones said it is "an important principle of the rule of law that the Government does not interfere with judicial decisions".

She added: "It is not appropriate for me or the government to comment on judicial processes nor the reliability of convictions or evidence."

Ms Davies-Jones later told the Commons that Letby could apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission if she believed she had been wrongly convicted.

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Letby, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016.

Letby, who was in her mid-20s and working at the Countess of Chester Hospital at the time of the murders, is now the UK's most prolific child killer of modern times.

The 33-year-old killed her victims by injecting the infants with insulin or air or force-feeding them with milk.