Over 2,000 days have passed since Lucy Letby was imprisoned, and no proof that she ever hurt anyone has surfaced.
She was imprisoned as an unconvicted prisoner on remand for over a thousand of those days of gloom and suffering.
Since she must die in jail, her sentence is actually the death penalty. However, the state lacks the guts to execute the death penalty swiftly; it is a slow-motion punishment. It could take fifty years to murder her. As that great liberal hero John Stuart Mill argued in 1865, it is considerably more cruel than any gallows. She will be “cut off from all earthly hope, and barred from all pleasant sights and sounds” for all time.
However, specialists have now completely disproved the circumstantial and ambiguous evidence against her, or it has blown up in the faces of those who provided it.
Imagine going almost 2,000 days without breathing. However, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) continues to deliberate.
The powerful and significant feminist movement in Britain has yet to address this issue, which surprises me.
The dispute started when Ms. Letby confronted male, senior coworkers who were making disparaging remarks about her.
Furthermore, compared to a guy in the same situation, women is in an even worse situation. In January, she will turn 37. There is very little time left for her hopes of leading a life that is even remotely normal if she is not guilty of the horrific crimes that she is said to have committed.
According to Peter Hitchens, Letby has very little chance of leading a life that is even remotely normal if she is not guilty of the horrible murders she is accused of committing.
To put it plainly, if she is ultimately found not guilty and freed after it is too late for her to conceive, the state will have deprived her and her family of something so incredibly valuable and irreplaceable that no amount of money or grovelling apology could ever make up for it.
Here, there’s no time to waste. If she is to remain incarcerated, we must be certain that the numerous accusations made against her are not the only reason for her incarceration.
However, the most recent report suggests that we might find out the CCRC’s decision before Christmas. I acknowledge that it is merely a rumour, but I have rarely encountered a case that has been questioned and contested at such a high level by so many knowledgeable individuals, ranging against a conviction that still lacks a single concrete fact supporting it.
And how long will it take if the CCRC decides that her appeal should finally be heard? She has shockingly been denied permission to appeal twice.
I am one of many persons who have spent months researching this case and coming to the conclusion that, to put it kindly, the conviction is unsafe—nearly all of them unrewarded and unrelated to Ms. Letby.
A recent attempt by Cheshire Police to file fresh charges against her was even turned down by the Crown Prosecution Service. Perhaps someone in a position of power is starting to recognise that she was thrown into her cell on a wave of assumed guilt and never received the fair trial that is meant to be everyone’s birthright.
These unsuccessful accusations shared similarities with the ones that led to her initial conviction. Something has evolved. However, English law’s massive, rusty, black cast-iron mechanism that clicks slowly has barely moved an inch.
Why is it taking so long? Experts, including statisticians, engineers, highly skilled neonatology doctors, former police officers, a retired Supreme Court judge, and two former cabinet ministers, have been reviewing this case for almost two years and have found it lacking.
If she is to remain incarcerated, we must be certain that the numerous accusations made against her are not the only reason for her incarceration.
However, despite what the prosecution’s detractors say, a lot of people still hold certain views about it. I’ve had numerous interactions with people who still hold these beliefs. For instance:
- “She admitted it.” No, she didn’t. This assertion is based on one of the numerous conflicting and distressed notes she produced during therapy following her accusation. The claims have always been refuted by her.
- “She was apprehended.” No, she wasn’t. Since nothing of the sort happened, no one really said this. At one point, the term “virtually red-handed” was employed. However, it has since been discovered that the doctor engaged in this accusation provided a completely different email account of the incident, one that was far more beneficial to Ms. Letby.
- “She was the only member of the medical staff present at every infant death that occurred at the Chester hospital during the relevant period.” No, she wasn’t. During this period, there were further infant deaths on the unit. For some of them, she wasn’t there.
- “After she was taken out of the ward, the deaths stopped.” This is a blatant illustration of one of the most fundamental fallacies in logic: if A occurs after B, then B must be the cause of A. It is a half-truth and highly deceptive. After the ward was downsized to handle less dangerous cases, the deaths also halted.
Although some experts, including renowned neonatologist Shoo Lee, believe that the poor quality of the hospital and its standards of care and hygiene provide far better explanations for the deaths, all of the alleged methods by which she is accused of killing babies—causing an air embolism, for instance—could account for the deaths. To put it bluntly, these issues are not unheard of at NHS facilities, and they are far less uncommon than insane murderers.
In fact, no reason for Ms. Letby’s claimed actions has yet been proposed. There is nothing in her personality that suggests she could have done these things, according to her friends, who continue to support her.
Additionally, it has been suggested that Ms. Letby tried to poison infants by inserting lethal amounts of insulin in feed bags.
This, according to many, was essential in convincing the jury that she was guilty. During Letby’s trial, the prosecution informed the jury that there was no question that these were poisonings rather than accidents.
However, the evidence supporting these purported poisonings is of poor scientific quality. Furthermore, according to a recent study by bioengineer and insulin delivery expert Professor Geoff Chase and chemical engineer colleague Helen Shannon, there is serious doubt that the infants in question ever received any additional insulin.
The insulin assertion was “the smoking gun” that led to Ms. Letby’s conviction, according to many prosecution supporters. However, there is now compelling evidence that the pistol was not smoking. Actually, it wasn’t even loaded.
For God’s love, reopen the case right now.
