Why we defend Lucy Letby

To anyone trying to understand the Letby case, the sheer volume of information, including complex medical arguments, can seem daunting. Actually, it’s quite straightforward. Lucy Letby was scapegoated for the failings of care in the hospital where she worked. She was framed up in a show trial that turned a dedicated and professional nurse into a monster who we were led to believe was a killer of tiny infants. The NHS bosses, whose entire system depends on taking advantage of the selflessness and dedication of women workers, had no qualms about pinning the blame for the system’s failings on this young working-class woman.

To understand why the trade unions must take up her case, we must unpack the toxic mix of factors that led to this frame-up by the NHS bosses, the cops and courts. First of all, she worked in conditions that are typical of the collapsing NHS where patients are dying in corridors and staff are leaving in droves because they cannot do it anymore. The neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital where Lucy Letby worked treated very premature babies who by definition are high-risk. The number of baby deaths there spiked in 2015-16. The unit was short of such vital equipment as incubators and was woefully understaffed. Not to mention that, on occasion, sewage backed up into toilets and sinks. But the hospital authorities refused to tackle these problems. Rather than recruiting more nurses and doctors, or buying equipment, they looked for someone to blame. Some consultants branded Lucy Letby the “angel of death” on the grounds that she was on duty when many of the deaths occurred. The conviction of Lucy Letby is a warning to every worker — especially but not only in the NHS — that what happened to her can happen to anyone.

Following a police investigation, Letby was put on trial on multiple murder charges. But to secure a conviction, the prosecution had a fundamental problem: there was no evidence of Lucy Letby — or anyone else — harming any child. To prove her guilt, the crucial question to be answered was, how exactly did the babies die?

The answer was provided by the leading expert witness for the prosecution, Dewi Evans, a paediatric consulting expert, who came up with a series of hypotheses that were pivotal to her conviction. He claimed that air was injected into babies’ stomachs via nasogastric tubes causing air embolism. Another of his hypotheses was insulin poisoning.

His theories have since been discredited and there is an avalanche of material available that exposes the trial as completely rigged. The Crown Prosecution Service has admitted that door-swipe data submitted as evidence that Letby was alone during some baby collapses was incorrect. Post-it notes saying things like “I am evil” were presented in court as if they were her confessions of guilt. In fact, she wrote them on the advice of her therapists to help her cope with the distress she was going through. The blood tests showing sky-high insulin levels in some babies have been shown to be invalid.

The testimony provided by Evans was vital to her conviction. However, far from an independent expert witness, he had helped the police to build a case against Letby. During the trial, her defence team tried to have him removed on the grounds that he was “dogmatic and biased” but the judge rejected the challenge.

By now, Evans’s theory about air embolism as the cause of death has been ridiculed by medical experts as “implausible” and “not practically feasible”. Amid growing public criticism, including in a Channel 5 documentary, Evans modified his account of the cause of death of three of the seven infants (babies C, I and P) that Letby was convicted of murdering. Having originally claimed that Baby C died of air being forced into the stomach via a nasogastric tube, Evans now claims that the probable cause of death was air being forced into the veins. He denies that his change of opinion is significant. In any case, he maintains that she’s guilty.

Also, as of now, medical experts working with Letby’s defence team have found evidence of the likely cause of death in two of the babies (so far) showing that the theories on which she was convicted are simply wrong. One of the babies probably died due to a blunder by one of the consultants, who intended to aspirate the baby’s abdomen but perforated the liver. And the basis for the conviction continues to unravel.

How to defend Lucy Letby?

Lucy Letby’s barrister, Mark McDonald, has announced that he will refer her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, a body which examines potential miscarriages of justice. He will also try to take it back to the Court of Appeal. These legal avenues are to be welcomed, but we cannot rely on the courts. The legal review process takes forever. And history has shown that the British establishment will fight to the bitter end to uphold the honour of its “justice” system rather than admit that it locks up innocent people. The freeing of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, innocent Irish people who were framed up by the cops for bombings, took years of tenacious legal battles as well as public campaigns.

As we saw in the Post Office scandal, it took years of struggle to expose the frame-up and even then, the authorities held out to the bitter end rather than admit the truth. It is worth noting that the Post Office got away with it for so long by silencing its critics using fear of being sacked and even prosecuted, and sending people to prison to make examples of them. In a similar fashion, nurses in the NHS have been threatened with disciplinary action for speaking up in favour of Letby. One of her co-workers was warned not to provide a character statement in her defence for the trial.

The health service unions must take up the defence of Lucy Letby. When she was first targeted by some hospital consultants, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) represented her in a grievance procedure. Her grievance was upheld and consultants were forced to apologise to her. But since then, the RCN has kept a shameful silence while medical and other experts are working hard to expose her conviction as a travesty of justice. While she was RCN general secretary, Pat Cullen despicably rushed to publicly endorse the conviction of Letby. It is no surprise that Cullen would side with the establishment against Letby. On Cullen’s watch, during the 2022-23 strike wave, the RCN bowed to the monarchy and refused to mount an effective struggle against the NHS bosses. The strikes ended in a demoralising defeat for the RCN which emboldened the NHS bosses to carry out further attacks on the health service.

There is an urgent need for trade unionists in the health service to defy their leaderships and build a campaign demanding justice for Lucy Letby. The union should galvanise the support for her that already exists. Nurses who worked with her knew her as a competent, caring and hard-working nurse who often worked extra shifts to cover for staff shortages. The NHS unions must push back hard against the notoriously bullying NHS bosses, who have intimidated nurses and doctors voicing support for Letby. The unions must take up the defence of Lucy Letby and build a public campaign for her freedom. She should not spend another day in prison for crimes that simply did not happen.