PETER HITCHENS: Lucy Letby's case MUST be re-examined

When a leading witness in a huge and famous criminal case says that he got a key piece of evidence wrong, you might think that the news would appear in letters of fire near the top of every TV bulletin.

Yet it passed last week with barely a whisper. You may even have missed it. Here is what you need to know.

When the mighty Court of Appeal refused even to hear Lucy Letby’s appeal against her multiple murder convictions, it listed the crimes which she is believed to have committed.

One of them is the killing of ‘Baby C’, who died in the Countess of Chester Hospital around midnight on the night of June 13-14, 2016. It describes the method of killing as ‘air via nasogastric tube’, the injection of air into his stomach. Well, that will now have to be revised.

The main prosecution expert witness in the Letby trial, Dr Dewi Evans, now says this is not how Baby C died. His astounding about-turn followed a Radio 4 programme, Lucy Letby: The Killer Questions, part of the File On 4 series, transmitted by the BBC last Tuesday but still available via BBC Sounds. I commend it.

In it, several highly qualified experts cast doubt on this and much of the evidence accepted by the jury in Ms Letby’s first trial.

During that trial, Dr Evans said an X-ray of Baby C showed an unusual amount of air in the boy’s stomach, which could have been caused by the deliberate pumping of air into his feeding tube. This aroused his suspicions.

But the Radio 4 programme points out that Letby was not actually in the hospital on June 12 when the X-ray was taken. She had not even met Baby C at that point.

The stomach bubble, which had absolutely nothing do with Lucy Letby, did not therefore cause the baby’s death.

But Dr Evans now says: ‘His demise occurred the following day around midnight (when Ms Letby was on duty) , and due to air in the bloodstream’. What!? If it was physically impossible for Letby to have killed the baby in the way first alleged, at the time alleged, then he can just say she did it by another method on a different day? And that is all right? Well, yes, he can. And it is.

In this very strange trial, his swerve from one murder method to another makes no legal difference to the outcome. For the jury were told they did not need to know how the theoretical murders had been done, only to believe that the babies had been murdered. Judge Goss directed them that if they decided Ms Letby had deliberately harmed babies in one way, they could also conclude that she had inflicted deliberate harm on others, even if they were not certain of her methods.

So despite sprouting leaks from every quarter, the Letby conviction is still – amazingly – technically sound. Look at all its problems. The door swipe evidence in the first trial, crucial to working out who was where, and at what time, has turned out to be haywire. It showed people being present when they were absent, and absent when they were present. This is not just serious in itself. If such a mistake can be made and rubbish can be presented as fact in court, this raises questions about the quality of all the evidence.

The theoretical attempted murders of babies F and L with insulin is very much in question, as the tests used to detect the presence of insulin are widely believed by experts to be wholly inadequate as evidence. These are vital as the insulin cases were the first on which the jury decided to convict, and they were unanimous. They can be said to have opened the way for all the other convictions.

A chart supposedly showing Ms Letby present at all the deaths (and made much of in all coverage of the trial) has been cut to ribbons by leading statisticians.

A supposed confession (‘I am evil. I did this’) now seems likely to have been written as a form of therapy, on the advice of professionals, as a way of dealing with extreme stress.

It would be very hard to argue (though some do) that the chart and the ‘confession’ had no influence on the verdict, as compared with the thousands of pages of detailed medical evidence which the jury grappled with.

All falsely accused people know that, once suspicion is aroused against you, everything you have ever done and said can be made to look like evidence of your guilt.

They also find that the authorities are not looking impartially for the truth about them, but for things which will convict them. This is important because there seem to be quite a lot of false accusations going round at the moment: from the legions of sub postmasters wrongly accused of stealing, humiliated, ruined and sometimes jailed, to Andrew Malkinson who spent 17 years in prison for a rape he absolutely did not commit. His appeal was denied and repeated attempts to have his conviction reviewed were turned down flat.

So yes, there can be smoke without fire. The pro-verdict mantra, that Letby was convicted by two juries and turned down by three Appeal Court judges, so she must be guilty, means nothing. Juries get it wrong. Judges get it wrong.

So it is no good assuming that Britain is so fair and just that this will never happen to you.

And if it might happen to you, you should be vigilant to protest – or at least keep an open mind – when it even appears to be happening to someone else.

You do not have to be sure Lucy Letby is innocent to believe that this case deserves a serious and thorough re-examination by the courts.

If, like me, you are a British patriot and believe that this country is even now, in general, more just than any other, you have a special duty to be vigilant when that reputation is in doubt.