How public opinion can change. Do you remember reporters rushing from the Manchester courthouse on August 18, 2023, breathlessly exclaiming, ‘She’s guilty!’, moments after Lucy Letby‘s convictions were announced?
Looking back, do those journalists wonder if they might have said, in more measured tones, ‘She’s been found guilty’. For, as we now discover all too often, as innocent people stumble, blinking out of the High Court, having endured years of wrongful imprisonment, being convicted and being guilty are not necessarily the same thing.
Do you remember the avalanche of headlines in the days afterwards, dwelling on the fathomless evil of Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted that day of murdering seven babies and trying to murder six more (she would later be convicted of a further attempted murder)? I would guess, on that afternoon, almost everyone watching thought justice had been done and a wicked mass killer had got her deserts.
That was nearly two years ago. And since then there has been a very definite shift in public sentiment. Last week the ITV programme Loose Women polled its audience on the Letby affair and found they were split 50:50 on whether the case should now be re-opened.
There are grave doubts in many minds about whether these convictions are safe. I first expressed such concerns myself on September 24 that year, and have continued to do so since.
I might add that there are also still plenty of intelligent, thoughtful, informed people – including colleagues of mine – who think Ms Letby is guilty as sin and deserves to be in prison, where she now is, until she dies.
I, in turn, continue to respect their sincere opinions and to keep in mind the possibility that she may be guilty.
But as her new barrister, Mark McDonald, said in last night’s fascinating and carefully balanced BBC Panorama programme on the case, major media in this country have now stopped calling Ms Letby ‘evil’.
Lucy Letby was convicted of the murders of seven infants and the attempted murders of seven others between June 2015 and June 2016
A recent Panorama documentary has cast doubt on the medical evidence used to convict the neonatal nurse in 2023
The strength of this documentary is that it reflects this change so well. The two presenters, reporter Judith Moritz and producer/director Jonathan Coffey, plainly disagree on whether Ms Letby is guilty as charged – she very much did think so, he didn’t – though I would guess that Mr Coffey is more open to the possibility that he is wrong than Ms Moritz is. Much credit should go to both of them for their careful interviews with witnesses on both sides.
Having myself reported the claims (made last December) that a doctor deeply involved in the case had punctured the liver of one of the babies who died, I must record that this programme throws serious doubt on that allegation – though this does not make Ms Letby guilty.
The toughest puzzle in the case is the suggestion that two babies in the hospital involved, the Countess of Chester, were poisoned with insulin. It is a labyrinth of contradictions.
The original hard evidence of blood tests is lost. It was probably not reliable in the first place and its implications seem to be on the edge of known science (the defence side of the argument was made powerfully in the ITV programme on the subject just over a week ago and is still available). If only the great detective Sherlock Holmes really existed, he might be able to solve it, if – that is – he was able to find anywhere to sit peacefully and smoke vast quantities of his revolting favourite shag tobacco.
I’d say that even if it could be found that insulin was pumped into babies’ feed bags, there is not one half-ounce of evidence that Ms Letby did it.
As for suggestions that she went round a Liverpool hospital dislodging breathing tubes, they look all too similar to exploded claims that she was present at all the deaths in the Chester hospital.
But let us see. The key thing is this: we now have a more or less balanced discussion on this case, instead of the overpowering Wall of Sound so brilliantly created, in the courtroom and outside it, by police and prosecutors during her ten-month trial.
In that great blast of circumstances and guesswork, everything she had ever said and done was somehow turned into evidence of her guilt, and her previous character was obliterated – to be replaced in the public mind by the image of a calculating mass child killer.
In this country, God be thanked, it is still the case that you must be convicted beyond reasonable doubt after quiet deliberation and with a proper consideration of the evidence.
In my view, we have now got back to that point.
Unusually, we have had the storm before the calm. Let us now see if the courts can at last discover the King’s Justice, which is their real job, amid all the raging claim and counter-claim, and amid all the grief of the bereaved parents.
The Panorama programme, Lucy Letby: Who to Believe? was first broadcast last night and is available on BBC iPlayer.
