Like many others who have studied the case of Lucy Letby – the nurse now known as the worst serial killer of children in modern times – I believe she is innocent and has been fundamentally failed by our justice system.
I believe, also, that the parents of the babies who died at the hospitals where she worked will want to know the truth.
And that one day, Letby – sentenced to 15 whole-life terms – will eventually walk out of prison a free woman. The question is when.
The new two-part Channel 4 documentary on the case, Lucy Letby: Murder Or Mistake, might have brought that moment just a little closer.
At the heart of the programme, which began last night, sits the curious figure of Dr Dewi Evans, the key medical expert witness for the prosecution.
As I have pointed out before, Dr Evans is not a qualified neonatologist, a doctor who specialises in the care and treatment of prematurely born babies of the sort that Letby is supposed to have injured and killed. Rather, he is a retired former hospital consultant who hasn’t practised medicine for 15 years.
He has never published a single peer-reviewed research paper in his own field or qualified as any sort of luminary. But that didn’t stop Dr Evans putting himself forward as a key witness at Letby’s trials. And it was his hypothesis about her involvement that would eventually see the nurse, now 35, sent to jail.
Dr Evans seems to welcome the attention the case has brought him, even though some of it has been unfortunate: he notoriously suggested that a statistician who dared to question his use of figures had ‘the hots’ for Letby in her nurse’s uniform.
Dr Dewi Evans, the key medical expert witness for the prosecution, is not a qualified neonatologist. He is a retired former hospital consultant who hasn’t practised medicine for 15 years
But presented with the chance to defend himself by Channel 4, Dr Evans took full advantage. The programme makers have given him no less than 30 minutes of airtime – a great deal of rope with which, in my view, he proceeded to hang both himself and the rotten theories that convicted Letby.
The case against her, remember, was entirely circumstantial. Letby’s trial at Manchester Crown Court was presented with no concrete evidence that she had killed a single child because, as the documentary made clear, there wasn’t any. Rather, the case was based on likelihood and statistics, many of which have now been challenged.
The groundswell of concern continues to grow. Yet Dr Evans’s rather prickly response was to tell viewers that those who question his opinions are merely ‘the great metropolitan elite, or what I call them, ‘God’s most entitled’.
Asked why people might want to challenge such an obviously flawed case, Dr Evans concluded: ‘These people seem to be making things up. And I think that’s because this case did not involve the metropolitan elite.
The barristers were from Liverpool. The court was in Manchester. You know, the expert witnesses were from west Wales and the Channel Islands and I think they can’t cope with that.’
An extraordinary statement: grossly unfair – and plain wrong, of course. Who did Dr Evans have in mind? Letby’s new defence barrister, Mark McDonald? Or was he having a go at me? I was among the first newspaper columnists to place the character of Dr Evans under a microscope.
But as for ‘elite’, I grew up in working-class Liverpool; Mark McDonald was born on a Birmingham council estate. A dedicated humanitarian, McDonald will never make the prestigious ranks of King’s Counsel because he challenges the system, specialising in miscarriages of justice. I have known him for 20 years and a less elite barrister I have yet to meet.
I believe that one day, Letby – sentenced to 15 whole-life terms – will eventually walk out of prison a free woman, writes Nadine Dorries. The question is when
It wasn’t just social class that seemed to fuel Carmarthenshire-born Dr Evans’s persecution complex last night, but nationality too. He suggested, bizarrely, that anti-Welsh sentiment might somehow have driven people to question his conclusions. ‘In Wales, we’ve been told for the past 700 years, you know, that we’re not good enough,’ he explained.
Some of us might agree that Dr Evans wasn’t good enough – not, certainly, to be a leading witness in a trial as complicated as Letby’s. But those failings had nothing to do with being Welsh.
Dr Evans was even dismissive about the global team of renowned neonatologists who, at their own expense, studied the case of every baby in the Letby case who had died.
They concluded earlier this year that sub-optimal hospital care was to blame for each of the infant deaths. They presented factual medical and scientific reasons to support their conclusion.
Their careful fact-based arguments were a million miles from the hypotheses of Dr Evans.
The team was headed by Professor Shoo Lee, a distinguished neonatologist and health economist. He had first been alerted to the Lucy Letby trial when it emerged that Dr Evan’s had wrongly interpreted one of Lee’s own research papers to help convict her.
So, what was Evans’s considered response to this impressive body of expertise? They were no more than ‘hired guns’, he said. ‘They’ve got their thoughts wrong. They’re Americans, they’re Canadians,’ as though their nationality, too, was damning. ‘They don’t know how the system works here.’
Not that such a casual dismissal can take account of the 24 UK-based scientists, statisticians and neonatologist who also wrote to Health Secretary Wes Streeting. According to Dr Evans, ‘babies on neonatology units don’t suddenly deteriorate and die’.
Letby has a new defence barrister, Mark McDonald, who is a dedicated humanitarian, specialising in miscarriages of justice
Yet, as every nurse – and any parent – who hears the constant, dreadful, ringing of alarms will tell you, babies do just deteriorate and die. Especially babies weighing less than 2lb who have been born with complex health conditions.
Things might have been different in Dr Evans’s day, when very low birth weight babies didn’t make it from birth to an incubator. But now, as medicine advances, it’s an entirely different story.
Last night’s appearance did nothing to change my opinion of Evans: that he is a shallow character who, when it suits him, will play the man and not the ball.
He continues to insist that his motives and his methods, like the verdict, are correct.
And in a surprising plea for sympathy, Dr Evans told Channel 4 he has had to ‘put up with a lot’ and that ‘it certainly shouldn’t happen to someone who has put away one of England’s worst serial killers.’
Not that the expert witness is entirely without supporters. The police who pursued and secured her conviction, will do everything in their power to ensure there is no reprieve for Lucy Letby.
That includes bringing further criminal charges – an attempt to bury Letby in legal papers before the Criminal Cases Review Commission has had the chance to review her case and refer her convictions to the Court of Appeal.
Cheshire police have already said that they are looking at cases of baby deaths at Liverpool Women’s hospital where Letby did her neonatology training.
The police have spent millions of taxpayer pounds on Letby’s troubling case. Now they’re proposing to spend still more. In my view, their behaviour has been found as wanting as that of Dr Evans.
Yet my response to the prospect of additional charges is ‘bring them on’. At her first trial, Letby’s defence barrister didn’t call a single medical witness for the defence. That won’t happen next time.
Speaking yesterday Mark McDonald said he now has at least 26 witnesses and 1,000 pages of fresh evidence to support her.
And of this we can be certain: many, many colleagues in the medical and legal professions are recoiling at what may prove to be the worst miscarriage of justice this country has seen. And a young woman who is spending the best years of her life in jail for crimes she didn’t commit.
