Who do Cheshire Police think they are? On Monday, they complained publicly that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had decided not to proceed with several new cases against Lucy Letby. What business is this of the police?
If experienced prosecutors think a jury won’t convict on their evidence, then that is just tough. Worse, the CPS statement contains the first faint whisper from the establishment that maybe a jury – if it had known what we have since gathered from expert inquiries – would not have convicted her in either of her two original trials.
Remember, this is the force that held two secret press conferences (they still won’t release transcripts) before and during the trial, commissioned a self-praising video about the case and grandiosely named its investigation ‘Operation Hummingbird’ – as if it had been preparing an invasion of Lancashire next door. ‘Operation’, indeed. This sort of thing is a symptom of the way police have been getting way above themselves in recent years, since they gave up walking.
The police, though they often forget it, are the servants of the public – not some elite corps of forensic geniuses who know everything and never make mistakes. Their job is not, in fact, to convict the accused or to comment on their guilt or innocence once convicted or acquitted. That’s the task of prosecutors, the very people with whom Cheshire Police are now publicly quarrelling.
It is more than a century since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who repeatedly made fools of Scotland Yard’s finest because they were too ready to form fixed ideas at the start of a case. Doyle knew what he was talking about and took part in the righting of two wrongful convictions. Partly thanks to the Holmes stories, proper police investigators have long been taught not to jump to conclusions or to ignore evidence that does not support their prejudices. Their job is to investigate without fear or favour, without making their minds up in advance. Indeed, there was once a ‘Copper’s ABC’, which ran ‘Assume Nothing. Believe Nobody. Check Everything’.
Did Cheshire Police follow it in their investigations into deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital? Are they following it now? The CPS looked at the ‘evidence’ the force produced about further crimes supposedly committed by Ms Letby. They decided that it did not meet the basic tests, which are roughly summed up as, ‘Would a jury believe this?’ Well, of course it wouldn’t.
The claims against this nurse have always been based on the atmosphere of supposed evil, which was somehow built up around the case. Britain, alas, is full of hospitals where inadequate care of newborns (and others) is leading to needless and tragic deaths. Only last week, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde conceded there is a ‘causal connection’ between fatalities at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and its water system – after six years of saying there wasn’t.
Last June, Health Secretary Wes Streeting ordered a rapid national investigation into what everyone knows is a shameful crisis in NHS maternity and neonatal services. He said: ‘For the past year, I have been meeting bereaved families from across the country who have lost babies or suffered serious harm during what should have been the most joyful time in their lives. What they have experienced is devastating – deeply painful stories of trauma, loss, and a lack of basic compassion – caused by failures in NHS maternity care that should never have happened.’
But somehow this did not apply to the Countess of Chester Hospital. There, the deaths and damage were the work of a crazed infanticidal madwoman who had no record of crime, deceit or dishonesty, was loved and trusted by friends and against whom there was no actual evidence.
And Mr Streeting has yet to repudiate his own intemperate public attack on critics of the Letby verdicts. In September 2024, he said that the campaign to re-examine the Letby case was ‘crass and insensitive’, citing the grief of the parents. I cannot see why the supporters of the verdict insist on citing the grief of the parents. Did not the police investigation and the initial trials cause those parents grief? Of course they did. Was it therefore wrong to pursue the matter? Of course not. Justice has to be served, and sometimes it exacts a painful price.
Now it turns out that a possibly innocent woman must sit in prison till she dies, is justice no longer required and can it be pursued without hurting anyone? Mr Streeting also asserted: ‘There is no purpose to a media campaign.’ But of course there is. Without that campaign, the Canadian professor of paediatrics Dr Shoo Lee would not have assembled the greatest experts on neonatology in the world, who would not have concluded, devastatingly, that no crime had been committed.
I note that a lot of media, including the supposedly impartial BBC, still describe Ms Letby as a ‘serial baby killer’. I really wish they would stop doing this. By doing so they ignore more than a year of slashing, accurate, effective, and in many cases unanswerable, blows against the prosecution of Ms Letby.
The Shoo Lee commission has destroyed the medical evidence. Claims that Ms Letby was the only one reliably present at the deaths of several babies, and that she had written a confession note, have been utterly exploded. Prosecution witnesses have changed their stories, about how the babies allegedly died and about what Ms Letby was doing while on duty, in one case so dramatically that it is enough to make your jaw drop.
Supposed door-swipe evidence, allegedly showing where people were or weren’t, has turned out to be not just wrong but the opposite of the truth. Friends and former colleagues have rallied to her with more and more confidence as the witch-hunt atmosphere has melted away. Repeated TV and radio programmes have explored grave failings in the prosecution case. A book whose authors originally set out to recount her conviction ended up expressing severe doubts about it.
At least one reporter who thought her guilty at the main trial has now changed his mind. Evidence-free claims that she tampered with insulin bags turn out to be based on pathetic foundations, which couldn’t be used to disqualify an Olympic athlete, let alone lock someone up till she dies.
In fact, the whole dark smog of presumed guilt, which had hung around Ms Letby from the day police publicly dug up her garden in July 2018, has been blown away by a strengthening, fresh wind of intelligent doubt. Stripped of its insinuations, alleged coincidences and guesswork, the prosecution case turns out to be as impressive as a soggy sandcastle.
There is not now and has never been any actual evidence that Ms Letby ever harmed a single soul. And the CPS are beginning to grasp this. It would do the Cheshire Constabulary a lot of good if, even at this late stage, they might show a bit of modesty and caution, and, if nothing more, accept that grave doubts now gather thickly around this conviction.
