PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "I do hope that a full transcript of the whole report will soon become readily available. Although Dr Lee uses medical and scientific terms, he also uses clear, hard, professional English. Any lay person can easily grasp the points he is making. In all the cases so far revealed, he offered a complete explanation for the problems the babies underwent, and for the tragic outcomes of the treatment. Needles were inserted where they should not have been inserted. Antibiotics were not given or were given far too late. Infections were not spotted. Babies were said to be stable when they were not. Tubes that were the wrong size were used. The claim that Ms Letby tried to poison babies with insulin, once viewed by the prosecution as a ‘smoking gun’, was also argued to be unfounded and more or less absurd. Claims that bedside alarms were switched off to cover up crime were shown to be plainly wrong."
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COMMENTARY: "Bombshell Lucy Letby evidence I saw today blows the case apart... and exposes an unknown gaping mystery at the heart of her trial," by Peter Hitchens for the Daily Mail, published on February 4, 2025. "Peter Hitchens has worked in Fleet Street for 47 years, beginning as a specialist on subjects from education to defence, and from strikes to politics. He has been a resident foreign correspondent in Moscow (1990-92) and Washington DC (1993-1995) and has reported from 57 countries including Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, China and Japan. He has also written nine books, is an irregular broadcaster and regularly posts on X/Twitter, which he calls 'an electronic Left-wing mob'."
GIST: "Once there was an executioner so skilful that he could slice through the condemned man’s neck without him even knowing he was dead.
‘Kindly nod, please!’, he would then say to his victim, smiling gently, after he had delivered the fatal stroke.
I believe something like that happened yesterday to the prosecution case in the Lucy Letby affair. It is dead, but – alas – it may take a while to grasp how dead it is.
Though it is beyond doubt deceased, and at some point in the next 20 years, Lucy Letby, unrecognisable after her long imprisonment, will stand on the steps of some grand courthouse, blinking in the TV lights, free to take up what remains of her blasted, ravaged life.
Nobody can say for sure she is innocent but she is certainly not guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps at least the Ministry of Justice will not try to charge her for her prison board and lodging, as they sought to do with another wrongly convicted person, Andrew Malkinson.
I wish and hope her release could be sooner. But that is not how things work here, however much we pride ourselves on British justice.
The executioner in this case was Dr Shoo Lee, a quiet, gently humorous, retired Canadian doctor and professor. He did not lay about him or shout or denounce, as he might have done, given the story he had to tell. He just showed that the theories on which the arrest and trial of Ms Letby were largely based are flat wrong.
He knows this partly because some of those theories were a crude misunderstanding of his own research, and partly because he and his colleagues have looked, scrupulously, at what actually happened in the troubled hospital where Ms Letby worked.
His research backed the argument that the babies who died or were harmed at the Countess of Chester Hospital were not murdered or deliberately hurt. In many cases they died because of poor treatment there – hardly a surprise in the current NHS.
In an unforgettable verdict, all the more ferocious for being so softly delivered, he said: ‘If that hospital was in Canada, it would be closed down.’
Discussing one dunderheaded clinical error by the hospital, he remarked: ‘We teach all medical students not to do this.’ He said of a consultant that he ‘did not know what he was doing’ and ‘he did not understand the basics’.
Dr Lee, an obviously kind man, was standing in a London press conference, 4,000 miles from his Alberta farm, solely out of a sense of decency, though this is not how he put it. It is how I put it, because it is one of the most movingly selfless acts I have seen for some time.
Nobody had paid him to be there. He even bought his own air ticket to come to Britain. The Letby case is little known in Canada and he had got involved only after the nurse’s conviction.
When he learned, many months ago, that his research had been used to convict her, he quickly concluded that it had not been rightly used. The prosecution expert had simply got it wrong about skin discolouration as a symptom of air embolism, a blockage caused by the pumping of air into the veins.
When Dr Lee’s evidence, which he thought was important, had made no impact on the English Court of Appeal, he was dismayed. My suspicion is that his sense of justice was outraged. This has happened to many people who have begun to examine this curious case and then found that they cannot bear the fact that Ms Letby is locked up for life on such thin excuses.
But rather than merely complain, he decided to act. He spoke to Ms Letby’s lawyers and asked: ‘What happens now?’ They said the case had ‘run out of road’. The only option was to apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. But the bar for reopening it would be ‘very high’.
And Dr Lee said: ‘Well, this is not fair, because the evidence that was used to convict her, in my opinion, wasn’t quite right.’
As a result, he put together a hugely impressive brains trust of experts in neonatal medicine, plus an engineering specialist who could examine claims made that Ms Letby had poisoned patients with insulin. They were the best qualified people in the world, he maintained, noting: ‘These are not just neonatologists you might find on the street.’
I do hope that a full transcript of the whole report will soon become readily available. Although Dr Lee uses medical and scientific terms, he also uses clear, hard, professional English. Any lay person can easily grasp the points he is making.
In all the cases so far revealed, he offered a complete explanation for the problems the babies underwent, and for the tragic outcomes of the treatment.
Needles were inserted where they should not have been inserted. Antibiotics were not given or were given far too late. Infections were not spotted. Babies were said to be stable when they were not. Tubes that were the wrong size were used.
The claim that Ms Letby tried to poison babies with insulin, once viewed by the prosecution as a ‘smoking gun’, was also argued to be unfounded and more or less absurd. Claims that bedside alarms were switched off to cover up crime were shown to be plainly wrong.
I am often asked how it is that I can believe that the jury were wrong to convict Lucy Letby. Who on earth am I, a mere scribbler with no expertise in crime or medicine, to take such a stance? The jury, after all, heard the whole case from beginning to end, whereas I am still climbing the foothills of the immense trial transcript.
It is a good point, or it would be if it were not for the mysterious gap at the heart of the trial.
Ms Letby’s defence never called their own medical expert, for which nobody knows the reason. They challenged the prosecution experts, but this is not evidence in law and the jury did not have to take it into account.
Dr Mike Hall, the distinguished and scrupulous neonatologist who saw almost the whole trial and was ready to testify, bafflingly did not give evidence on behalf of Lucy Letby.
Why didn’t he? One theory is that the defence thought he might somehow make things worse. But this does not really stack up. What could be worse than being convicted of child murder and sent to prison until you die?
Dr Hall has said he thinks Ms Letby did not get a fair trial. And he has made it clear in an interview given since that trial that he believes there are non-criminal explanations for the deaths.
And that is pretty much what Dr Shoo Lee argued and explained in detail yesterday. So what everyone at the press conference saw was the defence that Ms Letby never had, but ought to have had.
It was also the defence that the jury never heard, but which they ought to have heard.
Personally, I am sure that if the jury had heard Dr Lee’s evidence, they would never have convicted Lucy Letby at all."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
