QUOTE OF THE DAY: "High-profile investigative pieces, including a 13,000-word exposé in The New Yorker and Channel 4’s Lucy Letby: Did She Do It?, have since also highlighted critical institutional failures at the hospital that experts argue could more reasonably explain the spike in infant mortality. “There’s a really tragic story here, absolutely,” says Knox. “But is it a crime story, or is it an institutional failure story? There were staffing shortages, there were plumbing leaks that were leading to infection. All of these things could have contributed to this [spike in infant deaths], but the doctors were like, ‘No, that is not what is going on. It’s not staffing shortages. It’s not all of these really practical alternative explanations. It’s because we have a serial killer.’”Why Now?
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STORY: "Was Lucy Letby’s Wrongly Accused Of Murder?," by Ben Day, published by 'Marie Claire' Australia, June 11, 2026.
The Case For Letby’s Innocence
Since Letby’s conviction in 2023, the narrative of “Britain’s most prolific serial child killer” has been met with rigorous opposition from parts of the scientific community. “The first people who started reaching out were the statisticians,” recalls Knox, “and they were really just aghast – not just concerned, but aghast – that the way statistics had been used in the case was completely erroneous and gave a false representation of reality.
“They’re not medical experts, they are experts in statistics. And they’re saying, ‘If I know one thing, I know that that piece of evidence – which was super compelling to a judge and a jury – was wrong. So what else is wrong?’”
These statisticians point to the “smoking gun” shift chart, a spreadsheet presented by the prosecution that used a grid format to show that Lucy Letby was the only staff member present during 25 suspicious deaths and collapses. (Suspicious incidents that occurred when Letby was not on duty were excluded.) The chart has been called a classic example of something known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which data is cherry-picked to support a particular theory. Parts of the medical community are equally troubled by what they claim are key evidentiary misunderstandings at trial.
In a movement that echoes the scientific uprising that eventually freed Australia’s Kathleen Folbigg, a global panel of 14 neonatologists and related experts dismantled the crown’s forensic pillars.
The prosecution alleged Letby attacked her tiny victims by injecting them with air or milk or, in two instances, poisoning their feeding bags with insulin. It used descriptions of skin discoloration to prove air was injected, but many neonatologists now say those descriptions don’t actually match what an air embolism looks like in a neonate.
Critics also point to the unreliability of the specific blood tests used to prove insulin was used, as they can produce false positives if not handled with laboratory precision. Another panel of experts called for a public inquiry into the forensic evidence. Despite being twice refused leave to appeal, Letby’s legal team is now pursuing a Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referral, bolstered by this new medical testimony.
High-profile investigative pieces, including a 13,000-word exposé in The New Yorker and Channel 4’s Lucy Letby: Did She Do It?, have since also highlighted critical institutional failures at the hospital that experts argue could more reasonably explain the spike in infant mortality.
“There’s a really tragic story here, absolutely,” says Knox. “But is it a crime story, or is it an institutional failure story? There were staffing shortages, there were plumbing leaks that were leading to infection. All of these things could have contributed to this [spike in infant deaths], but the doctors were like, ‘No, that is not what is going on. It’s not staffing shortages. It’s not all of these really practical alternative explanations. It’s because we have a serial killer.’”
Why Now?
For the substantial portion of society still convinced of Letby’s guilt, the question of timing is a compelling one. For Knox’s detractors (of which there are still many, even a decade on from her exoneration), it fuels the accusations of attention-seeking or profiting from tragedy.
Why, three years after Lucy Letby’s conviction, is all of this just coming out? The answer may lie in the UK’s strict contempt of court laws, which – like Australia’s – can discourage external scrutiny while the trial is ongoing.
Under these rules, any public commentary deemed prejudicial could result in criminal charges and fines or imprisonment. It’s a wall of silence Knox experienced firsthand when she began looking into the case. “People were not just disincentivised to question it and scrutinise the trial, but people were afraid of losing their jobs, losing their friends, if they expressed any kind of doubt at all around Letby’s guilt,” she says.
“When I first began poking around and talking to contacts at the BBC, people were like, ‘Dude, no-one can touch that case unless you are doing the narrative that she’s a serial killer psychopath, no-one. You will lose your career if you look into this case.’
“And I was like, OK then,” Knox continues with a wry smile. Because for the woman who famously describes herself as “patient zero” of the digital age’s first great trial by media, the threat of cancellation is a spent match. And while the specific details of Letby’s case and her own couldn’t be more different, the pattern of similarities between the two women – and the media response to their trials – was too strong for Knox to ignore.
Fallen women
For one thing, both women arrived at their respected reckonings with slates that were not only clean, but the apparent inverse of what you might expect from remorseless murderers. No priors. No record of mental illness.
Knox was a Dean’s List language student, Letby a dedicated neonatal nurse. Knox argues it’s precisely this lack of any incriminating character evidence that creates a vacuum for prosecutors and the media to paint a sinister picture: the narrative of a cold, calculating psychopathy and the idea that the woman is so evil she has successfully spent her entire life performing normalcy. For Knox, it was the “Foxy Knoxy” myth, where a goofy 20-year-old’s lack of visible grief was interpreted as the mask of a killer.
For Letby, the beige, ordinary life she lived up until her trial as well as the absence of a motive have been held up as proof of secret malevolence. Even Letby’s frantic, handwritten Post-it notes, scribbled in a state of mental collapse and containing the phrase “I am evil”, were presented not as evidence of a breakdown but as a confession.
Knox knows this trap well: it is all-too reminiscent of her much-derided “yoga in the police station” that Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini argued was proof of a remorseless, abnormal response to tragedy as opposed to an overwhelmed young woman’s coping strategy.
“We are primed to find fault in a woman no matter what she does,” she says. “There’s no right way for a woman to act when you’re incentivised to find fault in that woman.” Knox doesn’t deny that there is trauma at the heart of her own pull towards advocacy.
Her release from prison at 24 ejected her back into a life in the States that was at once crushingly familiar and altogether foreign. And while the desire to be as far as possible from another murder trial might be understandable, Knox found a singular belonging in the community of fellow exonerees who’d shared her experiences. “There’s something about translating a painful experience into service for others that is really meaningful,” Knox reflects.
“And that can look like a lot of different things – mine just happens to look like this. “In prison I was so aware that I was in a situation that was going to change me, whether I wanted it to or not. I wanted to have agency in how it was going to change me. I saw how it wrecked human beings’ lives and I didn’t want to become an angry, bitter person who felt estranged from humanity for the rest of my life, so I’ve really sought out means to feel connected to humanity.
“Realising that lessons from my story can be applied and paid forward elsewhere, to me, is very meaningful,” she continues. “I think anybody who has been through a bad thing, it can either mean nothing, or it can mean something. And this means something.""
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "These statisticians point to the “smoking gun” shift chart, a spreadsheet presented by the prosecution that used a grid format to show that Lucy Letby was the only staff member present during 25 suspicious deaths and collapses. (Suspicious incidents that occurred when Letby was not on duty were excluded.) The chart has been called a classic example of something known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which data is cherry-picked to support a particular theory. Parts of the medical community are equally troubled by what they claim are key evidentiary misunderstandings at trial. In a movement that echoes the scientific uprising that eventually freed Australia’s Kathleen Folbigg, a global panel of 14 neonatologists and related experts dismantled the crown’s forensic pillars.
----------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The prosecution alleged Letby attacked her tiny victims by injecting them with air or milk or, in two instances, poisoning their feeding bags with insulin. It used descriptions of skin discoloration to prove air was injected, but many neonatologists now say those descriptions don’t actually match what an air embolism looks like in a neonate. Critics also point to the unreliability of the specific blood tests used to prove insulin was used, as they can produce false positives if not handled with laboratory precision. Another panel of experts called for a public inquiry into the forensic evidence. Despite being twice refused leave to appeal, Letby’s legal team is now pursuing a Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referral, bolstered by this new medical testimony."
-----------------------------------------------------------
STORY: "Was Lucy Letby’s Wrongly Accused Of Murder?," by Ben Day, published by 'Marie Claire' Australia, June 11, 2026.
SUB-HEADING: “There’s a really tragic story here. But is it a crime story or an institutional failure story?”
GIST: "When British nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of the murder of seven infants and the attempted murder of seven more, the world recoiled in collective shock. Yet for Amanda Knox – who spent four years in an Italian prison for a murder she didn’t commit – Letby’s media burning at the stake felt hauntingly familiar, even before the trial commenced.
Now, as a global movement of scientists and statisticians attempts to dismantle the evidence used to convict “Britain’s most prolific serial baby killer”, Knox speaks to marie claire about her new mission to uncover the truth, the “Foxy Knoxy” trap, and why we must choose justice over vengeance, even in the face of the unthinkable.
You don’t have to have witnessed the semi-translucent chest of a premature baby rise and fall inside a hospital incubator to understand the abject horror evoked by the idea that anyone would intentionally harm such a fragile being.
To absorb the idea that someone murdered not just one, but seven babies – crimes for which 36-year- old nurse Lucy Letby is currently serving 15 whole-of-life sentences – causes a moral injury so brutal it’s almost visceral.
Yet it is precisely this level of horror, believes Amanda Knox, that creates the conditions for the type of mistakes that saw the American spend four years of her life imprisoned in a 21-square-metre cell at Italy’s Capanne prison outside Perugia for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher.
Now a mother herself, Knox is not immune to the shock the deaths of these children evokes, but experience has shown her the danger of surrendering logic to it. “It’s something I find again and again in wrongful conviction cases,” she explains from her home office in Seattle.
“Particularly in these really horrible, shocking cases, there’s this impulse to pit the original victims against the accused and say you can only care about one or the other, but it’s not actually true, and in fact does a great disservice to our legal system and our society.
“We can be concerned about the emotional and judicial stakes for the original victims, and also be concerned about reasonable doubt and justice,” she adds. She believes a similar miscarriage of justice has taken place with Lucy Letby, though she’s at pains to point out she didn’t “go looking” for a chance to get involved – rather, Letby’s people found her.
“My inbox was just flooded over a number of days, with emails from people responding to the conviction, saying they had not seen that kind of vilification of a woman on the basis of really questionable evidence since my own trial,” Knox says.
It’s how the 38-year-old, who has spent the past decade heavily involved in innocence projects and exoneree networks advocating for nuance in “trial by media” cases, finds herself the host and creator of a new eight-part podcast series, Doubt, which looks at the Letby trial and adds to the growing number of voices calling for an appeal to her conviction.
To absorb the idea that someone murdered not just one, but seven babies – crimes for which 36-year- old nurse Lucy Letby is currently serving 15 whole-of-life sentences – causes a moral injury so brutal it’s almost visceral.
Yet it is precisely this level of horror, believes Amanda Knox, that creates the conditions for the type of mistakes that saw the American spend four years of her life imprisoned in a 21-square-metre cell at Italy’s Capanne prison outside Perugia for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher.
Now a mother herself, Knox is not immune to the shock the deaths of these children evokes, but experience has shown her the danger of surrendering logic to it. “It’s something I find again and again in wrongful conviction cases,” she explains from her home office in Seattle.
“Particularly in these really horrible, shocking cases, there’s this impulse to pit the original victims against the accused and say you can only care about one or the other, but it’s not actually true, and in fact does a great disservice to our legal system and our society.
“We can be concerned about the emotional and judicial stakes for the original victims, and also be concerned about reasonable doubt and justice,” she adds. She believes a similar miscarriage of justice has taken place with Lucy Letby, though she’s at pains to point out she didn’t “go looking” for a chance to get involved – rather, Letby’s people found her.
“My inbox was just flooded over a number of days, with emails from people responding to the conviction, saying they had not seen that kind of vilification of a woman on the basis of really questionable evidence since my own trial,” Knox says.
It’s how the 38-year-old, who has spent the past decade heavily involved in innocence projects and exoneree networks advocating for nuance in “trial by media” cases, finds herself the host and creator of a new eight-part podcast series, Doubt, which looks at the Letby trial and adds to the growing number of voices calling for an appeal to her conviction.
The Case For Letby’s Innocence
Since Letby’s conviction in 2023, the narrative of “Britain’s most prolific serial child killer” has been met with rigorous opposition from parts of the scientific community. “The first people who started reaching out were the statisticians,” recalls Knox, “and they were really just aghast – not just concerned, but aghast – that the way statistics had been used in the case was completely erroneous and gave a false representation of reality.
“They’re not medical experts, they are experts in statistics. And they’re saying, ‘If I know one thing, I know that that piece of evidence – which was super compelling to a judge and a jury – was wrong. So what else is wrong?’”
These statisticians point to the “smoking gun” shift chart, a spreadsheet presented by the prosecution that used a grid format to show that Lucy Letby was the only staff member present during 25 suspicious deaths and collapses. (Suspicious incidents that occurred when Letby was not on duty were excluded.) The chart has been called a classic example of something known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which data is cherry-picked to support a particular theory. Parts of the medical community are equally troubled by what they claim are key evidentiary misunderstandings at trial.
In a movement that echoes the scientific uprising that eventually freed Australia’s Kathleen Folbigg, a global panel of 14 neonatologists and related experts dismantled the crown’s forensic pillars.
The prosecution alleged Letby attacked her tiny victims by injecting them with air or milk or, in two instances, poisoning their feeding bags with insulin. It used descriptions of skin discoloration to prove air was injected, but many neonatologists now say those descriptions don’t actually match what an air embolism looks like in a neonate.
Critics also point to the unreliability of the specific blood tests used to prove insulin was used, as they can produce false positives if not handled with laboratory precision. Another panel of experts called for a public inquiry into the forensic evidence. Despite being twice refused leave to appeal, Letby’s legal team is now pursuing a Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referral, bolstered by this new medical testimony.
High-profile investigative pieces, including a 13,000-word exposé in The New Yorker and Channel 4’s Lucy Letby: Did She Do It?, have since also highlighted critical institutional failures at the hospital that experts argue could more reasonably explain the spike in infant mortality.
“There’s a really tragic story here, absolutely,” says Knox. “But is it a crime story, or is it an institutional failure story? There were staffing shortages, there were plumbing leaks that were leading to infection. All of these things could have contributed to this [spike in infant deaths], but the doctors were like, ‘No, that is not what is going on. It’s not staffing shortages. It’s not all of these really practical alternative explanations. It’s because we have a serial killer.’”
Why Now?
For the substantial portion of society still convinced of Letby’s guilt, the question of timing is a compelling one. For Knox’s detractors (of which there are still many, even a decade on from her exoneration), it fuels the accusations of attention-seeking or profiting from tragedy.
Why, three years after Lucy Letby’s conviction, is all of this just coming out? The answer may lie in the UK’s strict contempt of court laws, which – like Australia’s – can discourage external scrutiny while the trial is ongoing.
Under these rules, any public commentary deemed prejudicial could result in criminal charges and fines or imprisonment. It’s a wall of silence Knox experienced firsthand when she began looking into the case. “People were not just disincentivised to question it and scrutinise the trial, but people were afraid of losing their jobs, losing their friends, if they expressed any kind of doubt at all around Letby’s guilt,” she says.
“When I first began poking around and talking to contacts at the BBC, people were like, ‘Dude, no-one can touch that case unless you are doing the narrative that she’s a serial killer psychopath, no-one. You will lose your career if you look into this case.’
“And I was like, OK then,” Knox continues with a wry smile. Because for the woman who famously describes herself as “patient zero” of the digital age’s first great trial by media, the threat of cancellation is a spent match. And while the specific details of Letby’s case and her own couldn’t be more different, the pattern of similarities between the two women – and the media response to their trials – was too strong for Knox to ignore.
Fallen women
For one thing, both women arrived at their respected reckonings with slates that were not only clean, but the apparent inverse of what you might expect from remorseless murderers. No priors. No record of mental illness.
Knox was a Dean’s List language student, Letby a dedicated neonatal nurse. Knox argues it’s precisely this lack of any incriminating character evidence that creates a vacuum for prosecutors and the media to paint a sinister picture: the narrative of a cold, calculating psychopathy and the idea that the woman is so evil she has successfully spent her entire life performing normalcy. For Knox, it was the “Foxy Knoxy” myth, where a goofy 20-year-old’s lack of visible grief was interpreted as the mask of a killer.
For Letby, the beige, ordinary life she lived up until her trial as well as the absence of a motive have been held up as proof of secret malevolence. Even Letby’s frantic, handwritten Post-it notes, scribbled in a state of mental collapse and containing the phrase “I am evil”, were presented not as evidence of a breakdown but as a confession.
Knox knows this trap well: it is all-too reminiscent of her much-derided “yoga in the police station” that Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini argued was proof of a remorseless, abnormal response to tragedy as opposed to an overwhelmed young woman’s coping strategy.
“We are primed to find fault in a woman no matter what she does,” she says. “There’s no right way for a woman to act when you’re incentivised to find fault in that woman.” Knox doesn’t deny that there is trauma at the heart of her own pull towards advocacy.
Her release from prison at 24 ejected her back into a life in the States that was at once crushingly familiar and altogether foreign. And while the desire to be as far as possible from another murder trial might be understandable, Knox found a singular belonging in the community of fellow exonerees who’d shared her experiences. “There’s something about translating a painful experience into service for others that is really meaningful,” Knox reflects.
“And that can look like a lot of different things – mine just happens to look like this. “In prison I was so aware that I was in a situation that was going to change me, whether I wanted it to or not. I wanted to have agency in how it was going to change me. I saw how it wrecked human beings’ lives and I didn’t want to become an angry, bitter person who felt estranged from humanity for the rest of my life, so I’ve really sought out means to feel connected to humanity.
“Realising that lessons from my story can be applied and paid forward elsewhere, to me, is very meaningful,” she continues. “I think anybody who has been through a bad thing, it can either mean nothing, or it can mean something. And this means something.""
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. 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. 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; 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;
