Lucy Letby lawyer seeks fresh appeal over reliability of expert witness
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Ex-nurse’s lawyer announces move after witness changed his mind on some key evidence about baby deaths. Lucy Letby’s lawyer has announced he is seeking to reopen her appeal because the prosecution’s lead medical expert witness, Dr Dewi Evans, has changed his mind on some key evidence.
At a press conference held at the Royal Society of Medicine on Monday, Mark McDonald said Evans was not a reliable expert, and that all the convictions were not safe. “Today the defence is announcing that it will immediately seek permission from the court of appeal to take the exceptional, but necessary, decision to apply to reopen the appeal of Lucy Letby and immediately review all her convictions,” McDonald said.
He also gave details of new medical expert reports produced for the former nurse’s defence by two consultant neonatologists, which wholly dispute the prosecution evidence for two of the babies Letby was convicted of killing. Letby, 34, was found guilty across two trials of murdering seven babies by injecting them with air, and attempting to murder seven others, when she worked as a nurse in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2015 and 2016.
In May, three judges at the court of appeal refused Letby’s application for permission to appeal against the convictions, which was largely based on challenging Evans’ reliability. Since the trials ended, Evans has, in a range of media interviews, emphatically stood by his conduct as an expert witness. At the trial he alleged that Letby killed babies by injecting air, either down feeding tubes into their stomachs or into their bloodstream, causing lethal air embolisms.
