A leading criminal defence lawyer has said that looking at just the medical evidence in Lucy Letby's case is flawed and her behaviour around babies was an important factor for the jury. Joseph Kotrie-Monson is a baby murderer legal expert, he works on 10% of baby murder cases in the UK, as a criminal defence lawyer and has spoken out after claims from Letby's defence team yesterday stated that no murders took place at all, at the Countess of Chester hospital under her care and the deaths were due to either natural causes or errors in their medical care.

In August 2023, a jury took 22 days and found Letby guilty of seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder. She was found not guilty of two counts of attempted murder. Verdicts were not reached on six counts of attempted murder. She was retried on one count of attempted murder in July 2024 and found guilty. Letby was sentenced to 15 whole-life prison orders meaning she will spend the rest of her life in prison.

Her supporters led by her barrister Mark McDonald KC and MP David Davis, who branded the case 'one of major injustices of modern times', produced 'medical evidence' from 14 neonatal medical experts which they say debunks the medical evidence presented at trial by the crown's witness. Retired medic Dr Shoo Lee, who co-authored a 1989 academic paper on air embolism in babies, presented the findings of a panel who said they had compiled an “impartial evidence-based report”. He went on to give seven examples of how the care of each baby had, he claimed, wrongly been blamed on Letby, when there was "clear evidence" something else "really happened".

Now Mr Kotrie-Monson has said that the jury did not just look at medical evidence alone when they came to their guilty verdicts. Speaking to the Mirror he said: "In this case, it was not just the medical evidence upon which the jury convicted. Irrespective of the ins and outs of statistical evidence, the behaviours of Letby presented to the jury, and for which she didn’t have a satisfactory answer must have been highly significant.

"She had medical notes of the dead babies under her bed. She researched the parents of the dead babies. She marked her diary with the initials of the dead babies on the dates of their birth, the point their conditions worsened, and their deaths. And finally there is the small matter of the written confessions from her own diaries. "It’s worth adding that the law does not require for a jury to be satisfied about the detail of the methods of a killing. The total picture is important, and for medical experts to assume a conviction was unsafe in the absence of hearing all of that evidence of her behaviour and apparently ghoulish obsession with the babies and their families, is a step that goes far beyond their own expertise.".

He added that the convening of this panel of 14 experts "is at the very least interesting". "In fact, in cases involving death or serious injury of babies, a major challenge for defence lawyers in the UK jurisdiction at trial is finding medical forensic experts in paediatric medicine who are prepared to give evidence, even if they have opinions on the evidence which may assist the defence. "This is because there are regular occurrences of such expert’s’ careers or even their professional status being damaged by disciplinary proceedings or political damage as a result of them assisting the defence. Many such experts in case we have acted have told us directly that they are unprepared to assist us for this reason. This points to there being something very wrong with the way in which cases of suspected assault against children are dealt with by the justice system.