John Sweeney and Edward Abel Smith investigate the safety of the convictions of the former nurse Lucy Letby.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
Lucy Letby is Britain’s worst female serial killer in modern times.
Or is she? On the day she was first convicted, veteran journalist John Sweeney tweeted: “Lucy Letby may well be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, that the Crown has taken a cluster of accidental and natural deaths and pointed the finger at Letby. There is no compelling evidence of a single murder. The law, sometimes, gets it wrong.”
In a forensic six-part podcast series Sweeney, who helped free cot death mum Sally Clark in 2003, and investigative writer Edward Abel Smith address the elephant in the courtroom: was there ever a crime?
The Crown’s version is that there is compelling medical evidence, a confession and a spreadsheet proving she is the only common denominator when death happens on her watch, time and again. Lock her up and throw away the key. That’s exactly what the trial judge did. Judge Goss told the court: “There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions… you will spend the rest of your life in prison.”
The parents of those poor babies who died at the Countess of Chester of Hospital have been going through hell, with every detail of their child’s death being laid out in front of them. Nothing should take away from their tragedy or grief. But it is important in a country where we pride ourselves on our legal system, that Lucy’s case is properly scrutinized.
The trigger to this case was a spike in deaths in the unit which looked after very premature, very small babies, sometimes only two pounds in weight at birth, from three deaths per year up to ten in 2015 and eight in 2016. How come?
The series sets out the evidence that the neo-natal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital was full of shit, literally and metaphorically, badly-run, poorly-staffed, the sink flooded with raw sewage when it rained heavily; that the spreadsheets proving Lucy’s guilt tell a lie as dishonest as painting the target around the arrow after it has been shot; that the babies who died were very, very sick; that her accusers; that her “confession” is no such thing; that the medical evidence against her is a poorly-evidenced theory, not fact; that the spike in baby deaths in Lucy’s unit can be readily explained by the hospital accepting the most vulnerable babies for the first time, a national surge in neo-natal deaths and the hygiene issues; that there was never proof of a single crime. And the hospital did not publish evidence of a high-risk bacteria in the tap at the neo-natal unit.
This podcast, from the makers of the award-winning podcast series, Hunting Ghislaine, will be an extraordinary listen. Look out for the first episode Was There Ever A Crime? The Trials of Lucy Letby: A Hospital Full Of Shit.
The series is being crowdfunded because we could not get commercial backers for this project. If you fear that Lucy Letby has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice, please contribute to our crowdfunder here - https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/lucy-letby-was-there-ever-a-crime
Twitter/X: @johnsweeneyroar
Thank you