Lucy Letby has been refused permission to appeal against a conviction for attempting to murder a baby girl at the hospital where she worked.
The former nurse, who is serving 12 whole-life prison terms, had sought to overturn the conviction on the basis that she was unable to have a fair trial due to the “unadulterated vitriol” of media coverage.
But senior judges dismissed her legal challenge after a two-hour hearing at the court of appeal in London on Thursday.
Letby, now 34, gave no reaction to the judges’ ruling, listening via video link from the UK’s only all-women prison, HMP Bronzefield in Surrey.
Letby was originally convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.
She was found guilty following a retrial in June of attempting to murder a seventh infant, known as Baby K.
Letby, who has consistently maintained her innocence, had been refused permission to appeal against last year’s convictions.
The former nurse on Thursday asked Lord Justice William Davis, Lord Justice Jeremy Baker and Mrs Justice McGowan to allow her to appeal against her conviction for trying to kill Baby K.
Benjamin Myers KC, for Letby, told the three judges that it was “unprecedented” for such “highly prejudicial and emotive” comments to have been made about a defendant before a criminal trial.
He said police detectives had described the nurse as “evil, cruel and devoid of emotion” while a senior prosecutor had labelled her “devious, cold-blooded, calculated [and] manipulative” after her first trial last year.
Myers, for Letby, said the trial judge, Mr Justice James Goss, had been wrong to allow the retrial to go ahead given the “overwhelming and irremediable” public comment that followed her original convictions.
The barrister said the appeal was focused only on this “very narrow” argument of abuse of process and not the wide-ranging concerns that have been raised about the evidence in recent months. He said the media had been “saturated with unadulterated vitriol” towards the former nurse before the retrial, citing 62 examples of hostile coverage, including a debate on ITV’s Loose Women titled: “Was Lucy Letby born evil?”
Myers said it had been “unprecedented” for a police force,in this case Cheshire constabulary, to launch into “blistering attacks” on a defendant at a time when a retrial was under consideration.
He told the judges: “Where the police have embarked on a media campaign, which undoubtedly this was … in such emotively charged circumstances against a background of multiple convictions for the most grave offences and where they knew a retrial was under consideration – we say that is unfair and should offend the court’s sense of justice and propriety.”
Nick Johnson KC, the prosecutor, said this was not an “reasonable or accurate” characterisation of the media coverage.
He told the judges that most of the disapproving public comment had been directed towards hospital management for allowing Letby to remain on the neonatal unit despite concerns raised by senior doctors.
Johnson also said the vast majority of the media material cited by Letby appeared in the immediate aftermath of the convictions in August 2023, 10 months before the retrial, so would have “faded” from the memory of any jurors.
He cited the example of a “very, very pro-Lucy Letby” article by the New Yorker, published in the weeks before the retrial, which he said had been given “significant traction” when it was mentioned in parliament by Sir David Davis.
Johnson said: “If ever this court wants evidence that publicity had no effect on this jury, this is it. Because this was very pro-Letby, anti-prosecution material circulating with significant traction on the internet in the weeks and days before the trial.”
He added: “In that context, one remembers the old epithet that today’s front page is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers.”
