‘I’ve all the time had doubts’: Sarah Vine offers verdict Letby conviction
Sarah Vine has admitted she always ‘had doubts’ over the conviction of killer nurse Lucy Letby while speaking on the Mail’s talk show, The Reaction.
Vine told viewers she had reservations over the conviction of the 34-year-old, who was found guilty of murdering seven children and attempting to murder seven others, due to much of the evidence being ‘circumstantial’.
Appearing alongside the mother-of-two, co host Peter Hitchens agreed that the trial ‘was full of suppositions about what might of happened’ and disputed statistical claims.
Hitchens questioned whether it was possible that the deaths of the babies were ‘not the result of murder’, adding that the supposed methods Letby used to murder them were ‘fundamentally hypothetical’.
The Reaction hosts were discussing the Letby case as experts and media outlets have once again questioned her innocence, just weeks after a retrial found her guilty of attempted murder against a seventh baby known as Baby K.
Lucy Letby, 34, was convicted last year of murdering seven premature babies and trying to kill six others at the English hospital where she worked. This image was taken in 2012 three years before Letby’s killing spree began
Speaking about the case Vine said: ‘Okay, so this week, there’s been a whole resurgence of the Lucy Letby case. Your fascinating on this. Tell me your views.’
‘I mean, I actually raised the question back in September because it just looked wrong to me and the more I looked at it the more wrong I thought it was.
‘Fascinatingly in the long period of silence imposed by the second trial, The New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv produced this astonishing article.
‘Now I must urge you to read it. Because if you had doubts before, you will have much greater ones later.
Vine added: ‘I’ve always had doubts because I’ve always felt the evidence was all quite circumstantial.’
Hitchens then continued: ‘Totally circumstantial that’s the problem with it and full of suppositions about what might have happened.
Letby is Britain’s most prolific child killer. Here she pictured in 2013 before her killing spree began, holding a baby’s piece of clothing while working as a nurse in an English hospital
Notes found by police when Letby was arrested in 2018 included this one, in which she scribbled in capital letters: ‘I AM EVIL I DID THIS’
In another note found by police in 2018, Letby had scribbled a jumble of words, with phrases like ‘love’, ‘I can’t do this anymore’ and ‘help me’ written on it
‘And also statistical claims which actual statisticians, including the Royal Society of Statisticians, have pointed out are extremely dubious and probably wrong.
‘I think there is a case for the Criminal Cases Review Commission taking it up and asking the appeals court to reopen it because the Court of Appeal have already refused to leave it to appeal.
‘Having read their (The Court of Appeal’s) judgment, I just thought, I’m not quite sure what it is that makes them so keen to prevent an appeal or why it would be good idea.
‘When the case is so controversial why not have an appeal? What can possibly be the argument against it?’
Later in the episode Vine and Hitchens discussed the King’s speech during the reopening of Parliament on Wednesday, in which Labour outlined a blizzard of around 40 bills.
Amid the usual pomp and ceremony, the King said ministers will go ahead with controversial class-war plans to impose VAT on private school fees, which Hitchens called a ‘spiteful attack on private schools’.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla arriving to deliver the King’s speech at the State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Conservative leader Rishi Sunak lead MPs through the Central Lobby at the Palace of Westminster ahead of the State Opening of Parliament
Hitchens said: ‘It’s interesting that they’re so keen to do this thing, which will raise very little money and make almost no difference at all to state education, but which will make life incredibly difficult for so many of those people on the very edge of being able to afford independent education, who now won’t be able to.
‘It won’t hurt the rich, who won’t care at all.’
Vine added: ‘No they’ll just carry on.’
Hitchens continued: ‘It’s just a pure act of spite against independent education and it gives you a very good indication of what kind of government this really is.’
Vine said: ‘Particularly against middle class people, I think, because as you say, the rich will just have one less holiday. And that’ll be fine.’
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