Lucy Letby was sentenced to die in prison 370 days ago. Should we really be happy with such a savage sentence on such questionable evidence?
Last week the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) admitted that incorrect information about the case had been given during Ms Letby’s first marathon trial. It was about door-swipe records, highly useful for knowing who was where during crucial events.
The CPS said: ‘We are confident [it] did not have a meaningful impact on the prosecution, which included multiple strands of evidence.’ But I wasn’t reassured.
The CPS are one side in a tough adversarial fight. How can they be the best judges of how much their own mistakes matter? This was a case carefully prepared over many months. If mislabeled information could be given to the jury once, how could we be sure about the quality of the rest? One piece of sloppiness is bad in itself. It also makes you wonder about the whole prosecution.
Above all, if the jury in the first trial had been misled in any important way, how safe was the verdict? I could not possibly say. I was not at the trial, and I have been told informally this week that a transcript of the whole thing would probably cost a whopping £8,000. The second trial would of course be extra. So others must find out.
Anyway, on Tuesday I asked the CPS a series of questions. I’ll publish them all next week on the Peter Hitchens blog. But I believe that the police discovered the error. They then informed the CPS. A week later, the CPS told Ms Letby’s legal team. This was in early March. That’s about six weeks before the Appeal Court heard and refused Ms Letby’s application for leave to appeal, in late April.
Last week the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) admitted that incorrect information about about door-swipe records had been given during Lucy Letby’s first marathon trial
It was decided, I don’t know by whom, that the mistake ‘only’ had a ‘material impact’ on count 14, the attempted murder of Baby K. Only? This was the charge on which the jury in the first trial could not reach a verdict. This was the charge that the CPS saw as so important that it embarked on a retrial of it.
It did so even though Ms Letby had already been sentenced to die in prison. This was the charge in which it was claimed in court on June 11 (during the second trial) that a doctor had caught Ms Letby ‘virtually red-handed’.
This was one of the most widely reported moments in the whole of the second trial.
In that second trial the prosecution said that Ms Letby had ‘deliberately displaced’ the newborn’s breathing tube when Baby K’s designated nurse (not Ms Letby) had briefly left her side. Nobody actually saw Ms Letby do this. How was the timing of this alleged event established? Could it have been through door-swipe records?
It is most unusual for the same crime to be tried twice. It would be interesting to compare the accounts of this event given in each court before and after the door-swiping mislabelling was discovered.
Ms Letby was found guilty of murdering seven very young babies and trying to murder seven others
Ms Letby was duly convicted of the attempted murder of Baby K in the second trial. But by then everyone in the Kingdom knew she had recently been sent to die in prison as a mass killer of babies. So I struggle to see how she could possibly have had a fair trial.
I’m also still unsure whether the Appeal Court knew about the door-swipe problem, before they decided to refuse her leave to appeal.
How can a small business flourish?
Not long ago a jolly little coffee stand, a small blue van, began selling rather good coffee on the square in front of Oxford station, in my home town.
Last week, I asked the barista how his business was going. Pretty well, he said, but he would be doing a lot better if he didn’t have to pay the City Council nearly £9,000 a year for the freedom to pursue his trade. Without that impost, he reckoned, he could perhaps set up another stall and hire more staff.
Dumbstruck by the town hall’s greed, I checked the figure. They eventually confessed that they do indeed charge him £8,715 a year to park his van. Looking for a silver lining, I asked if they also milked the locally approved e-scooter hire company for the three hideous orange rental stations they are allowed to maintain on the same windswept plaza.
The e-scooter outfit involved is a Swedish-based multi-national giant which makes hundreds of millions a year. But no, they don’t require ‘street trading consent’.
I don’t understand why not, and don’t much care.
How can any small business flourish under such conditions? What has gone wrong with our local government?
The owner of the Little Blue Van in Oxford, where Peter enjoys buying coffee in his home town, must pay £8,715 a year to park outside the train station
Quite soon, it will be harder to get out of this country than it is to get into it. As criminal-run fleets of dinghies deliver thousands of illegal migrants to our southern shores, His Majesty’s law-abiding subjects will have to queue for hours to cross in the other direction.
Unlike the lawless migrants, we will probably have to submit to intrusive fingerprinting and facial scans. In some parts of Kent, we’ll pass each other going in opposite directions. It’s impossible to find out exactly when the EU’s catastrophic new border control system will come into force. But it is coming. You will hate it.
The only way to lose weight is to eat less
Most of us, when given a weight in foreign kilograms, cannot work out whether the thing or person involved weighs as much as a baby elephant or as little as a large tomato. There’s no need any more for this country to use these tedious, cold, bureaucratic measures. So it annoyed me when Davina McCall announced last week that ‘I’m a 5ft 6in woman who weighs 61 kilos’.
I think she means 9½ stone.
And it annoyed me even more when she then claimed to have achieved her slender state by exercise, not dieting. I struggle to believe her. I have never lost an ounce through exercise (and I do a lot, dozens of miles of cycling each week). The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to eat less. I tried this. It was no fun. Which is why I weigh so much.
But I am not telling you how much, especially not in kilograms.
Come on, Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, agree to debate against me on the Ukraine War. The country needs to hear both sides, articulately put, before it all gets even worse.