A court artist’s drawing of the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, cross-examining Lucy Letby during her retrial at Manchester crown court.A court artist’s drawing of the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, cross-examining Lucy Letby during her retrial at Manchester crown court.began giving her evidence at Manchester crown court, the scene outside courtroom seven looked more like the queue for Centre Court at Wimbledon than for a criminal trial over the alleged attempted murder of a newborn baby girl.
Wrapped in a blanket, wearing the smallest knitted hat nurses could find, Baby K took her final breaths in the arms of her father shortly after 5am on 20 February 2016. She was three days old. Letby was found guilty last year of murdering five babies and attempting to murder three others by the time Baby K arrived on the neonatal unit. She would go on to murder another two infants – triplet brothers – and to try to kill three more before she was removed from frontline nursing in July 2016.The category A prisoner looked drawn and weary behind the glass-enclosed dock of the courtroom, where she was brought each morning from HMP New Hall in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
In the witness box, Letby restricted her answers to as few words as possible. Most of the prosecutor’s questions were met with “I don’t recall” or “I have no memory of the event”.any events of that morning. She had no memory of Jayaram walking in on her while Baby K deteriorated, nor of two later incidents when she was placed with the baby by medical records and staff accounts.
The jury of six women and six men were told of Letby’s convictions. They were also told that the original jury had been unable to decide whether Letby had tried to kill Baby K, who would now be eight years old and in primary school had she lived. Cheshire constabulary is understood to have reported the publication to the attorney general’s office as a breach of the strict contempt laws that had bound the UK press since last September, when prosecutors decided to seek a retrial.
It can now be reported that Letby’s legal team said the evidence of the prosecution’s key expert, Dr Dewi Evans, should have been struck out for being “dogmatic and biased”. Letby’s third argument was that the judge was wrong to direct the jury that they did not have to be sure of the precise act, or acts, that led to a baby’s collapse or death.