Forums Forums National News Lucy Letby

I've often said the if you force targets on people you end up with liars and cheats, this was my suspicion in the Lucy Letby "baby murderer" case. Here was a hospital department failing badly on targets.

Lucy was convicted without any hard evidence, primarily on statistics and opinion, here are some points to consider ....


A number of senior statisticians have stated that the way the statistics were used and interpreted was completely unsafe.

Her own boss admitted that she had made misleading statements.

The medical expert has changed his mind about three of the cases and now believes they were not murder.

The systems used to show when she was on the ward have been blown apart as totally unreliable data.

A lot of accusations happened retrospectively after considerable periods of time, it took over a year for this supposed information of murder to filter up the management chain.

The department's consultants will be very aware that some of the deaths could end their careers.

There was a huge trial by media with a heavy bias towards her being guilty.

To me it smells of a scapegoat scenario for a failing department or plain bad luck. She might be guilty, she might not, but she is innocent until proven guilty and there is no credible evidence that she is guilty. There undoubtedly has been some unsafe convictions against her.

There used to be a band of dedicated Letby supporters who would post frequently on social media or newspaper comments pages about her being scapegoated and hidden from the media (until it all came out).

These comments used to be quickly deleted.

Common sense is starting to prevail https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...lucy-letby-conviction-expert-panel-finds

That statement also concurs with what I hypothesised previously about a a failing department looking for a scape goat.

This could be a travesty for Letby, the justice system and the families of the babies involved in this case. Not only would the families find out their babies weren't murdered but also they may have died through medical negligence.



Furthermore, if the prosecutors misrepresented evidence in court, is that not perjury?

I also raise questions as to why the identity of some of the witnesses in court were kept secret, there is absolutely no reason in a case like this for that to occur. Perhaps without that anonymity their damning statements may not have been the same?

Three managers from the Countess of Chester Hospital have now been arrested for suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter. Presumably attempts to hide the department's failings are among the reasons this has come about. Investigations into this matter are ongoing.

It should be noted that the police investigations into the deaths of the babies is still ongoing as a separate issue.

Experts with so much experience don't come much bigger than this .....l

PROFESSOR JOHN ASHTON
Professor John Ashton CBE is not an internet commentator who has casually attached himself to this case. He is a medically qualified public-health specialist with decades of senior experience examining how healthcare systems function, fail and respond when patients die.
He served for 13 years as Regional Director of Public Health and Regional Medical Officer for North-West England. He later became Director of Public Health and County Medical Officer for Cumbria and was President of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal Colleges of Physicians from 2013 to 2016.
His career has brought him into direct contact with some of Britain’s most serious medical and institutional disasters, including the Harold Shipman murders, the Alder Hey organ-retention scandal, the Morecambe Bay maternity deaths and the aftermath of Hillsborough.
Professor Ashton’s particular expertise lies in public health, patient safety, organisational failure and the way large institutions behave when services have gone badly wrong.
He says that his initial position was cautious. He believed the prosecution case was wholly circumstantial, but did not then claim to know whether Letby was guilty.
After spending two years studying the evidence and engaging with international specialists from relevant disciplines, his position became unequivocal. In February 2026 he wrote:
“I can now say that I have every reason to believe that Lucy Letby is innocent of the charges against her.”
His central argument is that the deaths and collapses should have been examined as a possible systems failure before being constructed as the work of a serial killer.
He points to:
• a neonatal unit caring for babies beyond the level of complexity it could safely manage;
• staffing and clinical practices that he considers inadequate;
• an ageing building with environmental-health concerns;
• stretched resources and institutional ambition;
• the failure to use established multidisciplinary child-death review processes properly;
• police officers effectively being drawn into determining medical causation;
• the misuse of statistics;
• medical theories involving insulin and air embolism that are now heavily disputed;
• an institutional culture in which attention shifted from systemic failure towards one individual.
Ashton believes that what occurred at the Countess of Chester fits a familiar pattern: an ambitious but struggling organisation fails to recognise the limits of its service, closes ranks when outcomes deteriorate and eventually finds an individual upon whom the catastrophe can be placed.
This is particularly significant because he has personally witnessed how institutions protect themselves. He has described recognising in the Countess of Chester the same dynamics of institutional self-preservation that he encountered following Hillsborough.
His conclusion is therefore not simply that a few items of evidence may be questionable. He believes the entire case was approached through the wrong lens.
Instead of asking first whether prematurity, natural illness, infection, inadequate staffing, poor clinical practice and an overstretched neonatal service explained the deaths, investigators came to interpret events through the theory that one nurse was deliberately harming babies.
Professor Ashton now believes Lucy Letby was scapegoated for failures within both medical care and the justice system.
People may agree or disagree with him. However, his views cannot honestly be dismissed as uninformed speculation. They come from a senior doctor and former national public-health leader with extensive first-hand experience of healthcare disasters, institutional defensiveness and catastrophic failures of accountability.
When somebody with that background says he believes the convictions are unsafe and that Lucy Letby is innocent, the proper response is not ridicule or censorship.
It is independent, scientifically rigorous scrutiny of the evidence.