Here it is M
The crucial detail that those defending Lucy Letby are missing
While a new Netflix film on the investigation of the nurse convicted of murder offers a new perspective, there is one vital question that no-one is asking, says David James Smith
Friday 06 February 2026 06:00 GMT
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-innocent-netflix-b2914804.html#comments-area
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Lucy Letby is serving 15 whole-life orders and a new documentary looks at how she came to be accused and eventually convicted(Cheshire Constabulary)
If nothing else, the new feature-length documentary on
Netflix,The Investigation of Lucy Letby, offers some corrective to the growing clamour of doubt that surrounds her convictions. It gives a different viewpoint to those inclined to believe she has been the victim of a
witch hunt, made a scapegoat for institutional failures, or even been the target of a conspiracy, involving her former hospital consultant colleagues and Cheshire
police.
As the film reminds its audience, there was a case to answer: a prosecution case that crossed multiple hurdles and was subject to repeated challenges. That rigorous process stands in contrast to the claim that she has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice, as advocated on Netflix by Letby’s new barrister, Mark McDonald, and the head of his expert panel, Dr Shoo Lee.
Together with a Twitter/X army of “Letby truthers”, they have so far had free rein to put forward the case for Letby’s innocence in the media. Sooner or later, however, that fresh defence will bump up against the reality of legal scrutiny. The court of social media may have been swayed but it will not be so easy to convince the Criminal Cases Review Commission that there is a “real possibility” of success if it refers the case back to the Court of Appeal.
Many commentators appear to assume that step is a foregone conclusion. But the outcome is far from certain. It is worth remembering that Letby has not exactly been fast-tracked to penal oblivion. She was first suspected by some doctors in June 2015, but for a long time there was internal wrangling at the Countess of Chester Hospital – broadly, the consultants versus the managers and execs – that stymied any action.
More babies died, or suffered collapses, meanwhile. It was not until August 2016 that Letby was removed from her frontline role. It was still a further 10 months before the case was formally referred to Cheshire police, in May 2017, nearly two years after suspicions about her were
The new Netflix film documents what followed. The police spent the next year investigating and only then arrested Letby for the first time in July 2018. She was arrested for the second time a year later and finally rearrested and charged in November 2020, half a decade after suspicions that she was harming babies were first raised.
She was interviewed multiple times – and often answered opportunities to give her version of events with the replies, “no comment” or “I don’t remember”.
Although the film doesn’t say so, the decision to charge Letby and put her on trial was made not by the hospital consultants or the police but by the Crown Prosecution Service, observing a double-headed legal test that there is a realistic prospect of conviction and that a trial is in the public interest. We saw the CPS exercising its independent judgment just recently, when it declined to prosecute Letby for further offences. We don’t know the reasons, but we know – because they told us – that it was not the decision Cheshire police had hoped for.
After Letby was charged in late 2018, she had nearly two years to prepare her defence case for trial, which began on 4 October 4 2022 at Manchester Crown Court. Letby called only one expert witness – a plumber. But still the trial lasted for 10 months, during which time multiple expert witnesses for the prosecution were robustly cross-examined by Letby’s highly experienced trial counsel, Ben Myers KC.
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Letby’s new barrister Mark McDonald in the new Netflix documentary (Netflix)
The last line (an on-screen caption) in the Netflix documentary is given to Myers, stating that he had declined to explain to the film why no defence experts were called. While that was Letby’s decision, not Myers’, it is likely that the KC and the rest of her legal team advised their client on the best course of action, and she agreed.
Unless or until Lucy Letby waives her right to legal confidentiality, Myers cannot tell anyone what passed between them, or how that critical trial decision came to be made.
The trial ended in August 2023, when Letby was convicted of seven murders and seven attempted murders, for which she received 14 whole life sentences. Letby faced a second trial for the attempted murder of Baby K and was convicted by a second jury in July 2024, when she was sentenced to a 15th whole life order.
By that time, Letby had also made her case for an appeal over a three-day hearing before a panel of three senior judges. She was again represented by Ben Myers KC, and now had the benefit of her own expert, Dr Shoo Lee, who gave evidence via video link from Canada, that the prosecution had misrepresented his earlier medical paper on air embolism.
Through a sequence of edits, the Netflix film implies that Lee was brought in by her new barrister, McDonald, but that was not what happened. Lee’s revised account of his earlier findings, and his claim that they had not been properly deployed by the prosecution, was considered at length by the Court of Appeal – and then rejected. Letby was refused leave to appeal.
It remains to be seen, given that failure at appeal, how Lee’s new evidence, and the evidence of his expert panel can help Letby further.
The Netflix documentary focuses on the death of baby “Zoe” and the moving testimony of her mother “Sarah”, who appears in “digitally anonymised” form. Letby was convicted of repeated attacks on Zoe, causing her death in June 2015. Letby could not remember, she said, searching Zoe’s parents on Facebook, three days after Zoe’s death.
Dr Shoo Lee is one of the experts working on a possible appeal bid for Letby (Netflix)
Sarah was surprised to find Dr Lee discussing Zoe’s death in public, at the July 2025 press conference when he outlined the work of his expert panel and said, “in summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any evidence of murder”. He claimed Zoe had died instead because she had not been treated with antibiotics.
But this was not a revelation. Indeed, it had featured in the original trial when Zoe’s case was considered in great detail. The prosecutor had flagged up the concern in his opening speech to the jury, when he said that Zoe “should have been given antibiotics to stave off infection but she was not. That failure is a legitimate target of criticism”.
However, experts said that while Zoe might have died with an infection, she had not died
of an infection. The jury heard the criticism – and observed the debate over the cause of Zoe’s death – but still convicted Letby. On that basis, Dr Lee’s evidence is not apparently new, in Zoe’s case, and is unlikely to find much favour with the CCRC. You can’t rehash trial evidence for an appeal. You have to have something new to argue, and it needs to be both relevant and substantial.
The documentary rightly focuses on what one contributor, Press Association court reporter, Kim Pilling, calls an “interesting” aspect of the case, namely, as he says, “the volume of circumstantial evidence. Singly (the strands) don’t prove she was a cold-blooded murderer, but when you bring it all together, you’d be forgiven for thinking, if this woman’s innocent, then she’s pretty unlucky.“
This indirect evidence of Letby’s guilt includes the 250 handover sheets, including some of the babies she was convicted of harming, that she took home (in breach of her professional duty) and carefully filed away in date order.
We see in the film an image of the box file marked “keep”, in which the papers were stored by Letby, sitting on the top shelf of a wardrobe. She is then seen in a police interview saying she had “inadvertently” taken the sheets home in her pocket and did not dispose of them because she didn’t have a shredder. But, we hear in the film, there was in fact a shredder where she was living. Indeed, Netflix shows us a photo of it.
And then there are the notorious Post-it notes which, it is suggested, were misrepresented to the jury as all being indicators of her guilt – “I am evil, I did this” – whereas, in fact they are a mixture of the damning and the exculpatory – “I am innocent”. But again, the jury heard and saw all this at trial. The two sides of Letby’s psyche, as revealed in the notes, were made clear by prosecutor Johnson in his opening speech.
Controversy surrounds the admission as evidence of Post-it notes on which the nurse supposedly admitted her guilt (Netflix)
The commission – and the Court of Appeal – will want to examine how the trial unfolded, what happened at the first appeal, and – first and foremost – they will be expecting to hear why the defence adopted the tactics it did, only calling one expert, a plumber.
In the Netflix film, Mark McDonald says he doesn’t know why that happened. It is easy to say this in public, but not knowing will not satisfy the CCRC or the Court of Appeal.
There must be a reason – we know the trial defence team instructed multiple experts, they just never called any of them. Why?
If that was an error (which in itself is implausible) Letby may have some hope, but if it was the best tactical decision that could be made at the time, then unless McDonald has uncovered some genuinely startling fresh evidence that might have altered the outcome of the trial, evidence that the CCRC is satisfied will stand up to the scrutiny of cross examination and the court, and there will be little hope for Letby’s future freedom.
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