A former government minister has told MPs that he believes Lucy Letby is ‘a clear miscarriage of justice’ whilst casting doubt on the ability of the courts or the miscarriage of justice watchdog to be able to get to grips with the injustice. The conservative MP David Davis, a longtime supporter of the nurse convicted of murdering seven babies in her time at the Countess of Chester hospital, made the claims in a parliamentary debate he called last week.

Today I held an adjournment debate on the role of expert witnesses and the trial of Lucy Letby.

I discussed what to do about a trial which, in my view, is a clear miscarriage of justice. https://t.co/V5bLhhWC85

— David Davis MP (@DavidDavisMP) January 8, 2025

A former shadow home secretary, the MP claimed to have been approached by numerous experts sharing concerns about the safety of the conviction including a past president of the Royal Statistical Society and a past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. People, as he put it, who were ‘more knowledgeable than the purported experts whose evidence convicted Lucy Letby’.

The MP quoted Exeter University’s miscarriage database listing nearly 500 people who have been wrongfully imprisoned pointing out that ‘astonishingly’ incorrect forensic evidence had been responsible for 81 ‘leading to over 500 years of unjust imprisonment’. ‘Many of those cases involve caregivers convicted by medical expert testimony asserting deliberate harm where causes of death were in fact natural,’ he said. ‘Those people were all exonerated, but those who doubted their guilt were initially met with the same fierce public pushback that now faces those who question Letby’s guilt.’

‘A clear miscarriage of justice by a judicial system that could not manage admittedly difficult statistical and medical scientific evidence.’
David Davis MP on Lucy Letby

‘One of the problems we face is that much of the evidence was available at the time,’ the MP told MPs, ‘but it was simply not presented to the jury. That means the Court of Appeal can dismiss it.’ Davis said that, if that was the case, the courts were ‘in essence’ saying: “If your defence team weren’t good enough to present this evidence, hard luck, you stay banged up for life.” ‘That may be judicially convenient, but it is not justice,’ he added. ‘This has been an historic problem in Britain…’

Davis was also sceptical about the ability of the troubled miscarriage of justice watchdog to be able to deal with such a case in a timely manner. He raised the Criminal Cases Review Commission’s serial failures in the Andrew Malkinson ‘where there was effectively a 17-year delay in releasing him from prison’. ‘That cannot happen again. We cannot repeat that. If, as I believe it will, a retrial clears Lucy Letby, she should be released in her 30s, not in her 50s.’

The MP attacked the prosecution case which was ‘built on a poor understanding of probabilities that was to translate later into an influential but spectacularly flawed piece of evidence’. Davis highlighted the importance of the involvement of Dewey Evans, a retired doctor who approached the National Crime Agency to volunteer his services, and who was responsible for formulating the idea that Letby had injected into the baby‘s veins causing an air embolism. Evans’s assertion of ‘murder by air embolism’ was entirely based on a research paper from 1989, and had been ‘robustly challenged by the actual author of that paper’.

According to Davis, three months into the trial, Letby’s defence team applied for Evans to be excluded due to an adverse judgment from a previous judge who said his report in that case was ‘worthless’ and ‘makes note effort to provide a balanced opinion’.

The MP claimed that the CPS might have acted in breach of the of the prosecutors’ code after instructing Cheshire Police to drop a consultancy arrangement with a leading statistician, Professor Jane Hutton, who argued that police’s approach to stats was flawed. Prof Hutton has later said the statistical errors in the Letby case were ‘similar to those…in the Sally Clark case but worse’.

The justice minister Alex Davies-Jones would not be drawn on the details of case, saying: ‘It is not safe for me or the Government to undermine any of the processes in the justice system. Our attention should rightly remain on the families and parents impacted by this case and on continuing to work towards providing answers and closure for them. It is to the families that I speak to.’