LONDON (Reuters) – Former British nurse and convicted child serial killer Lucy Letby on Thursday lost an attempt to appeal against her conviction for trying to murder a newborn baby, amid questions over the fairness of her trials.
Letby, 34, was found guilty of murdering seven children and attempting to murder seven more between June 2015 and June 2016 while working in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester, northern England, making her Britain’s worst serial child killer of modern times.
She was convicted of an eighth count of attempted murder at a retrial earlier this year, after the original jury was unable to reach a verdict on that charge.
Letby’s lawyer Benjamin Myers told London’s Court of Appeal that Letby “maintains and has maintained she is not guilty of the offences”.
He argued that the retrial was an abuse of process as Letby could not have a fair trial because of extensive coverage of her convictions, which featured “intense hostility towards her”.
“There was no way in which the jury in trial two were going to have the publicity and the comment and the hostility ameliorated,” Myers said.
Judge William Davis said that the court would refuse Letby’s application for leave to appeal against the conviction from her retrial.
Letby’s attempt to overturn her convictions from the first trial was refused in May. She can now only challenge those convictions if the Criminal Cases Review Commission refer those cases back to the Court of Appeal.
Since her trials, Letby’s conviction has increasingly come under a spotlight, following criticism by some experts of medical and statistical evidence presented by the prosecution.
Some media in Britain and abroad have questioned whether she might be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, while a public inquiry into her crimes continues.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin, Editing by Paul Sandle and William James)
