\n<\/p>\n
Just two months before Lady Justice Kathryn Thirlwall opened her inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester hospital and the crimes of Lucy Letby, a report by Chris Henley KC was published into the \u201catrocious\u201d wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson for rape.<\/p>\n
Henley prefaced that report with a plea for the legal establishment to recognise that the criminal courts produce miscarriages of justice. Right up to top judges in the court of appeal, Henley wrote, the system has \u201ca deep-seated \u2026 cultural reluctance\u201d to accept it \u201cwill on occasion make mistakes\u201d and that \u201centirely innocent defendants will sometimes be convicted\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said the system needed a culture that acknowledges mistakes can be made and ensures \u201cin our various roles when making decisions we are all alive to this potential risk\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Thirlwall inquiry was set up in 2023 by the then health secretary, Steve Barclay, on the basis that Letby was guilty of murdering seven babies, and attempting to murder seven more, at the Countess of Chester hospital\u2019s neonatal unit where she was a nurse. Thirlwall\u2019s terms of reference were to spotlight the hospital\u2019s management, and whether their actions and culture \u201ccontributed to the failure to protect babies from Lucy Letby\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Lady Justice Kathryn Thirlwall arrives at Liverpool town hall before the publication of her inquiry report on Tuesday.<\/span> Photograph: Christopher Furlong\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Many distinguished experts had already looked at the evidence and expressed very serious concerns that the system had made another of its mistakes and convicted an entirely innocent person. As the Guardian reported, 24 experts wrote to Wes Streeting, who took over as health secretary after Labour\u2019s general election win in 2024, urging him to pause the inquiry or widen its terms of reference to examine the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Streeting did not do so.<\/p>\n In her opening speech in September 2024, Thirlwall, a court of appeal judge, referred to the criticisms of Letby\u2019s convictions dismissively, referring to \u201ca huge outpouring of comment\u201d since the court of appeal refused Letby leave to appeal in May 2024, and to \u201call of this noise\u201d that had caused distress to the bereaved parents.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not for me to set about reviewing the convictions,\u201d she said. \u201cThe court of appeal has done that with a very clear result. The convictions stand.\u201d<\/p>\n The core premise of the inquiry from the start was that the hospital\u2019s managers had not acted on warnings about Letby from the consultants, and should have called in the police earlier. That was the central conclusion Thirlwall has reached in her 822-page report.<\/p>\n <\/span>Damning Lucy Letby inquiry finds \u2018complete failure to protect babies\u2019 – The Latest<\/span><\/p>\n She criticised \u201ca prolonged delay by senior managers in calling the police\u201d after two of three triplets, babies O and P at the trial, died in June 2016. There was an assumption throughout that the police, the Cheshire constabulary, were uniquely equipped to find the forensic truth about how the babies died.<\/p>\n Thirlwall again emphasised in her final statement that her inquiry was \u201cnot an investigation into the criminal convictions or the guilt of Letby\u201d. But the report is based on it being a fact that Letby is guilty and Thirlwall has delivered the devastating conclusion that babies would have been protected if the hospital had acted more quickly to safeguard them from the nurse.<\/p>\n There was almost no moment in any of the gruelling inquiry sessions in the long, glittering ballroom of Liverpool town hall that engaged with the question looming over the proceedings: whether Cheshire constabulary may have got the case catastrophically wrong.<\/p>\n A large group of British and international experts, led by the renowned Canadian neonatologist Dr Shoo Lee, who has argued relentlessly that his own research was misrepresented by the prosecution, concluded that there were no murders, only vulnerable newborn and premature babies, and poor care on the unit.<\/p>\n <\/span>From left to right: Letby\u2019s barrister Mark McDonald, the Conservative MP David Davis and Dr Shoo Lee at a press conference in 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Andy Rain\/EPA<\/p>\n Thirlwall heard in exhaustive detail about the actions the medical director, Ian Harvey, his management colleagues and the consultants took when considering the deaths and collapses of the babies. Postmortems had been carried out by three very experienced consultant pathologists at Alder Hey, Liverpool\u2019s renowned children\u2019s teaching hospital. They found no deliberate harm or any suspicion of it.<\/p>\n Harvey had asked the Alder Hey pathologists to review their conclusions and they confirmed their original findings. He also had the babies\u2019 deaths reviewed by a consultant neonatologist, Dr Jane Hawdon, of London\u2019s Royal Free hospital. She also did not find any deliberate harm, but identified many areas of \u201csub-optimal care\u201d on the unit.<\/p>\n Harvey invited a review by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, whose team came to a conclusion grimly familiar to maternity and children\u2019s units in the NHS around the country. It had insufficient consultants and not enough consultant time was being spent on babies of such medical vulnerability, just two ward rounds each week. The management downgraded the unit so that it would no longer care for babies born so prematurely.<\/p>\n Thirlwall examined all those processes and has concluded that none were adequate. Her conclusions are that when the consultants had raised concerns about Letby, safeguarding should immediately have been introduced and the police should have been called in earlier.<\/p>\n So during two years and \u00a318m spent on so much legal inquiry, the question has not been answered, nor was it allowed to be asked: how and why did Cheshire constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service, and the doctors they recruited as expert witnesses, come to so wholly different a conclusion about the causes of death, from all the experts that had looked at the same medical evidence before?<\/p>\n And nor was there permitted to be any solid engagement with the new experts, led by Lee, as to why they so fundamentally disagree with the prosecution\u2019s case and convictions.<\/p>\n In his call for more vigilance after the Malkinson catastrophe, Henley wrote: \u201cMiscarriages of justice disfigure the lives of all connected to the case and make the public generally less safe.\u201d<\/p>\n The Criminal Cases Review Commission, the strained body whose role is to refer potential miscarriages of justice back to the court of appeal, is still looking at Letby\u2019s application, and the copious expert reports submitted with it. In the meantime, a public inquiry chaired by a senior judge was set from beginning to end not to consider the possibility that the police, CPS and courts might have made a mistake, and served up a terrible injustice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just two months before Lady Justice Kathryn Thirlwall opened her inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester hospital and the crimes of Lucy Letby, a report by Chris Henley KC was published into the \u201catrocious\u201d wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson for rape. Henley prefaced that report with a plea for the legal establishment to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[752,1844,357,1199,23486,1165,1226,25320,1530],"class_list":{"0":"post-52265","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-biggest","9":"tag-case","10":"tag-inquiry","11":"tag-left","12":"tag-letby","13":"tag-lucy","14":"tag-questions","15":"tag-thirlwall","16":"tag-unanswered"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}