Lucy Letby latest: Inquiry into baby murders begins as police probe ‘assault’ on medical witness at trial

The Thirwall Inquiry begins at 10am – we will be watching it and reporting from it live here.

Britain’s worst convicted child serial killer Lucy Letby has maintained her innocence and is to launch a fresh appeal with a new legal team.

Here we take a look at the questions being asked:

It’s important to say that the inquiry’s remit does not include reviewing evidence used to prosecute Lucy Letby.

There have been fresh questions in recent weeks on the reliability of the evidence used by the prosecution in the first trial – but the inquiry is to look at the circumstances around the killings, not the actual case.

It will consider the experiences of the parents of Letby’s victims, the conduct of staff at the hospital and the wider NHS culture and effectiveness of its management.

The reference terms for the inquiry, which can be read here, state the convictions as fact.

Speculation about Letby’s case in the media and possible future appeals had been “upsetting” for her clients, said solicitor Tamlin Bolton who is representing the families of six victims.

The first week of the inquiry will hear opening statements from the counsel to the inquiry, along with legal representatives from “core participants” including the families of Letby’s victims.

Evidence is scheduled to begin the following week and will continue until at least December.

A court order prohibits reporting of the identities of the surviving and dead children involved in the case.

Lucy Letby’s new lawyer, Mark McDonald, has claimed that new medical evidence and expert opinion had revealed “flaws” in the prosecution case and that he plans to apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to ask it to return the case to the Court of Appeal for consideration.

In recent months a number of doctors, scientists and statisticians have publicly challenged how the evidence was presented to jurors.

While a letter to Government ministers from 24 signatories including neonatal experts and professors of statistics called for a rethink over the terms of the public inquiry and warned that important lessons could be missed from a “failure in understanding and examining alternative, potentially complex causes for the deaths”.

In November, Lady Justice Thirlwall, who will be chairing the inquiry, issued an opening statement.

The senior Court of Appeal judge said she would also probe what recommendations had been made from previous inquiries into events in hospitals and other healthcare settings, and what difference they made.

She referred to the case of another child killer nurse, Beverley Allitt, who murdered four infants and caused grievous bodily harm or attempted to murder a total of nine other children in Lincolnshire in 1991.

She said: “Everyone was determined that it would not happen again. It has happened again. This is utterly unacceptable.”

The scope of the inquiry into the circumstances around Letby’s crimes will be wide. The three general areas to be covered in the inquiry are:

• The experiences of the parents of the victims.
• The conduct of staff the Countess of Chester and how Letby was able repeatedly to kill and harm babies. Despite mounting concerns, she was not removed from the unit until after the deaths of two triplet boys and the suspected collapse of another baby boy on three successive days in June 2016. Police were not called in until the following year.
• The wider NHS relationships between the groups of professionals, the culture within NHS hospitals and how these affect the safety of newborns in neonatal units.

Speculation on the guilt of Lucy Letby and possible future appeals has been “upsetting” for the families of victims, according to a solicitor representing them.

In recent days, there has been speculation the convicted child killer may launch a fresh appeal with a new legal team, with her new barrister claiming there is “absolutely” a strong case Letby is innocent.

Tamlin Bolton, who represents the families of six victims, described the speculation as “upsetting” for all of her clients.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Monday, the solicitor said: “I can’t stress enough how upsetting that has been for all of the families that I represent.

“And they have thought about so many ways in which they can try to address that and deal with it and make sure they put their voice across. But of course they’re restricted by wanting to keep themselves confidential and private.

“So it’s a really difficult challenge for them to try and avoid social media, avoid the reporting about it.

“But when you have children that are now eight or nine years old, they are looking at TikTok, they’re looking at social media and there are people claiming that the harm that was caused to them or their sibling was not caused by somebody who’s been found guilty of those crimes by a jury and whose appeals have been exhausted, and the Court of Appeal have also said she remains guilty of these crimes.”

We’ve been running a few parts tonight from our interview with Mark McDonald, who is Lucy Letby’s newly-appointed barrister.

He said he had a meeting with 22 professionals with expertise in forensic pathology, statistics and anesthetics last Sunday.

Asked what they told him, he said: “That the science, the medical evidence that was presented to the jury by the prosecution was unreliable.”

We spoke to Mark McDonald, Lucy Letby’s new barrister, on how he first got involved in the case as it emerged he was leading her fight for an appeal last week.

He said: “I have been involved in these types of cases for the past 15 years, because there are four nurses currently serving life imprisonment for harming patients.

“I represented Ben Geen [one of those convicted nurses] in both the Court of Appeal and and the CCRC, so I have been aware of these issues, so you might think to yourself ‘what has that got to do with Lucy Letby?”

“All four cases are very similar. All four cases mirror each other in the way they were presented to the jury. They present a statistical theory in relation to spikes in deaths and also a particular nurse being on duty.

“I have now statistical reports that say what is taking place, the assertions taking place are wrong.

“Secondly, they rely upon on technical expert evidence to look back in hindsight… let’s take Lucy Letby for example, everything was seen as a natural cause, every death was seen as natural, there were numerous post mortems and all came back as normal deaths, and years later an expert gets into a witness box and says ‘well, I think this is how that person died, there is no direct evidence against her in relation of harming the patients’.

“Same in Ben Geen, and the same in others, and I’m really concerned by the nature of the admissibility of that type of evidence put forward before a jury.

“So as soon as Lucy was charged, I pretty much knew what was going to happen…. I now have numerous medical experts that have looked at evidence put before the jury and raise serious problems with the science used and the realiability of the science used for the jury”