Former Cumbrian director of health voices concerns over Lucy Letby conviction (2025)

The 35-year-old nurse is serving 15 whole-life prison terms for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more while she worked as a nurse at Countess of Chester Hospital Neonatal Unit.

She continues to deny wrongdoing.

Professor John Ashton spoke to the News & Star as pressure continued to mount for the convictions to be quashed.

A qualified doctor, who served as Cumbria’s Director of Public Health between 2006 and 2013, Professor Ashton backs the conclusions of a 14-strong panel of internationally respected experts who reviewed Letby’s case.

They found no evidence of murder.

Several senior hospital managers with links to the Countess of Chester have also now spoken out, saying they believe there is a “real likelihood” Letby may not be guilty.

Along with the expert panel led by Dr Shoo Lee, Professor Ashton has highlighted what he says were fundamental mistakes in the prosecution case, including “fake science.”

“The Lucy Letby trial was deeply flawed,” said Professor Ashton.

“In every case, there are other explanations for why [the babies] died."

Lucy Letby was convicted ofmurdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more.

Professor Ashton believes The Countess of Chester Hospital had insufficient clinical expertise to care for babies which were as premature and as ill as those whose deaths triggered the Letby murder trial.

He said: “In past disasters – such as Hillsborough, the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, and the Herald of Free Enterprise –there were multiple things happening at the same time which all lined up and made what happened inevitable.

“What’s happened at Chester was a similar catalogue of things which lined up. The background is that successive governments got into the idea of hospitals competing for business.

“They encouraged hospitals to do things they shouldn’t be doing.

"The Countess of Chester Hospital should only have taken babies which were over 32 weeks in gestation.

“The 14 global experts who reviewed the Letby case made it absolutely clear that these babies were much sicker than the prosecution made out.”

Professor Ashton suggested there was “dysfunction” at the hospital’s maternity unit, with problems that included staff shortages and infection in the water supply.

Letby is serving 15 whole-life prison terms

There were sewerage leaks through the ward ceiling, he said.

“They had problems with an organism called pseudomonas, which can cause pneumonia and septicaemia in babies. They’d been trying to get rid of it for a couple of years.

“But this was never really taken seriously at the trial.

"The hospital had real environmental health problems – so much so that a plumber was called to give evidence at the trial. He was the only expert witness for the defence.”

The Professor believes Letby may have been "scapegoated.”

He said: “There was junk science presented at her trial: junk science in the insulin evidence, junk science in the statistics evidence, and junk science in the injected air story."

Ashton rejects the evidence of the paediatrician called by the prosecution, and said it was remarkable the babies’ clinical notes did not feature in the trial, though they were reviewed by Dr Lee’s expert panel.

“They ought to send her case back to the Court of Appeal," continued the Professor.

He argued that Letby’s trial was an ‘abuse of process’ – an unequal contest in which the nurse was confronted by the prosecution’s “expert evidence” without the benefit of any alternative expert opinion.

Dr Shoo Lee of the expert panel (Image: Ben Whitley)

His key objections to the Prosecution case include:

• The Incriminating “Post-It” notes: Letby was encouraged to write “free association” thoughts about her situation. Some notes – including one which said: “I killed them” - read like admissions of guilt. Others gave the opposite impression, with one stating: “I didn’t do it.” “Lucy Letby was agonising over this stuff, feeling she wasn’t good enough,” said Ashton. “The notes are evidence of self-loathing, not murder.”

• Duty rota statistics.The Professor said: “The prosecution argued that Lucy was on duty at the time of the deaths. They built their case around that. But she was on duty for only half the cases.” He says prosecution statistics featured the “Texan sharpshooter fallacy,” which means selectively highlighting only the information that supported the theory prosecutors wanted to prove.

• Injecting air into the babies: Letby was accused of injecting air into babies' belly buttons. “The expert panelists,” said the Professor, “say this was conjured up out of thin air; and that even if it was a way of killing a baby, you’d have to inject so much air you’d have to do it repeatedly.” Letby was also wrongly blamed for damaging a baby’s liver with an injection, despite clinical notes showing it was done by a doctor, said Ashton.

• Insulin injection:It was argued that Letby injected synthetic insulin into babies. Yet, says the Professor, the test results supporting that claim were not corroborated by secondary testing procedures. A natural cause may have been to blame, he suggested.

Letby’s barrister Mark McDonald has now lodged an application for her convictions to be reviewed as possible miscarriages of justice with the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

At the ongoing Thirlwall Inquiry into the Letby case, Peter Skelton KC, on behalf of the babies who died, said Letby was convicted after two trials during which she had access to "the finest criminal legal teams".

He said that the "new evidence" being presented by Letby's current legal team was in fact "old and full of analytical holes."

Lady Justice Thirlwall said she intends to publish her report in November of this year.