Lucy Letby bombshell as new memo from sole medical witness threatens to blow prosecution's case wide open.

[MissJoGrant]

This seems like a pretty major development.

www.lbc.co.uk/crime/lucy-letby-bombshell-new-memo-sole-medical-witness-nurse-conviction/

Do you know any of the relevant dates here? ie when the request to appeal was submitted and when the defence received the email. Because all I’m seeing is lots of ‘may have been’ ‘not necessarily’ and ‘probably’, which doesn’t strike me as particularly conclusive. Unless you do know those dates, it may also be the case that the defence did have time to build or re-work the request to appeal around the email but actually decided that it’s material value was too low so didn’t bother with it.

(Also, could they not have requested an adjournment if something of such evidential significance for a potential appeal had come to light so late in the day? Or is that another one that we must put down to her totally incompetent - yet still somehow one of the most well-respected and eminent in the country - KC…)

I don't know the dates - we don't have them, so my point is that we don't know either way.

My main point though is that it doesn't matter. The request to the CCRC had to be made anyway. There is nothing strange or suspicious about deciding to use the new evidence there, along with other documents emerging then and since.

I'd have waited for Dr Jayaram to give his testimony at Thirlwall before going public with this one myself, and that was November. And if I already knew my international medical experts were analysing what went wrong in that case, again, I'd wait.

There is no obligation to throw everything relevant at a request to appeal. The only obligation is to get the request in within 28 days of sentencing.

I find that this happens a lot. A significant piece of information emerges. Someone somewhere online makes a point about process and others keep echoing it. But this one doesn't matter.

Why would it matter, if Lucy Letby's team had it and decided not to include it in the request for appeal on the retrial?

I don't think there's any need to consider Letby's original legal team were incompetent. Myers was certainly disadvantaged by some of the judge's decisions, but he did defend Letby successfully of some charges. He tackled Evans well. If he had been allowed to go through the cases one at a time I suspect that would have been clearer.

I think it was not having alternative explanations for the insulin that scuppered them, but we have those explanations now.

Unfortunately our legal system does not guarantee perfect outcomes, even when people do their jobs reasonably well.

I’m a bit confused about your timeline here. I don’t think Mark McDonald was instructed until sometime after her request to appeal following the retrial was denied? Are you suggesting that it was always Benjamin Myers plan to go to the CCRC? In which case why has she instructed a junior barrister in Mark M to put together the CCRC application?

And why would you not throw everything at a request to appeal? A successful appeal against one of the convictions which has the effect of completely undermining one of the key prosecution witnesses across all the convictions would surely be helpful when it comes to the CCRC application?

It doesn’t matter at all to me if LL’s team had the email but decided not to use it in the request for appeal, but I am quite interested in why they didn’t.

Yes, McDonald's new role was announced before the appeal request on baby K - so he and Myers working in parallel for a while: Myers on that request to appeal the retrial, McDonald on the CCRC request.

So you can see that there was indeed a strategy looking beyond that potential appeal (which was on baby K only so would have left Letby imprisoned anyway).

It would have been a bonus if Letby had got an appeal on baby K but it's very obvious, not just from this incident, that resources were being pushed to McDonald by this stage.

Then why won’t the CCRC just say that you had the opportunity to use this email as part of the original baby k request to appeal (which it pertains to) but chose not to, so why should it now be considered significant new evidence that warrants a referral back to the CoA? (And I know that there is also reams and reams of new opinion in the CCRC application, but this thread is about the bombshell new evidence that is this email..).

There's no obligation to use all grounds for appeal in a request, so CCRC has no reason to ask this question.

If they did ask, there are lots of good answers