UK baby killer Letby’s lawyer to present new evidence in bid to clear her name

Former British nurse and convicted child serial killer Lucy Letby appears by video link during an appeal against her conviction for trying to murder a newborn baby, at the Court of Appeal in London, Oct. 24, 2024, in this courtroom sketch. (Reuters/File)
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Updated 02 April 2025
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UK baby killer Letby’s lawyer to present new evidence in bid to clear her name

  • “The fresh evidence I will hand in to the CCRC tomorrow totally undermines the prosecution case at trial,” McDonald said
  • The CCRC has said it is assessing Letby’s application but has not given a timeframe for any decision

LONDON: A lawyer for nurse Lucy Letby said he would present new evidence on Thursday to the commission which considers miscarriages of justice, saying it undermined the case against the British nurse convicted of murdering seven babies in her care.
Letby was jailed in 2023 for the remainder of her life after being found guilty of murdering the newborns and attempting to murder eight more between June 2015 and June 2016 while working in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England.
Letby, 35, Britain’s worst serial child killer of modern times, has maintained her innocence throughout but has been refused permission to appeal against her convictions.
However her case has become a cause celebre after medical experts, media and other supporters challenged the prosecution case used to convict her, and said that evidence suggested no babies were murdered.
Her lawyer Mark McDonald said on Wednesday he would hand over an 86-page report by leading medical specialists to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), saying it cast serious doubt on the trial’s key findings about two of the children, known as Babies F and L.
The court’s conclusion that the babies were poisoned using insulin was key to the prosecution proving she had committed murder.
“The fresh evidence I will hand in to the CCRC tomorrow totally undermines the prosecution case at trial,” McDonald said. “This is the largest international review of neonatal medicine ever undertaken, the results of which show Lucy Letby’s convictions are no longer safe.”
The CCRC has said it is assessing Letby’s application but has not given a timeframe for any decision.
Meanwhile police are still investigating Letby and hospital managers, saying her previous appeals about flawed evidence have been rejected. The head of a public inquiry into the deaths has also rejected calls for her investigation to be paused.


Russia sentences Briton who fought for Ukraine to 13 years in prison camp

Updated 18 December 2025
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Russia sentences Briton who fought for Ukraine to 13 years in prison camp

  • The jailed Briton was named as 30-year-old Hayden Davies by Russia’s Prosecutor General
  • State prosecutors released a video of Davies being questioned as he stood behind bars

MOSCOW: A British man who fought for Ukraine against the Russian army has been sentenced to 13 years in a maximum security prison camp after being convicted of being a paid mercenary, Russian prosecutors said on Thursday.
The jailed Briton was named as 30-year-old Hayden Davies by Russia’s Prosecutor General which said he had been tried by a court in a part of Russian-controlled Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions which Moscow claimed as its own in 2022 in a move Kyiv and the West rejected an illegal land grab.
State prosecutors released a video of Davies being questioned as he stood behind bars, dressed in a black coat and with a shaven head. He says in the video that he had traveled to Ukraine to join the International Legion which paid him $400-500 per month.
The International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine is a unit of the Ukrainian military made up of foreign volunteers.
Asked if he pleaded guilty to the charge against him, Davies says “yeah” and nods his head.
It was not clear whether Davies was speaking under duress and there was no immediate comment from the British Foreign Office.
London in February said Davies was not a mercenary but a Prisoner of War entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. It also condemned what it called Moscow’s exploitation of prisoners of war “for political and propaganda purposes.”
Russian prosecutors said on Thursday that Davies had arrived in western Ukraine in August 2024, signed a contract to fight for the International Legion, undergone military training, and then fought against the Russian army in Donetsk.
Davies had been captured by Russia in winter 2024 carrying a US-made assault rifle and ammunition, they said.
British media have reported that Davies once served in the British army and is married and originally from Southampton.
A Russian court jailed another British man, James Scott Rhys Anderson, for 19 years in March after finding him guilty of fighting for Ukraine in the Kursk region of western Russia.