A government inquiry into the Countess of Chester Hospital has deepened serious questions about the convictions of neonatal nurse Lucy Letby, after one of the doctors whose testimony helped secure her prosecution publicly withdrew his certainty that she was responsible for the deaths and injuries of fifteen infants.
A Prosecution Witness Steps Back
Dr John Gibbs, a retired paediatrician who gave evidence at Letby’s trial, told The Sun that he is “no longer certain” she murdered seven babies or attempted to murder eight others. When asked directly whether he remained convinced of her guilt, his answer was unambiguous: no.
Dr Gibbs now considers a retrial “the most appropriate thing for everyone”, and acknowledged a residual but significant concern: “I hold a very small concern there may not have been any deliberate harm done.” He added that if Letby is imprisoned for crimes she did not commit, “that’s clearly appalling.”
His position is carefully calibrated. He does not wholesale endorse the growing body of expert opinion arguing for her innocence — noting he disagrees with aspects of many of those arguments — but he identifies the central unresolved question as why so many babies collapsed on the neonatal unit in Chester in 2015 and 2016. That question, he suggests, has not been answered to his satisfaction.
Accountability Beyond the Dock
The inquiry’s findings place institutional culpability squarely alongside individual culpability. Yvette Cooper acknowledged that the hospital trust “repeatedly failed the parents” and kept them in the dark for years — a failure the report’s author characterised in stark moral terms.
Cheshire Police’s decision to examine whether hospital management committed criminal offences signals that the legal reckoning over events at Chester is far from complete. The force is concentrating specifically on whether senior decision-makers bear criminal responsibility for their response to the mortality data they possessed.
The convergence of a recanting prosecution witness, a damning institutional inquiry, and an active police investigation into hospital leadership creates an accountability picture that extends well beyond the question of one nurse’s guilt or innocence. Whether the criminal justice system will revisit that question remains, at this stage, uncertain — but the pressure to do so is mounting with documented force.