The Sark based doctor who is helping to raise awareness about potential miscarriages of justice has said he is confident Lucy Letby will win the right to an appeal, while reiterating his work is about more than her case alone.
Dr Roger Norwich is among a number of medical and legal experts who have been contributing evidence to the UK’s Criminal Cases Review Commission which will decide if Letby can appeal her convictions for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more.
While the court of public opinion appears to have swayed more in Letby’s favour in recent months – Dr Norwich and others have always said she is innocent.
The former neo-natal nurse was convicted of the murder and attempted murder of the 14 babies in total in 2023. By 2024 Dr Norwich was already involved with efforts to highlight the serious concerns he and others held about the way she had been prosecuted.
Dr Norwich told Express in July 2024 that he had lodged complaints with the General Medical Council about the prosecution’s expert witnesses – which included Guernsey based paediatrician Dr Sandie Bohin, and Dr Dewi Evans – who he said were pushing a theory on the jury with shoddy evidence.
Nearly two years on, Dr Norwich now says he stands by everything he said in 2024 – and that his opinion that Letby is innocent and is the victim of a miscarriage of justice has grown even stronger.
“When I was first interviewed in Guernsey, back in the middle of 2024, I had a lot of negative opinions from other professionals, other people that I knew, asking if I really was doing the right thing, standing up against this conviction, and really, the opinions that I expressed at that time have not changed in any way, and they’re much stronger than they were at that point, and of course, many, many people have come around to understand why some of us were willing to stand up and risk our reputations at the beginning, and a lot of people have joined that bandwagon,” he told Express this week.
While Letby has always maintained her innocence, she was convicted and is serving a whole life prison sentence for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of seven more.
She was refused the right to appeal her conviction in 2024, but her legal team – led by Mark McDonald – submitted a new bundle of evidence to the CCRC early last year in a bid to win an appeal.
Speaking at a meeting in Guernsey last year, Mr McDonald said the evidence submitted included documents referencing complaints made against Dr Bohin locally.
“We’ve seen a list recently of documents that have been submitted and was published by the CCRC,” said Dr Norwich.
“I’m not sure whether further evidence is now being put in but we believe that they are working at their own rate to deal with the issue, but there’s no guarantee as to exactly how long that will take. A lot of documents have gone in, and we know that the CCRC is very poorly funded and we don’t know how quickly they’ll deal with that.”
The Criminal Cases Review Commission looks into criminal cases where people believe they have been wrongly convicted or wrongly sentenced in the UK.
Regardless of how long it takes, Dr Norwich is confident the CCRC will find that Letby has suffered a miscarriage of justice.
“I believe eventually, given the weight of medical evidence, which I think is irrefutable, that she will eventually be let out, but we can’t guarantee when it might be, because if the CCRC sends the case back to the Court of Appeal, we have to remember that the judiciary is not so interested in justice as in process, and the judiciary do not like admitting mistakes.”
Dr Norwich said the Letby case could have wide ranging repercussions for other cases if she does win the right to appeal and her conviction is ultimately overturned.
He believes – along with other medico-legal experts involved in the Letby case – that the British jury system is not capable of trying crimes where the evidence is so technical.
“This has relevance to lots of other cases and now interest is not in Lucy Letby alone,” said Dr Norwich.
“Her own barrister and his experts will be dealing with that, and we’re not trying to impinge on the work they’re doing, but our interest is in trying to make sure that things like this don’t ever happen again.
“This can be changed if the whole system of prosecuting complicated, technical, medical, financial cases are dealt with in an inquisitorial fashion, rather than relying on a jury of 12 people who may not have any understanding about the issues involved.”
Dr Norwich’s concerns over the jury system were evidenced during the Letby case though, when he claims even the prosecution’s own witnesses didn’t understand what had happened.
“In the case of Lucy Letby, it’s clear, given the type of evidence that was given, that even the experts didn’t understand the signs, and that evidence was given where diagnoses were unheard of. For example, the baby who was alleged to have died of having it stomach blown up with air, there is no medical evidence of this type of diagnosis. This was absolutely speculative.”
“I think in the Lucy Letby case, had there been a jury that consisted of doctors and nurses, the case would have been laughed out of court, whereas it was allowed to take the head of steam that it had, and she was found guilty incorrectly, in my opinion,” he added.
Dr Norwich is working with other people – including other medical, legal, and medico-legal experts – who are trying to help free other nurses who he believes are wrongly incarcerated too.
“There are quite a number of nurses who are in prison, particularly in relation to insulin cases,” he explained.
“It seems to be clear from evidence that we’ve seen regarding some of those cases, that the people giving evidence against the nurses did not understand the massive technicalities involved in assessing insulin poisoning.
“There is a lot of new research coming out, which really negates a lot of the evidence that has been given in some of these cases. But even so, recently, there was an appeal, which was again rejected by the Court of Appeal on one of the nurses who we believe to be innocent.”
He said the cases he is focused on are all English, but the risk of a miscarriage of justice is being recognised globally.
“We’ve had a lot of people from North America, Canadians and people from USA, who’ve been looking at Lucy’s case, and other cases in great detail, who understand that things have really gone wrong with these trials. But of course, it’s up to people in England to try and deal with difficulties currently going on in England. It’s a matter for politicians in England to clear their own house up, but clearly they’ve got other things on their
mind,” he added.