Baby Killing Nurse Given Rare ‘Whole Life’ Sentence by UK Court

Lucy Letby, a 33-year-old nurse called the worst child killer in modern British history, has been given a life sentence at the end, the culmination of the longest UK murder trial ever.

Convicted last week of seven murders of newborn children at the hospital where she worked, Lucy Letby was told this afternoon that she had been sentenced to a whole life order, a rarely used sentence in British law which means she will never be allowed to leave prison. Life sentences can otherwise see inmates paroled without the additional whole life order added to it.

Handing down the sentence, the judge said Letby was guilty of a cruel and cynical “campaign of child murder” which was motivated by “a deep malevolence bordering on sadism”. Judge Mr Justice Gross said Letby had acted contrary to the natural human instinct to protect children and had told “many lies” to protect herself, including projecting an outward image of being a “conscientious, hardworking, knowledgable nurse” to cover for the murders.

The children ranged from just a few hours to a few days old and were already in ill health, having been born with complications. The court heard how Letby injected babies with air to kill them, and of poisoning them by adding medicines to their intravenous feeds. The judge said: “You killed seven fragile babies and attempted to kill six others. Some of your victims were only a day or a few days old. All were extremely vulnerable.”

Now the case is complete, attention is turning — to a limited degree — to the hospital where Letby worked and was free to attack babies relatively frequently over the course of a year. It is now claimed that senior doctors had noticed a pattern with babies under Letby’s care and attempted to get her removed from the ward, but were shut down by hospital management. Per a report in the Daily Mail, it is claimed the hospital even instructed doctors who had raised the alarm to write to Letby to apologise for airing their concerns.

The now-retired consultant paediatrician Dr John Gibbs has said “lessons need to be learnt” and that: “We began to realise that we were in direct confrontation with managers and we had no choice but to fight and to make sure the police got involved. By that stage, it was us or her.”

He is reported to have continued: “I think they could not accept and could not believe that a member of staff could be killing a series of patients in hospital. They just couldn’t believe it was possible.

“I’ve been told that some of the senior nurses were strongly defending Lucy Letby and they just couldn’t believe she had done anything. I think they (managers) closed their minds to the fact she could have done that too soon. It is a shame that, despite all us paediatricians expressing concerns, our clinical experience and our repeated observations that these deaths were outside our normal experience, they were unnatural and unusual, that advice wasn’t heeded.”