Lucy Letby, a former neonatal nurse who was convicted of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of seven others, was refused permission to appeal one of her convictions on Thursday.
It is the latest blow to Ms. Letby’s attempts to appeal her multiple convictions, even as a growing number of statisticians and medical experts have questioned the reliability of the evidence used by the prosecution at trial.
Ms. Letby, 34, who has always maintained her innocence, is serving 15 life sentences after she was found guilty of harming babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England between 2015 and 2016.
During two trials, the prosecution told the jury that she had harmed babies through a macabre range of attacks: injecting them with air, overfeeding them with milk, infusing air into their gastrointestinal tracts and poisoning them with insulin.
The first trial concluded in August 2023, when Ms Letby was found guilty of seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder, two of which involved one baby. She was convicted of attempting to murder another baby in a retrial of one charge earlier this year.
Thursday’s hearing focused on that single attempted murder conviction, for a child known as Baby K. The three judges decided that a full appeal will not be heard.
Lawyers for Ms. Letby argued that her retrial in the attempted murder of Baby K should have been halted because Ms. Letby could not receive a fair trial because of the intense public commentary from the media, police, prosecutors and witnesses following her earlier convictions.
“It’s an exceptional case with exceptional media interest,” said Ben Myers, a lawyer for Ms. Letby. The “intense hostility and the saturation” of media coverage had prejudiced her retrial, he argued.
But prosecutors countered that Mr. Myers’s approach was misguided and would establish a problematic principle that would allow anyone convicted of a notorious crime to avoid being tried or retried for additional offenses.
Nick Johnson, a lawyer for the prosecution, also said comments from the police after the first trial were accurate.
“What was said by the police in the aftermath of the convictions of the first trial was reasonable,” Mr. Johnson said. “It accurately and moderately described the horrendous offenses of which this applicant had been convicted.”
Ms. Letby has already been denied appeals in the other seven murder and seven attempted murder counts for which she is serving life sentences — two of the attempted murder charges relate to one baby. She appeared by video link from the high-security prison where she is being held, wearing a forest green dress and looking down through much of the hearing as she listened to the legal arguments.
At the start of the appeal hearing, Judge Baker acknowledged that Ms. Letby’s case “is very well known to most people in the country,” and reminded those present in the courtroom that Thursday’s appeal hearing had a very narrow focus.
“The underlying convictions that were sustained last year and all the public discussion there has been more recently since that, has nothing to do with what we are talking about today” Judge Baker said.
Last month Ms. Letby appointed a new defense lawyer, Mark McDonald, who plans to apply to Britain’s Criminal Cases Review Commission, the official body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice in the country, and the one remaining way for her other criminal convictions to be revisited.
“I can tell you now, if I was innocent and in prison, I’d rather be in the U.S. than the U.K.,” said Mr. McDonald. “It is so difficult to overturn a conviction in this country, it is almost impossible.”
Mr. McDonald said that in his application to the C.C.R.C. he would focus on the reliability of the evidence presented by the prosecution, rather than claiming that Ms. Letby’s original defense was insufficient, and plans to submit the case within weeks.
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