Lucy Letby has bid to overturn attempted murder conviction dismissed

Child serial killer Lucy Letby has had a bid to challenge a conviction for the attempted murder of a baby girl dismissed by the Court of Appeal.

Lawyers for Letby, 34, asked senior judges for their approval to appeal against her most recent conviction after she was found guilty at the end of a retrial in July of attempting to kill a newborn, known as Child K.

The former nurse’s lawyers told the Court of Appeal on Thursday that the attempted murder charge should have been “stayed” as an “abuse of process”.

They argued this was due to “overwhelming and irremediable prejudice” caused by media coverage of her first trial and that the retrial should not have gone ahead.

But three senior judges dismissed Letby’s bid at the conclusion of the hearing in London.

Letby was previously sentenced to 14 whole life orders for the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of six others – with two attempts on one child. She was sentenced to a 15th whole life term for the attack on Child K.

Thursday’s ruling marks Letby’s second appeal bid to be thrown out after the Court of Appeal dismissed a challenge against her first set of convictions in May.

Nick Johnson KC, acting for the Crown Prosecution Service, stated in written submissions that the appeal bid was “misguided” and the jury found Letby to be a “multiple killer and habitual liar”.

He argued: “The application appears to rely on the huge volume of publicity as being of itself sufficient grounds on which to base an application to stay the indictment.

“It also leans heavily on the proposition that it is wrong for a witness to speak to the news media and that fact in itself taints the prosecution to the extent that it should be stayed. This is a misguided approach.”

Benjamin Myers KC, representing Letby, told the court the attempted murder charge should have been “stayed”. He said: “The learned judge was wrong to reject the application made by the defence at the outset of the trial to stay the indictment as an abuse of process.”

Mr Myers continued: “It is an exceptional case, with exceptional media interest, and therefore exceptional unfairness is capable of arising, notwithstanding the safeguards that are often employed.”

The barrister added: “We are dealing with the impact of media coverage and public comment arising from the first trial, upon the second.”

Mr Myers said media coverage before the retrial was “saturated with unadulterated vitriol” towards Letby, which included coverage on the BBC‘s Panorama and ITV’s Loose Women which “described her as evil and depraved”.

The court heard that comments by police and members of the Crown Prosecution Service created “powerful prejudice against the defendant while simultaneously bolstering their own status”. Mr Myers said this “should offend the court’s sense of justice and propriety”.

He added: “It really is not what should happen at all and in the circumstances of this case, bearing in mind all that had already happened, the public interest could be met by finding that there was an abuse (of process).”

Letby, formerly of Hereford, watched the hearing via a video link from HMP Bronzefield, wearing a green dress.

At the end of her first trial, which ran from October 2022 to August 2023, jurors were unable to reach a verdict in the case of Child K, but a second jury took just three-and-a-half hours to convict her at the retrial at Manchester Crown Court.

The jury was told Letby targeted the “very premature” infant during a night shift at the Countess of Chester Hospital in the early hours of February 17, 2016, by dislodging Child K’s breathing tube after she was moved from the delivery room to the unit’s intensive care unit.

Sentencing judge, Mr Justice Goss, said the offence was “another shocking act of calculated callous cruelty”, describing Child K as “exceptionally vulnerable”.