Three senior managers who worked at the hospital where Lucy Letby, then a neonatal nurse, was convicted of murdering seven babies have been arrested as part of a police investigation into manslaughter by “gross negligence.”
Cheshire Constabulary, the local police force responsible for investigating a series of baby deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital, said the three people were part of the hospital’s “senior leadership team” between 2015 and 2016. Ms. Letby was convicted in 2023 of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others during that period.
Ms. Letby was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison. She has always maintained her innocence, and her lawyers have applied for her convictions to be overturned by the Britain’s Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates accusations of miscarriages of justice. No timing for that decision has been set.
In the arrests of the three senior managers, the police did not name the suspects, in accordance with internal guidelines and British privacy laws. But they said the managers had been arrested on Monday on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter and had been released on bail as the investigation continued.
The offense covers deaths that were the result of negligence and can be used in cases involving poor medical treatment.
The Cheshire police started an investigation into corporate manslaughter at the hospital in October 2023, after the first of Ms. Letby’s two trials.
The head of the investigation, Detective Superintendent Paul Hughes, said it “focuses on senior leadership and their decision making to determine whether any criminality has taken place concerning the response to the increased levels of fatalities” in the neonatal unit where Ms. Letby worked.
In March this year, the investigation, code-named Operation Duet, was widened to include gross negligence manslaughter, which is a separate offense that looks at the “action or inaction of individuals,” a statement added.
Mr. Hughes said that the investigation was continuing and “does not impact on the convictions of Lucy Letby”
He said there was also a wider investigation into deaths and nonfatal collapses of babies at the neonatal units of both the Countess of Chester Hospital and the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, which are 17 miles apart, between 2012 and 2016.
The prosecution said that Ms. Letby, 35, 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.
A jury at Manchester Crown Court found Ms. Letby guilty of murdering seven babies and of trying to murder six others after an initial eight-month trial that ended in August 2023. That jury did not reach a verdict on the attempted murder of a seventh baby, but Ms. Letby was convicted after a four-week retrial in June 2024.
At trial, her lawyer argued that she was being scapegoated for “serial failures of care” resulting from chronic understaffing. Since her convictions, a growing number of experts have suggested that the evidence used to convict her was flawed.
Concerns had previously been raised about nurse staffing levels at the Countess of Chester Hospital, including by an official regulator that assessed the hospital in February 2016 and in an independent report in 2016 by the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health.
A public inquiry into events at the hospital during the period of Ms. Letby’s convictions, as well as into staff conduct and management practices, is set to report its findings early next year.
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