A memo released the other day by Dr. Ravi Jayaram cast doubt on the Manchester Crown Court’s claim that British nurse Lucy Letby, sentenced to 15 life sentences for killing babies and attempted murder, was caught red-handed. The Daily Mail reports that.
“An explosive email appears to contradict prosecution claims that Lucy Letby was caught ‘red-handed’ with a baby who later died. The memo, made public yesterday, is a significant boost to the nurse’s legal fight to overturn her conviction,” the publication writes.
It is noted that Dr. Ravi Jayaram was the only medical witness at the two trials in the Letby case who was able to point to behavior directly linking her to the deaths of the babies. He testified that the nurse leaned over baby K.’s crib as the girl’s condition worsened without calling for help.
However, in a recently surfaced email that the doctor sent to colleagues at Countess Chester Hospital on May 4, 2017, even before the investigation began, Dr. Jayaram wrote that “at the time of deterioration … staff nurse Letby (was) in the incubator and called Dr. Jayaram to report low saturation.”
The doctor also suggested that the girl’s weakness was the cause of death.
“The baby’s condition subsequently worsened and eventually (he) died, but the events surrounding this are consistent with the explainable events associated with extreme prematurity,” he wrote.
Neither the fact that Letby called him for help nor that he believed the baby’s death was caused by problems related to extreme prematurity were included in the final version of the document the consultants sent to police, the article said.
Contradicting his 2017 email, Dr. Jayaram told police in a witness statement on April 17, 2018:
“It is also true that Lucy did not call me … at the time the desaturation occurred. It is quite common for a nurse to come in looking for a doctor to help when a child’s condition starts to deteriorate, but Lucy did not do that.”
And at the 2024 trial, he portrayed her behavior as suspicious… (However) in his 2017 email, Dr. Jayaram apparently wrote that he went (to baby K.) because Letby herself raised the alarm and asked for his help, not because he had suspicions about the nurse,” the newspaper noted.
The 2017 email was obtained by the website UnHerd and was only disclosed to Letby’s defense team after she received her sentence. Letby was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempted murder of seven others.
Earlier this month, Letby’s defense attorney Mark McDonald submitted a 698-page report by 14 of the world’s leading experts to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which looks into potential miscarriages of justice. The report concluded that the babies died from poor care, prematurity and natural causes, the newspaper emphasized.
Letby, 35, from Hereford, is serving 15 life sentences for killing seven babies and attempting to murder seven others in hospital between 2015 and 2016. The prosecution, citing Dr. Jayaram’s testimony in court, argued that Letby intentionally knocked out the breathing tube and that Jayaram caught her “virtually red-handed.”
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