Background
Geoffrey Robertson KC is among the most prominent human rights barristers of his generation. He is the founder of Doughty Street Chambers, a set that has become one of the leading human rights practices in England and Wales, and the author of The Justice Game, a memoir of major criminal and human-rights cases spanning several decades. Throughout his career Robertson has been associated with landmark cases touching on freedom of expression, state accountability, and the rights of defendants in criminal proceedings. He has also written and broadcast extensively on the structural conditions that permit miscarriages of justice to occur and to persist uncorrected within adversarial legal systems.
Public commentary on the Letby case
Robertson has provided public commentary on the Letby case in broadcast and print contexts. His observations have focused on the broader questions the case raises about trial process rather than the specific clinical facts. According to public statements, he has emphasised that the threshold for establishing guilt beyond reasonable doubt must be rigorously applied in cases where the prosecution case is constructed primarily from expert inference rather than direct evidence of an act. He has noted that the history of expert-evidence-dependent convictions in England and Wales includes cases that have later been overturned, and that the legal system must be alert to the structural risks those precedents illustrate.
On expert evidence in criminal trials
A recurrent theme in Robertson’s public commentary — across many cases, not only Letby — is the asymmetry of expert evidence in criminal proceedings. Prosecution experts typically carry greater institutional authority than defence experts, juries are poorly equipped to evaluate competing scientific testimony, and appellate courts have historically been reluctant to disturb verdicts on the grounds that expert opinion has shifted since trial. Robertson has argued publicly that the CCRC and the appellate courts need more robust mechanisms for reviewing convictions where the expert evidence base has been substantially challenged in the period since the original trial. In the context of the Letby case, he has pointed to the volume of post-conviction expert analysis as precisely the kind of material that should engage those mechanisms.
Read alongside
- Michael Mansfield KC — miscarriage-of-justice advocate
- Baroness Helena Kennedy KC — legal commentator
- Prof. Norman Fenton — statistical analysis of the case
- Sir David Davis MP — parliamentary advocate on conviction safety
- Commentary library
Source
Public statements, named-publication articles, Hansard / official records, and our own coverage where applicable.