Context
The Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) refused Lucy Letby’s application for leave to appeal against conviction on 24 May 2024. The judgment addresses the specific grounds then advanced by Ms Letby’s legal team, which were principally that the statistical presentation of the shift-rota chart was unduly prejudicial and that certain expert evidence ought not to have been admitted in the form in which it was.
The application was heard before the International Expert Panel convened by Dr Shoo Lee reported in February 2025, and before the majority of the independent expert reports subsequently filed with the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The Court of Appeal did not have, and could not have had, sight of the post-February-2025 material. That is why the CCRC is now the relevant body.
Key passages
Why it could not be reported at the time. The judgment opens by recording that reporting restrictions “prohibited the reporting of this application for leave to appeal against conviction and of this judgment until the conclusion of the applicant’s retrial on one count of attempted murder (count 14) or further order of the court”. Once the Child K conviction was returned, “this judgment and the hearing of the application can now therefore be reported”. The babies are anonymised in it for the same reason they are anonymised here: orders under sections 45 and 46 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 that also cover siblings, bereaved parents and “some medical and nursing personnel”.
The single sentence that decides the case. At paragraph 18: “We agree with the single judge’s reasons for refusing leave and with his conclusion that none of the grounds advanced are arguable. We do not consider that the criteria for the admission of fresh evidence have been met.” The formal outcome, at paragraph 209, is one line: “The renewed application for leave to appeal is refused as are all associated applications.” Nothing in the judgment is a finding that the convictions are safe on the merits — the court is deciding whether the grounds arearguable, which is a lower threshold and a different question.
On Dr Evans. The court dealt with the challenge to the Crown’s lead expert as a question of admissibility, not of correctness. It held that “it is unarguably the case that Dr Evans was suitably qualified — or to put it another way, it is not arguable that he lacked the necessary expertise — to give evidence”, and that the criticisms of him “were capable of being dealt with within the trial process”. On the trial judge’s refusal to exclude the evidence it found “no arguable basis for interfering with the judge’s exercise of his discretion not to exclude the evidence of Dr Evans under section 78 of PACE”, because “ultimately, as with any other witness, it was for the jury to assess Dr Evans’ reliability”. Whether his conclusions were right was, on this reasoning, a jury question that had already been answered.
The Shoo Lee ground. The proposed sixth ground was that Dr Lee’s evidence, “in conjunction with the weaknesses in the scientific evidence relied upon by the prosecution at trial to prove air embolus”, rendered the air-embolus convictions unsafe and thereby undermined the rest. It failed at the fresh-evidence threshold rather than on its substance: the court simply did not consider the criteria for admission met. That distinction is why the Panel’s later work went to the CCRC rather than back to this court.
How the court described the trial. “In our judgment, the judge handled the trial with exemplary skill and patience.” The rulings under challenge were, it said, “thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct”. On the jury irregularity ground it noted that “it is inappropriate and impermissible to speculate about what the verdicts might have been”, and that the complaint that jurors had made up their minds “does not square with their very long and careful deliberations in retirement” — pointing to “The mixed verdicts they returned, or were unable to reach”.
What to read alongside this
The judgment pre-dates the February 2025 Panel report. See our pages on the air-embolism evidence, the insulin assay, the shift chart, and the Dr Evans methodology. A CCRC application was filed in October 2025; the Commission’s review is ongoing.