Context
Nicholas Johnson KC opened the prosecution case to the jury at Manchester Crown Court on 10 October 2022. The opening set out the indictment architecture, the shift-rota statistical framework, the Crown’s expert witnesses, and previewed the evidence on air embolism, insulin, NG-tube mechanisms and the handwritten notes. Reading the opening alongside the post-conviction Shoo Lee International Expert Panel report (February 2025) and the Joint Expert Witness Insulin Report (May 2025) shows the precise points on which the Crown’s framework is now contested.
Full contemporaneous court coverage is available via the Chester Standard live-blog archive. This page is a structured reference summary.
What the Crown set out
- The structure of the indictment and the court-assigned A–Q pseudonyms the jury would hear referred to throughout.
- The shift-rota framework on which the statistical case would rest: identification of Ms Letby as the nurse present at every one of 25 selected suspicious events.
- The Crown’s expert witnesses: Dr Dewi Evans as lead paediatric causation expert; Dr Sandie Bohin as secondary paediatric expert; Dr Andreas Marnerides as reviewing pathologist; Prof. Owen Arthurs as paediatric radiologist; Prof. Peter Hindmarsh as paediatric endocrinologist on the insulin counts.
- The air-embolism theory drawing on Lee & Tanswell 1989 as the Crown’s diagnostic-criterion authority.
- The insulin immunoassay results from Royal Liverpool clinical biochemistry for Babies F and L, treated as diagnostic of exogenous insulin administration.
- The NG-tube mechanism theory on Babies C and I.
- The handwritten notes recovered from Ms Letby’s home, treated by the Crown as admissions.
- Facebook searches for families of indicted babies, treated as consistent with post-event perpetrator interest.
- Handover sheets recovered at Ms Letby’s home, treated as “trophy” material.
What the post-conviction record now shows
- Dr Shoo Lee, lead author of the 1989 air-embolism paper, has publicly stated that the paper was misapplied at trial. The Panel he convened found no case meets the diagnostic criteria of the 1989 paper.
- The Joint Expert Witness Insulin Report (May 2025) sets out in technical detail why the Roche Cobas screening immunoassay result cannot bear the evidential weight the Crown’s opening placed on it.
- The denominator analyses on Facebook searches (257 family searches spread across many babies, not clustered around deaths) and handover sheets (257 sheets total; 21 related to indictment; 236 unrelated) dissolve the “trophy” and “perpetrator-interest” framings.
- The “gang of four conspiracy theory” framing the Crown later introduced in closing (19 June 2023) is, on independent reading, a rhetorical framing that collapsed the confirmation-bias argument into a straw-man frame.
- The January 2026 CPS decision not to pursue 11 further charges on 9 additional babies confirms that the same methodology, applied to further candidate cases, does not clear the Full Code Test evidential threshold.
Read alongside
Nicholas Johnson KC — biography, The ‘gang of four’ framing, Summing-up critique, Defence opening (Benjamin Myers KC), Kate Blackwell KC closing, Myers KC closing (expanded).