A British court has sentenced nurse Lucy Letby to life in prison for the fifteenth time, on charges of attempting to kill a young girl in the hospital where she worked, after she was convicted of killing seven newborns during her work.
A jury at Manchester Crown Court on Wednesday quickly reached a conclusion that Lucy Letby, 34, also tried to kill a premature baby who was in intensive care at the Countess of Chester Hospital in north-west England in February 2016.
“She has now been convicted by two separate juries and the verdict means she will never be released from prison,” prosecutor Nicola Wynne-Williams said in a statement, describing what was an “incredibly difficult, complex and disturbing” case.
On Tuesday, Judge James Goss addressed Lucy Letby, who reaffirmed to him that she was “innocent,” saying: “You have coldly denied any responsibility, and have shown no remorse.”
In August 2023, the 34-year-old nurse was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others at the same hospital in 2015 and 2016, making her the worst child killer in modern UK history.
At the end of this first trial, the jury had not reached a verdict on six other attempted murders she was charged with – including the infant murder, the focus of this trial.
When she was admitted to the intensive care unit less than two hours after her birth, the doctor found that the little girl had run out of oxygen, and Lucy Letby did not come to her aid or ask for help.
“You deliberately moved the breathing tube to try to kill her,” the prosecutor summed up Tuesday.
The little girl was transferred to another hospital the next day because she was so weak, and she died three days later, but the prosecutor did not charge the nurse with murder.
The motives of Lucy Letby, who was sentenced in August to life in prison without the possibility of reduction, an extremely rare sentence in English law, are not clear.
Between June 2015 and June 2016, this nurse exposed a large number of newborns, by injecting air intravenously into premature babies, using nasogastric tubes to deliver air, or sending an excessive dose of milk into their stomachs.
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