This is a very rare sentence in English law. A sentence that the judges of the Manchester court (United Kingdom) considered useful to sanction the horror of the acts committed by Lucy Letby. This English nurse was sentenced Monday to life imprisonment for the murders of seven newborns. This measure of life imprisonment without possible release was pronounced on Monday for the seven murders and six attempted murders committed by the nurse in the hospital in which she worked. The 33-year-old carer is touted as the worst child killer in modern UK history.
Judge James Goss called the nurse’s crimes a “cruel, calculated and cynical campaign”. “You have acted in a manner totally contrary to normal human instincts which are to take care of babies and in flagrant violation of the trust that all citizens place in health professionals”, declared the magistrate during the verdict delivered live to television but in the absence of the respondent.
The nurse worked in the intensive care unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in north-west England. Claiming her innocence, Lucy Letby was accused of injecting air intravenously into premature newborns, using their nasogastric tubes to send air or an overdose of milk into their stomachs.
Alerts from 2015…
Convicted on Friday, the nurse refused to attend her sentencing on Monday. Arrested for the first time in 2018, then in 2019, Lucy Letby was imprisoned in November 2020. Her motives remain unclear despite the ten months of trial. According to the British press, doctors would have launched alerts as early as 2015, but the management of the hospital would not have listened to them or would not have acted, concerned about the reputation of the establishment.
The police continue to study thousands of files in search of possible additional victims of Lucy Letby. On Sunday evening, The Guardian newspaper reported that police were investigating dozens of “suspicious” incidents, involving 30 babies, at the hospital where she worked.
This article is originally published on 20minutes.fr
