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06 June 2025 / David Walbank KC
Issue: 8119 / Categories: Features , Procedure & practice , Criminal , Media
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Crime brief: 6 June 2025

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Can a retrial be fair when a conviction has been at the centre of a media storm? David Walbank KC considers the Lucy Letby case
  • Trial for murder and attempted murder.
  • Media comment after guilty verdicts.
  • Fairness of retrial.

Rarely in modern English criminal history can charges of murder most foul have generated so many column inches or such lurid headlines as in the case of Lucy Letby. The acres of coverage in the print media are matched only by the constant replaying on our television screens of the bodycam footage showing the moments after her arrest. And that is nothing when compared with the deluge of analysis, comment and speculation that continues to engulf social media.

It is not hard to see why. If Lucy Letby did what she is accused of, can there ever have been a more merciless campaign of indiscriminate killing, waged by the very person to whom those poor, defenceless infants and their grief-stricken parents were entitled to look for care

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