A TV crew member sets up outside of the Manchester Crown Court, ahead of the sentencing of the hospital nurse Lucy Letby, in Manchester, Britain, on Aug. 21, 2023.PHIL NOBLE/Reuters
A U.S. magazine article that people in Britain aren’t allowed to see has sparked a debate about how far British courts should go in restricting media coverage of high-profile criminal trials.
The 13,000-word investigation, which appeared in this week’s edition of The New Yorker, raises questions about the case of Lucy Letby, a former nurse who was convicted last August for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six more while working at a hospital in Chester, about 40 kilometres south of Liverpool. Ms. Letby, 34, was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole; she has appealed her conviction.
Her trial lasted 10 months and drew intense media coverage. She’s only the fourth woman in British history to receive a whole-life sentence, and she has been described in reports as the country’s most prolific serial killer of children.
In The New Yorker article, titled “A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?” author Rachel Aviv writes that “in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence were ignored.”
The magazine has blocked access to the story on the British version of its website so as not to run afoul of the country’s strict laws on court reporting. Because Ms. Letby is scheduled to face a retrial in June on one further count of attempted murder, British law bars any “reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings.”
The media has also been banned from reporting the details of an appeal court hearing into Ms. Letby’s case that took place in April. Last October, a month after prosecutors announced the retrial, the British Medical Journal removed a commentary piece from its website that also questioned the verdict.
The New Yorker has made the article available in print editions sold in Britain and through its mobile app. It’s not clear whether that could amount to possible contempt of court charges. The magazine is based in the United States, which would make it beyond the reach of British law, but its publisher, Condé Nast, has a British subsidiary.
Conservative MP David Davis raised the article in the House of Commons this week and expressed concern that it was not available to British readers. The story had brought to light “enormous concerns about both the logic and competence of the statistical evidence that was a central part of that trial,” he said.
The court order blocking publication “was well intended, but it seems to me in defiance of open justice.” He asked the Secretary of State for Justice, Alex Chalk, to look into the matter.
Mr. Chalk said court orders must be obeyed but they can also be challenged. “I will just simply make a point on the Lucy Letby case – that jury’s verdict must be respected. If there are grounds for an appeal, that should take place in the normal way.”
The Letby case has been the subject of unprecedented publication bans.
Before the trial started, High Court Justice Karen Steyn prohibited the media from identifying any of the victims – which include one set of triplets and three sets of twins – as well as their parents. She made this ruling even though they had all been widely named when Ms. Letby was charged in 2020. Instead, the babies were identified during the trial by letters of the alphabet.
Justice Steyn also granted lifetime anonymity to nine witnesses, consisting of doctors and nurses who worked alongside Ms. Letby in the neonatal unit. The judge accepted arguments that their mental health would suffer if they were identified.
After the verdict, Robert Buckland, a former justice secretary, said such wide-ranging anonymity orders were only intended to be used in exceptional circumstances. “Embarrassment or anxiety over having to give evidence does not seem to me to be a strong enough argument,” he wrote in a newspaper column last August.
“I watched what was happening in the Letby case with horror,” said Tim Crook, an emeritus professor in the department of media, communications and cultural studies at Goldsmiths University in London. “This was the first time in the history of the British criminal justice that the identity of seven murder victims had been rendered anonymous by court order.”
In an interview Thursday, Prof. Crook said Britain has a long history of restricting court reporting, dating back to the early 1980s when government legislation gave judges broad power to issue publication bans. “I think it’s been a disturbing and devastating trend in open justice.”
The Letby case “was absolutely disastrous, as far as open justice was concerned, and the whole New Yorker coverage is a demonstration of that,” he said.