Channel 5’s documentary “unpacking and questioning the evidence used to convict neonatal nurse Lucy Letby” omitted crucial expert opinions due to unrelated, unspecified tweets.

“It illustrates just how pernicious cancel culture has become,” Professor Norman Fenton writes.

Last month we published an article about an interview Professor Norman Fenton conducted with Dr. Scott McLachlan who provided evidence that all but one of the babies that Lucy Letby has been convicted of causing harm had a high probability of stillbirth or dying within the first week after birth.

Since then, The Telegraph has been publishing a series of articles that question the case the first of which was ‘Lucy Letby: Serial killer or a miscarriage of justice?’ published on 9 July. The next day The Telegraph reported, “Several former Cabinet ministers have expressed concern over the conviction of Lucy Letby, the former nurse, with the issue likely to be raised in Parliament.”

On 2 August, The Telegraph reported that Conservative Member of Parliament David Davis hopes to visit Lucy Letby in prison as part of an investigation into whether the serial baby killer may be the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

On 5 August, The Telegraph noted, “Neonatal nurses are resigning from Britain’s baby units because they fear being accused of harming infants like in the case of Lucy Letby, a consultant has claimed in a new Channel 5 documentary.”

The Channel 5 documentary aired on 5 August, ‘Lucy Letby Did She Really Do It?’, unpacks and questions the evidence used to convict Letby.  As Professor Fenton and Dr. McLachlan had been among the first to publicly raise concerns about the evidence used in Letby’s case a year ago, the producers of the documentary took the time to interview them. 

However, 3 days before the documentary was aired, the producers edited this interview out of the documentary.  The public was deprived of their expert opinions because of unrelated Twitter posts.

Why were we edited out of Channel 5’s Lucy Letby documentary? Were we cancelled due to our political views?

By Professor Norman Fenton, 5 August 2024

Tonight Channel 5 screened a documentary which looked critically at the evidence in the case of nurse Lucy Letby, who was convicted of seven murders and seven attempted murders of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital intensive care unit during 2015-16.

While many have raised concerns about the evidence following her most recent conviction on 2 July 2024, my colleague Scott McLachlan, along with statistician Richard Gill, was raising legitimate concerns about the case well before Lucy’s first trial ended in August 2023. At that time nobody else was raising such concerns. An interview I did with Scott shortly after the first conviction was watched by over a million people on Twitter, YouTube and Rumble.

Scott is a Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Health at Kings College London in the Division of Digital Health and Applied Technology Assessment within the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care. In addition to his PhD in computer science, he has extensive training in law and nursing and has a forensic knowledge of the case. Qualifications that speak for themselves.

My own interest in the case focuses on the “probability of coincidences and clusters”; it was the “too many deaths occurring when Lucy was on duty for it to be a coincidence” narrative that was a major driver of the case against her. Using Bayesian probability analysis, I had previously written about how such clusters of deaths are likely to occur without any malpractice and had provided such evidence to support the case for appeal in a similar case (Ben Geen).

When the company making the documentary for Channel 5 approached Scott and me to be interviewed for it, we were happy to oblige. It was agreed filming would take place in my house. A crew came and filming lasted all day. Here Scott is being prepared for his interview.

At that point, the documentary producers were very happy with our interviews.

However, on 2 August Scott and I got phone calls informing us that, because of some of our views expressed on X (twitter), they were cutting our interviews from the documentary. Views which had nothing to do with the Lucy Letby case and our investigation of it. No specific examples were given.

What is more important in a documentary whose strapline was “Unpacking and questioning the evidence used to convict neonatal nurse Lucy Letby”? That our investigation, prescient and hitherto considered crucial enough to include, is heard, or omitted due to what can only be described as the chilling vagaries of cancel culture? One of our chief concerns surrounding Lucy’s trial is that evidence that should have been heard, was not, potentially leading to a miscarriage of justice. It is ironic therefore, that the makers of this documentary have sought to do the same. It illustrates just how pernicious cancel culture has become.

In my phone call, I said I hoped they would reinstate our interviews, as it is vital that all the concerns about Lucy’s trial be heard. If they did not, I was prepared to write about it publicly and so I am. It goes without saying, Scott and I would be happy to help in any way we can to see that justice is eventually done.

For anybody who wants an idea of the material Scott provided, and which was edited out of the documentary, here is an interview I did with him while the crew were setting up their equipment:

About the Author

Norman Fenton is a Professor Emeritus of Risk Information Management at the Queen Mary University of London.  He is also a Director of Agena, a company that specialises in risk management for critical systems. He is a mathematician by training whose current focus is on critical decision-making and, in particular, on quantifying uncertainty using causal, probabilistic models that combine data and knowledge (Bayesian networks).  The approach can be summarized as “smart data rather than big data.”