Former Cabinet minister to lead campaign raising questions over conviction of murderous nurse Lucy Letby as experts raise concerns over her case

Former minister David Davis is to lead a campaign in the House of Commons to ask questions about the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby, as more experts raise concerns about the case.

The former Brexit secretary plans to table a series of questions under parliamentary privilege amid unrest within the NHS and legal community over the matter.

Mail columnists Peter Hitchens and Nadine Dorries have highlighted that Letby was convicted of the murder of seven newborns and the attempted murder of six other babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital, despite the fact that no one saw her kill or attempt to kill a baby and there was no forensic evidence to prove her guilt.

Two witnesses for the prosecution based their statements on a 30-year-old investigative report, claiming that Letby killed babies by injecting air into them through their feeding tubes.

However, the Canadian academic who wrote the original article was not called as a witness for the prosecution and has since raised doubts about the use of his work in the trial.

Some members of the Royal Statistical Society have expressed concern about the use of statistics to secure a conviction on the basis of probability. The recommendations on the use of such data in the cases of medical serial killers were not followed here.

The separate plaintiffs allege that Letby killed two babies with insulin. A damning investigation by The New Yorker magazine summed it up this way: “You’d have to assume she managed to inject insulin into a bag that another nurse had taken at random from the unit refrigerator.”

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Mr Davis is said to be concerned about the justice system’s institutional reluctance to admit its own failings, which is leading to innocent people being thrown into prison.

He said: ‘There is a growing consensus among experts that Lucy Letby’s guilt has not been established beyond reasonable doubt. I will use parliamentary privilege to make this argument: we must rule out the possibility that she has effectively been made a scapegoat for the wider failings in the system.

“At the very least, this appears to be a mistrial. But the justice system is slow to assess her own shortcomings, so if she is innocent, it could be a decade before she is released. We need to try to do much better than that.”

Helen Pitcher, the head of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, refused to resign last week despite a damning report into the watchdog’s handling of the case of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of rape in 2004.

Dr Alexander Coward, a former Oxford mathematics lecturer, has questioned the evidence used in the trial, which showed Letby was on duty at every death and attempted murder, and said it could have been a coincidence.

Former MP Edmund Bulmer, former chairman of the Herefordshire Health Authority, previously told Rishi Sunak he believed Letby was “the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice”.