Why charge amendments matter
The Crown Prosecution Service charges a defendant only when the evidence meets the CPS charging threshold: a realistic prospect of conviction and the public interest in prosecution. Between charging and trial, the CPS continuously reassesses the case. Charges are amended — dropped, reduced, replaced — when the CPS concludes the realistic-prospect-of-conviction test is no longer met on a specific count.
Amendments are therefore evidence of the Crown’s own continuing assessment. A charge that is dropped before trial is a charge the Crown itself concluded it could not sustain in front of a jury.
The Letby charge chronology
- November 2020. Letby formally charged with 8 murders and 10 attempted murders.
- Pre-trial amendments. Some originally-charged counts were not put to the jury at the October 2022 trial. The trial proceeded on seven murders and seven attempted murders’ worth of alleged offences in the indictment the jury considered.
- August 2023 verdicts. Jury returned guilty on 7 murders and 7 attempted murders; not guilty on two counts; failed to agree on six others.
- July 2024. Retrial on the Child K attempted-murder count (one of the originally-disagreed-on counts).
What the amendments suggest
The Crown’s willingness to drop some originally-charged counts between 2020 and 2022 is evidence that even the Crown’s own internal assessment considered some of the original counts not strong enough to take to trial. This is not a criticism of the CPS; it is standard prosecutorial practice. But it is relevant evidentially because:
- The Crown’s framing at trial of a seamless pattern of deliberate harm is already narrower than the Crown’s original 2020 framing would have been.
- The pattern-evidence argument relies on the remaining counts forming a coherent whole. Amendments remove counts from that whole on the Crown’s own assessment.
- The Crown’s retention of specific counts, and dropping of others, is itself a triage based on the available evidence. On the cases that survived to trial, the Panel’s retrospective review has since identified even these as not adequately supported.
The jury’s own filtering
The jury then applied a second filter. They convicted on 14 counts. They acquitted on two counts. They failed to agree on six counts. That is, in aggregate, a roughly 30% non-conviction rate on the counts the Crown thought strong enough to take to trial.
Combined with the pre-trial Crown amendments, the total filtering from the November 2020 charging position to the August 2023 conviction position is substantial. The counts on which Letby is now serving a whole-life order are a subset of a subset.
The surviving pattern is therefore narrower
The Crown’s pattern argument at trial was that a specific pattern of events across 2015–2016 constituted evidence of deliberate harm. Once the pattern is narrowed to the conviction counts only — excluding the amended-out charges, the not-guilty verdicts and the no-verdict counts — the remaining pattern is much smaller than the Crown originally framed it.
The question for the CCRC is whether the narrower pattern survives specific-case scrutiny on each conviction. The Shoo Lee Panel’s case-by-case review concludes that it does not.