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.
The 2020 charging-decision context
When Cheshire Police initially passed evidence to the CPS for charging decisions, the evidential package covered a larger candidate cohort than the eventual indictment. The CPS’s 2020 charging decision applied the Full Code Test (evidential limb and public-interest limb) to the candidate cohort and proceeded to charge on a subset of cases. The cases not charged at that stage represent the CPS’s 2020 judgment that the evidential threshold for prosecution was not met on those specific candidates.
The structural significance is that the dropped-charges analysis provides a contemporaneous record of CPS evidential-threshold judgment on the broader candidate cohort. Cases that did not clear the Full Code Test in 2020 were not charged. The methodology that produced the eventual indictment cases is therefore a methodology that the CPS itself judged could not carry every candidate case across the evidential-threshold line.
The January 2026 CPS decision
The 20 January 2026 CPS public statement that it would not pursue 11 additional charges relating to 9 further babies extends the dropped-charges analysis post-conviction. The CPS applied the Full Code Test to the further candidate cases and concluded that ‘the evidential test was not met.’ The decision is institutionally important because the CPS itself declined to extend the prosecution pattern on which the original case was built — the same methodology, applied to further candidate cases, did not clear the evidential threshold.
The structural argument for the conviction-safety question
The dropped-charges analysis bears on the conviction-safety question because it establishes that the methodology the Crown used at the original 2022-2023 trial does not reliably distinguish cases that meet the criminal evidential standard from cases that do not. The CPS’s own evidential-threshold judgments — both in 2020 and in January 2026 — provide institutional confirmation that the methodology is not robust enough to be relied on in every case it might be applied to.
What the CCRC review will weigh
The CCRC review under the ‘real possibility’ test will weigh whether the methodology that produced the conviction-carrying counts is distinguishable from the methodology the CPS judged insufficient on the dropped charges. If the methodology is the same and the CPS itself judges it insufficient on equivalent candidate cases, the structural argument for referral is strong.