What reporting restrictions actually are
In English criminal procedure, reporting restrictions are court orders limiting what may be published about live proceedings. Their function is protective: they stop a jury being contaminated by extraneous material, stop a defendant’s fair-trial rights being undermined by prejudicial reporting, and stop witnesses being identified where the court has made them anonymous. Breach is contempt of court, which carries criminal penalties.
Restrictions are not inherently controversial. They apply to every major criminal trial in England and Wales. The Letby case used them in a textbook way: no identification of the infants by name; no reporting of material not adduced in evidence; no reporting of jury deliberations.
Where the restrictions did more than that
Where this case differs from most is in the combination of three features:
- A retrial following the original trial. The Child K retrial opened in June 2024. UK reporting restrictions applied throughout. During this window, any publication that might be read by a jury pool had strong incentive to be cautious about airing critiques of the original convictions, in case those critiques became prejudicial material.
- A large dormant body of expert critique. By spring 2024, independent experts had begun to publish detailed critiques of the medical evidence. The May 2024 Rachel Aviv New Yorker piece was the most comprehensive of these.
- Trans-Atlantic publishing. The New Yorker is published in the United States, but its online edition is read worldwide. UK contempt law applies to anything readable in the UK. The publisher took legal advice and opted to geo-block UK readers from the article during the retrial, rather than risk a UK contempt action.
The Aviv geo-block as a natural experiment
The effect of the geo-block is worth understanding. During the retrial, a UK reader typing “Rachel Aviv Lucy Letby New Yorker” into a search engine was shown a link that, when clicked, returned a block page. An identical search from France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United States or Australia returned the article.
This created an unusual situation: the best-resourced, most rigorously fact-checked international long-form critique of the evidence was freely available to every major country except the one whose public most needed access to it. UK readers continued to be served the UK tabloid and broadsheet coverage, which had largely accepted the prosecution framing. International readers had a second frame available. The gap between UK and international public understanding of the case widened over the months the block was in force, and the gap did not fully close when the block was lifted.
For the Aviv piece itself, see our biography of Rachel Aviv.
Why this is not a criticism of reporting restrictions per se
The purpose of reporting restrictions is the protection of fair trial, which is load-bearing for the criminal justice system as a whole. Saying the restrictions had a second-order effect on public understanding is not saying they should not have existed. It is saying that in this particular case the usual trade-off ran in a direction worth noticing: the restrictions kept the UK public from the most substantial public critique of the evidence, at a moment when a new trial was determining the same question the critique addressed.
What changed after the retrial ended
The retrial concluded with a conviction on 2 July 2024. Restrictions lapsed. UK readers could then access the Aviv piece, the Private Eye coverage, and the full published record of independent expert criticism. The Shoo Lee Panel press conference followed in February 2025. David Davis’s Commons adjournment debate in November 2024 brought the critiques onto the parliamentary record. By summer 2025 the UK public had access to roughly the same evidence as the international public.
The intervening period — roughly May 2024 to February 2025 — is the window in which UK public opinion was formed without the dissenting evidence fully available. Opinion is sticky. The fact that the evidence is now available does not automatically mean the public reading of the case has caught up with the expert reading of it. That is part of why this site, and the wider network of sites it aggregates from, exists.