Why his position matters
Rob Rinder is not a campaigner. He is a working criminal-trial barrister whose day job is arguing criminal cases in front of juries. When a practising criminal barrister with his trial-level experience publicly says the evidence in a conviction gives him specific concern, that is a different class of statement from a newspaper opinion piece.
His professional background means he reads the case the way a criminal-law insider would. His points of concern, as set out in his 2024 television and column interventions, track closely with the points the Shoo Lee Panel and Prof. Richard Gill have made independently:
- The statistical shift-rota chart is the kind of evidence which criminal law knows, from the Sally Clark case, to handle with great care; the methodology of selection is the core issue.
- The weight-bearing expert evidence was the product of a single approach to causation that independent senior neonatologists now say they do not recognise as sound methodology.
- The notes do not, on the face of the document, read as a forensic confession. A working barrister would not normally invite a jury to treat them as one without much more.
- The separate, later investigation of Trust executives on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter is, in his professional view, a significant signal. The same police force that built the case against Letby is now investigating the Trust for the same deaths.
Distinguishing “concern” from “innocence”
Rinder has been careful to say that he is not making a determinative claim that Letby is innocent. His public position is that the safety of the convictions is a legitimate and serious question; that the CCRC is the right body to examine it; and that public confidence in the criminal justice system requires that the post-conviction evidence is given an adequate hearing.
This is the same distinction we hold to across this site. See our editorial standards.
Why this is different from most “campaigner” commentary
Campaign-style coverage of miscarriage-of-justice cases often gets discounted by the press as partisan. Rinder’s interventions carry different weight because:
- He is a senior barrister in active practice. He has nothing to gain and professional reputation to lose from speaking in favour of a convicted murderer.
- He shares a legal-profession vocabulary with Sir David Davis MP’s November 2024 Commons speech and the April 2025 Bar Council letter. This is not three campaigners saying the same thing. It is three independent voices inside the legal profession converging on a single conclusion: the CCRC must take this seriously.
- His audience is the general public. Statements from Prof. Shoo Lee and Prof. Richard Gill carry more technical weight; Rinder’s public reach translates that into public understanding.