Police interview consistency — three arrests, consistent denials, no admission
Prosecution claim
The Crown's case at trial did not need an admission from Lucy Letby in police interview — it relied on the Evans causation opinion, the shift-rota chart, the Post-it notes and the Facebook searches. The absence of an interview admission was not specifically addressed as a material evidential feature.
Counter-evidence
Lucy Letby was interviewed under caution by Cheshire Police on three separate occasions between July 2018 and November 2020. Across all three, over more than two years, she consistently denied the allegations, offered clinical-context explanations for each event put to her, and made no admissions. She did not exercise her right to silence. Her accounts were locked in, in detail, from the first interview and did not change. This consistency is inconsistent with the 'confession' reading of the Post-it notes and consistent with the self-blame-under-sustained-accusation reading the clinical-psychology expert reports have since developed. In the Allitt case (1991), colleagues gave direct observational evidence of suspicious behaviour on the ward; here, the Crown never had the defendant's own words in any admission.
A defendant who gives three consistent denials under PACE-compliant interview across two and a half years, followed by a consistent denial at trial, is behaving as a consistent-denier does. The 'confession' reading of the private Post-it notes cannot be reconciled with that public record.
What the jury heard
The jury heard portions of the police interviews but was not systematically walked through the overall consistency of Letby's denials across three separate interviews, two and a half years, and three different arrest contexts.
What the Panel says
The Panel's remit is medical, not procedural, but its finding that medical evidence of deliberate harm is absent is consistent with, not contradicted by, the defendant's consistent denial across all three police interviews.
What independent experts add
- Letby was interviewed on 3 July 2018 (first arrest), in June 2019 (second arrest), and in November 2020 (third arrest + charge).
- Across all three interviews she denied the allegations and offered clinical-context explanations.
- She did not use the right to silence available under PACE.
- Her 2022–2023 trial testimony was consistent with her 2018–2020 interview accounts.
- The Crown did not adduce any material inconsistency between interview and trial accounts.
- The Allitt case, to which Hummingbird was framed by analogy, did include colleague eyewitness observational evidence; the Letby case does not.
- Private self-blame notes written at home, without audience, are not the same evidential class as an interview admission.