May 2026: Thirlwall Inquiry report delayed to at least September 2026 · six-baby inquests relisted to 2027 · CCRC review active · Shoo Lee Panel: no medical evidence of deliberate harm.
A chart shown to the jury plotted 25 suspicious events against the nurses on duty for each. Letby was the only nurse present at all 25. The prosecution argued the improbability of this pattern, if she were innocent, was proof of her guilt.
The 25 events were selected in part because Letby was there. Collapses where she was not on shift were excluded from the chart. Statisticians including Prof. Richard Gill (Leiden, instrumental in the Lucia de Berk exoneration) and the Royal Statistical Society have characterised this as a textbook 'Texas sharpshooter' fallacy: painting the target around the bullet hole. triedbystats.com models the chart in detail — base rates of shift attendance alone mean that whoever works the most unsociable shifts will end up plotted against an unusual cluster of deteriorations, without any wrongdoing. When other nurses' attendance is plotted against the full set of collapses (including those excluded from the trial chart), the pattern dissolves.
"The chart shown to the jury is statistically meaningless. You cannot select the events because Letby was there and then use her presence as evidence of guilt." — Prof. Richard Gill
A rota-style grid of 25 events with every nurse's shifts shaded; Letby's row was the only one fully shaded. The Crown's opening invited the jury to infer from this single image that coincidence was impossible.
The Panel did not opine on statistics directly but referenced the Royal Statistical Society's published warnings that selection effects vitiate any inference from the chart. Its medical review concluded that every collapse was explicable without deliberate harm — which would itself dissolve the chart's premise.