Context
Benjamin Myers KC delivered his defence opening at Manchester Crown Court in October 2022, at the start of what became the longest criminal trial in English history. The opening laid out the defence framework for what would, across ten months, unfold into a million-word evidential record. This expanded summary walks through the opening in the order Myers put it to the jury.
The clinical-context opening
Myers began by framing the setting. The Countess of Chester was a Level 2 unit. It was caring, in 2015 and 2016, for infants whose acuity exceeded its design envelope. It was short of consultant and middle-grade medical staff. It was experiencing a superbug outbreak and documented infrastructure failures. The cluster of deaths the Crown would attribute to Letby was, in context, a signal of a unit in strain.
This framing is what the September 2024 Guardian investigation and the Thirlwall Inquiry evidence have since documented in detail. At the time Myers made it, the evidential back-up was thinner than it has since become. But the frame was correct.
The medical-evidence framework
Myers told the jury that the medical evidence of deliberate harm was, on a proper clinical reading, absent. Each alleged mechanism — air embolism, insulin administration, air in stomach — rested on expert interpretation that a different panel of specialists could read differently. The defence’s position was that a different panel, applying modern differential-diagnosis methodology, would read each case as consistent with natural causes or sub-optimal clinical care.
This is the reading the Shoo Lee Panel reached in February 2025. The February 2025 finding is effectively the formal scientific confirmation of what Myers told the jury in October 2022.
The statistical framework
Myers addressed the shift-rota chart head-on. The chart was, he told the jury, methodologically unsound: 25 events were selected partly because Letby was on shift, and presenting her shift attendance against that selected set generated a visual match that was an artefact of the selection rather than a fact about the world.
This is the same Texas sharpshooter critique Prof. Richard Gill has since developed in detail and the Royal Statistical Society’s post-Sally-Clark framework had explicitly warned against. At the time of Myers’s opening, no statistician gave evidence for the defence; the point was made at argument level.
The notes framework
Myers addressed the handwritten Post-it notes and the handover sheets. The notes, he said, were self-blame under stress by a nurse being blamed for unexplained deaths — a recognised pattern, not a forensic confession. The handover sheets were retained because NHS confidentiality training told nurses not to dispose of them in ordinary ward bins. Neither was, on a careful reading, evidence of a guilty state of mind.
The digital-evidence framework
Myers anticipated the Facebook and search-history evidence. Both, he said, were curated subsets of years of routine digital activity. A young nurse actively using social media, and actively looking up clinical information relating to her patients, would generate exactly this kind of record. The specific subset highlighted as incriminating was a selection from a much larger denominator that was not shown to the jury.
Why this opening is significant in retrospect
Every major theme the post-conviction expert evidence has developed was, at opening, put to the 2022 jury by Benjamin Myers KC. The difference between then and now is the depth and volume of independent expert reinforcement. The Panel, the Joint Insulin Report, the statistical reports of Gill and Green, the paediatric-pathology re-readings all reinforce the framework Myers set out. They do not displace it.
This matters for how the CCRC should read the case. It is not that the defence got it wrong at trial. It is that the defence got it right but did not, at that time, have the volume of independent specialist back-up to move the jury across the threshold.
Read alongside
Defence opening — short summary, Defence closing speech, Benjamin Myers KC — biography, Where the evidence now stands.