Context
In November 2025, Lord Sumption — former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and author of the 2019 Reith Lectures — made a sustained broadsheet intervention calling for the safety of the Letby convictions to be reviewed. The intervention was constitutionally unusual: former Supreme Court Justices typically avoid public commentary on specific contested convictions.
The substance of his position
Lord Sumption’s public position rests on three points:
- The body of independent expert evidence now in the public domain is materially different from what was before the jury in 2023. When such a shift occurs, the criminal-justice system has a mechanism designed to examine whether the conviction is still safe. That mechanism is the CCRC.
- The statistical arguments presented to the jury are of a type that the Royal Statistical Society’s post-Sally-Clark framework has explicitly warned against. That framework exists because previous miscarriages of justice proceeded on the same pattern of reasoning.
- Public confidence in the criminal-justice system is better served by transparent re-examination of a disputed conviction than by defence of a verdict against a tide of independent expert opinion. That is a system-stability position, not a campaigner’s position.
Why the intervention carries specific weight
Sumption was appointed to the Supreme Court directly from the Bar in 2012 — the first barrister in modern times to be elevated to the court without first holding a full-time judicial office. His professional default is careful, procedurally conservative, and cautious about second-guessing jury verdicts. When a judicial institutional insider of his standing publicly calls for a case to be re-examined, the call is signal, not noise.
What this does to the public conversation
Combined with Sir David Davis MP’s Commons adjournment debate (November 2024) and the Bar Council letter (April 2025), Sumption’s intervention closes a specific institutional circuit: senior Parliament, senior Bar, senior Judiciary all publicly saying the CCRC should look at this properly. That is an unusually wide legal- establishment coverage for a conviction-safety question.
Read alongside
Lord Sumption — biography, Davis Commons adjournment debate, Bar Council letter (Apr 2025), CCRC review explained.