Suspicious Timing...

I later heard from his campaign team that Bamber had not received the letter because HMP Wakefield had banned him from receiving mail and email from journalists.

However, the campaign team said he was not allowed to email a response saying how much he liked the tree because he had also been banned from sending letters and emails to journalists. The campaign group says he is now banned from all forms of correspondence with the media.

Bamber has been writing to journalists since he was jailed in 1985. This is how we have learned about many of the inconsistencies, errors and failings in the initial investigation that make many of us believe his conviction is unsafe at the very least. It’s also how we’ve learned about crucial evidence that has been destroyed in the intervening years. So why would HMP Wakefield stop him now?

Because they can - the Labour Party troubles are good cover after all. 

It’s hard to believe that it is unconnected to the coverage his case has received over the past couple of years.

Yes, it is.  

This month the Sun ran an interview with Michael O’Brien, one of three men wrongly convicted of the 1987 killing of Cardiff newsagent Phillip Saunders, who spent time in jail with Bamber and is convinced he is innocent. O’Brien became a seminal figure in ensuring that prisoners who claimed they were wrongfully convicted had access to the media to make their case. A number of high-profile convictions have been overturned at the court of appeal in recent years. In 2023, Andrew Malkinson was cleared after spending 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. In 2025, Peter Sullivan had his murder conviction quashed after spending 38 years in prison, which is believed to be the UK’s longest wrongful imprisonment. Not surprisingly, these wrongful convictions have led journalists to focus on other potential miscarriages of justice.

When you’re digging for gold and find some, naturally you keep digging! 

The most high profile of these cases are Bamber and Lucy Letby, who was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others. If either of these convictions were to be overturned, it would cast a huge shadow over whether the British justice system is fit for purpose.

There already is a huge shadow over it. It was cast by Michael O’Brien.  

Without giving the Guardian a specific explanation for the decision in Bamber’s case, the Prison Service said it does not issue blanket bans and cited “the need to protect victims from serious distress and maintain confidence in the justice system” as the basis for restrictions on communication. But the Simms and O’Brien ruling states that limitations on communications that are considered “necessary” and “proportionate” to protect the rights of others, including victims, must be justified individually. In Bamber’s case we have seen no such justification.

And you will not see any. Because there isn’t one they could admit to. 

There Are Too Many Errors And Deliberate Concealing Of Evidence By Essex Police ....

 ...for the State to ever allow the conviction to be overturned:

In the millions of pages disclosed to Jeremy Bamber over the decades, in his bid to prove his innocence of one of the 20th century’s most notorious crimes, PC Nick Milbank is barely mentioned. But this week, new evidence emerged that the late police officer held an essential clue to what happened on the night of the massacre at Whitehouse Farm on 7 August 1985.

I've long believed not so much in Bamber's innocence, but in the fact that this conviction was based on such a fatally flawed investigation by the hopelessly institutionally incompetent Essex Police that the State will never permit it to be exposed.

Writing from Wakefield Prison, Jeremy Bamber says: “We asked that the CCRC appoint an independent investigator to go and speak to Mr Milbank about what he’d told the New Yorker magazine. The CCRC refused our request, thereby losing the opportunity to hear Mr Milbank’s evidence. “Not only do I have a rock solid alibi now, but proof that Essex police covered up Milbank’s evidence by faking a witness statement to mislead the courts. The fact that Mr Milbank has sadly died quite recently has further compounded the failures of the CCRC and Essex police.” Well, he would have a rock solid alibi if Essex police had not taken that final statement from Milbank. And now Milbank is no longer here to say which version is true. Bamber believes charges for perverting the course of justice should be brought in relation to the 2002 statement. “The CCRC has no choice but to refer my case to the court of appeal.” The Metropolitan police, which carried out Operation Stokenchurch, declined to comment.

Of course they did. If they truly carried out a full and proper investigation, they know what Essex Police did and did not doon that night, and they cannot be trusted to bring it to light.  

Bamber believes that Essex police should have an audio record of the 999 call. “Where is the audio recording of that telephone call now?” he writes. “One wonders where it might be.”

Who believes Essex Police still has it, more like... 

Never Mind The Law And Reason, Feel The Emotion!

A mother whose baby boy Lucy Letby tried to murder hit back last night at the ‘upsetting’ and ‘disrespectful’ attempts to free her.

We've been here before, Reader.... 

The woman spoke out after a panel of experts claimed the former neo-natal nurse’s convictions were ‘one of the major injustices of modern times’. Letby’s new legal team yesterday unveiled a report which claimed all of the 14 babies murdered or harmed by her were victims of bad medical care and died or collapsed because of natural causes.

Well, we can't have the state (in the form of the NHS) losing, can we? Wheel out the weeping mothers!

Retired Canadian medic Dr Shoo Lee, who presented the findings of 14 international experts at a two-hour press conference, claimed the panel understood the ‘stress and anguish’ of the families involved and insisted their aim was simply ‘to tell the truth’.

But the mother of a baby boy who Letby, 35, was convicted of attempting to murder described the press conference as a ‘publicity stunt’.

Just the sort of person that, as Longrider points out, shouldn't be asked for their opinion. 

‘We want to hit back,’ the parent, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said.

‘Every aspect of what they are doing is so disrespectful, it is very upsetting.

‘They said the parents want to know the truth, but we’ve had the truth.

Well, you've had a verdict. You should know full well that it isn't always the same as the truth. 

'We believe in the British justice system, we believe the jury made the right decision.

I expect the others in that link did too...until they didn't.  

'We already have the truth and this panel of so-called experts don’t speak for us.’

'So-called' experts? I don't think there's any doubt about their qualifications, is there? 

The mother claimed she had previously emailed Tory MP David Davis, who led the press conference, to complain about his involvement but he had ‘ignored her’. 

Sound decision from Davis, I feel. 

“…of no more impact or relevance than for example if we had both had an interest in crown green bowling or church bell ringing”

A judge has denied he was asked to give legal advice to hospital bosses over concerns about nurse Lucy Letby because he is a Freemason, a public inquiry has heard. The Thirlwall inquiry into events surrounding the crimes of Letby heard that both Judge Simon Medland KC and the Countess of Chester’s former director of corporate and legal services, Stephen Cross, are members of the organisation.

This case gets murkier and more likely to turn out to have been a huge miscarriage of justice every week, doesn't it? 

Earlier this week, the inquiry heard of “rumours and hearsay” about a Freemason connection of a “number of high-ranking people in the hospital and elsewhere”. Dr Stephen Brearey, the neonatal unit clinical lead, said he understood Cross had risen “quite quickly” from a junior position, and queried whether the hospital had followed any processes “in terms of fit and proper candidates for executive roles” . He said he heard Cross had been demoted from a senior rank in the police force to a constable.

Blimey!  

Dr Brearey said people at the hospital had the impression there might be “deals going on behind the scenes”.

Gosh! You wouldn't expect that at a hospital, of all places, eh? *inserts tongue firmly back in cheek* 

It Appears We Do Have A Time Machine After All

George Gascón, the Los Angeles county district attorney, has recommended that the Menéndez brothers be resentenced for the 1989 killings of their parents, a step that is expected to lead to their release. Gascón said during a news conference on Thursday that the pair should be resentenced, and that life without the possibility of parole be removed, after the office reviewed new evidence in the case. They will be eligible for parole immediately because of their ages at the time of the murder, he said.

We can go back in time and re-sentence someone to what they should have been sentenced to, if only public sympathy they have now had been present at the time! 

The development is a major victory to the brothers and their supporters who said that they killed their parents in self-defense after years of sexual, physical and psychological abuse by their father. Prosecutors had argued that they were driven by greed and a desire to inherit a multimillion-dollar fortune.

But now there's a hit Netflix series, that modern addition to the legal process, changes have to be made. 

Gascón said he believed the brothers’ account of abuse.

“I do believe the brothers were subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home, and molestation,” he said.

“They have been in prison for nearly 35 years. I believe that they have paid their debt to society.”

Whatever happened to 'It doesn't matter what I believe, what matters is what I can prove'..? Is the US legal profession beholden to Netflix ratings now?

You May Have To Eat Those Words, Thirwell

When the public inquiry into the crimes of the former nurse Lucy Letby opened in Liverpool last month its chair, Lady Justice Thirlwall, dismissed concerns about the safety of the convictions as “noise”. The judge cautioned that questions being raised were increasing the distress of parents whose children had died or been harmed.

Isn't the point of any enquiry to ask questions, though? Otherwise, why are you even holding it? 

Letby was found guilty across two trials of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others at the Countess of Chester hospital (COCH) in 2015 and 2016. Thirlwall pointed out that in May this year, the court of appeal refused Letby permission to appeal, and she said it was not the role of her inquiry to review the convictions.

It's not. She got that right, but you cannot have an enquiry that closes off a line of questioning because of hurty feels, even in 2024. 

Yet questions about the case, and the number of experts raising them, have continued to mount. Letby is being represented by a new barrister, Mark McDonald, and a number of specialists including leading neonatologists – doctors who specialise in treating premature babies – are voluntarily working with him on an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

This should surely be something the enquiry needs to have an eye on, in case it becomes relevant.  

The Guardian has now learned that from an early stage, Cheshire police recognised the case involved statistics – and they had initially engaged Hutton. According to emails seen by the Guardian, in April 2018 an officer on the investigation approached Hutton, who has extensive experience in medical research. Without naming Letby, he asked Hutton whether she could put a figure on how likely it was to be just a coincidence for one member of staff to be on duty “during all the deaths/collapses” in the neonatal unit, “ie 1 in a million etc”. She informed the police that a proper statistical inquiry would not concentrate on one member of staff from the outset, but instead required full research into all possible explanations for any increase in babies collapsing including their medical conditions and prematurity, as well as the performance of the unit. Reviews commissioned by the hospital had found medical explanations for nearly all of the deaths, criticised the standard of care on the unit and noted a lack of senior doctors.

Then how did the police switch to 'There's been a muuuurderrr!' mode? 

Cheshire police then signed a consultancy agreement with Hutton and agreed fees, the documents suggest. The force did not proceed to commission Hutton’s analysis at that time, but contacted her again in 2021 after Letby had been charged. A video call was arranged, but an officer later cancelled the call. “We have had a further meeting this afternoon where we have informed the prosecutors that we were looking at the validity of statistical evidence again in the case,” he wrote in an email. “The prosecutor does not agree with our line of inquiry and has instructed us not to pursue this avenue, any further, at present.”

Aha! Ominously ticking parcel firmly in the CPS's grasp now!   

Neither the initial engagement with Hutton nor the CPS instruction to the police to drop their line of inquiry into the “validity of the statistical evidence in the case” were disclosed to Letby’s defence team, the Guardian understands.

Ouch! That should cost them, shouldn't it? Or are we ignoring disclosure breaches now? 

Fallout...

Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has called for the resignation of Helen Pitcher, chairman of the CCRC, over the case of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail for a rape he did not commit. An investigation into the CCRC's role by Chris Henley KC found it had missed several opportunities to refer the case to appeal. Malkinson, who was released only as a result of forensic tests by campaigners, said on proving his innocence: 'I'm not the only one.'

And so, as a result of the peculiar drive to demand a retrial on behalf of Lucy Letby, one of those others - which I've long believed was indeed deserving of a referral - is getting a turn in the spotlight: 

The New Yorker, which has also raised questions about the safety of nurse Lucy Letby's conviction for murdering seven babies, has been investigating the Bamber case since last October. It has focused on claims that Essex Police lied about evidence, altered witness statements, passed evidence to a third party, withheld and concealed evidence and tampered with a crime scene after the murders at the family's farm near Maldon, Essex.

Which to anyone who has read anything about the case isn't new evidence, it's just evidence that's been ignored up until now, to protect the reputation of the Essex Police... 

The police argued that Bamber must have carried out the murders because the gun had been fitted with a silencer, which made it too long for her to be physically able to shoot herself, but ballistics experts have subsequently cast doubt on whether the rifle was fitted with a silencer. Police also said if she had gone on a rampage her feet would have been covered in blood and that this was not the case. But a picture of her feet obtained by Bamber's lawyers shows bloodstains.

Bamber's lawyers also unearthed a police phone log of a call on the night of the killings from Nevill. The log, entitled 'daughter gone berserk', noted Mr Bamber had said his daughter had stolen one of his guns and gone 'berserk'. A bloodstained Bible, found by Sheila's side and open at pages containing Psalms 51-55 – on the struggle between good and evil – was never forensically examined or produced at trial, despite requests from Bamber's solicitor.

There surely must be enough to finally get the case reopened.  

A spokesman for Bamber's campaign said the New Yorker investigation highlighted a key issue raised in the report on CCRC failings in the Malkinson case – 'a refusal to carry out any investigations into submissions that are presented to them'. They added: 'The CCRC have had Jeremy Bamber's latest submissions since March 2021 and… they have not investigated any of the key exculpatory issues they contain, which demonstrate Jeremy Bamber's innocence.'

Here's hoping. And after this, Michael Stone.