Serial killer Lucy Letby has failed in a bid to challenge her convictions over the deaths of several babies in her care.
The former nurse, 34, was found guilty last August of the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of six others at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
The killing spree happened between 2015 and 2016, when Letby, from Hereford, was a staff nurse on the hospital’s neonatal unit.
Letby applied through her lawyers for permission to bring an appeal against her convictions at a two-and-a-half-day hearing last month.
She put forward four different grounds of appeal, each of which argued the trial judge wrongly refused applications that Letby made during the trial.
But at the Court of Appeal on Friday, Dame Victoria Sharp, the President of the King’s Bench Division, Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Lambert denied her permission to appeal.
Dame Victoria said: “Having heard her application, we have decided to refuse leave to appeal on all grounds and refuse all associated applications.
“A full judgment will be handed down in due course.”
Full details of Letby’s appeal bid cannot be reported at the moment for legal reasons.
A full ruling on the blocking of Letby’s chance of an appeal has not been made publicly available by the judges.
Dozens of member of the media as well as lawyers in the case were allowed to follow today’s ruling through a videolink, but the sound was not turned on until the final words of Dame Victoria’s ruling.
At Letby’s trial at Manchester crown court last year, the jury was unable to reach verdicts on six counts of attempted murder in relation to five children.
She is due to face a retrial in the same court on one charge of attempting tomurder a baby girl, known as Child K, in February 2016.
The retrial is set to start next month.
A court order prohibits reporting of the identities of the surviving and dead children who were the subject of the allegations.
