Lucy Letby’s sentencing should be broadcast into her cell if she refuses to attend court, a former justice secretary has said, as the government says it is still committed to forcing criminals to face judgment in person.
Robert Buckland, a senior Conservative, said the court currently had no power to compel Letby to attend but playing the sentence into her cell could ensure she had “nowhere to hide” from justice.
Letby, 33, was convicted of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six more on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital between 2015 and 2016. She was not present for the final verdicts on Friday after refusing to enter the dock at Manchester crown court.
Ministers have repeatedly promised to ensure that those convicted of crimes are compelled to attend court, or face penalties if they refuse.
But Rishi Sunak earlier this year refused to commit to a timescale on when the legislation would be brought forward.
Buckland told GB News that the government was right to act and suggested the victims bill could be amended to bring in changes rather than waiting for a new piece of legislation in the king’s speech in November.
“My suggestion would be to make sure that there was a live link beamed into the cell of the sound and/or send pictures to ensure that Letby has nowhere to hide and in fact has to listen to what the judge is saying about the case,” he said.
“Most importantly, she needs to hear the victim’s personal statements as impact statements that will really bring home, I think, to the wider world, the appalling devastating impact the loss of these innocent children, these innocent babies, has had upon dozens of families.”
Also speaking on GB News, Nick Gibb, an education minister, said Letby and all other convicted criminals should be in court for their sentencing. “We are looking to change the law when the parliamentary time permits, because I think that’s the view of everyone in government and the view of the country,” he said.
He also insisted that the families of victims would have a role in “shaping” the public inquiry, after the government faced criticism for failing to put it on a statutory footing, meaning it does not have the power to compel witnesses.
“We’ll be announcing a chair of that inquiry very soon and the terms of reference, we don’t know yet what the terms of reference will be,” he said. “What I can assure you is that they will look at all aspects of this, right across the health service so that we can understand what happened and learn lessons and absolutely prevent anything like this from happening again.
“We want parents to be involved in shaping this inquiry, so the government will be talking to the parents and the representatives to make sure that the inquiry does cover all the aspects of the concerns that they have and indeed the concerns the whole country has, so we can make sure that we learned all the lessons that need to be learned.”
In the past, some inquiries have been converted into judge-led statutory public inquiries after public pressure.
Lawyers representing the families of some of the babies attacked by Letby have said that a non-statutory public inquiry is “inadequate”.
Slater and Gordon, which is representing two of the families involved, said that a non-statutory inquiry was “not good enough”.
Richard Scorer, the head of abuse law and public inquiries, and Yvonne Agnew, the head of the firm’s Cardiff clinical negligence department, said: “As a non-statutory inquiry, it does not have the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence or production of documents and must rely on the goodwill of those involved to share their testimony.
“This is not good enough. The failings here are very serious and an inquiry needs to have a statutory basis to have real teeth.”
