Will Lucy Letby spend the rest of her life in prison?
Letby will be sentenced on Monday at 10am at Manchester Crown Court- but she will not appear in the court room
Following a nine-month trial and over three weeks of deliberations, a jury found serial killer Lucy Letby guilty of murdering seven babies and the attempted murder of six more.
During the period of June 2015 and June 2016 at the Countess of Chester Hospital between, she deliberately poisoned babies with insulin, overfed them with milk and fatally injected some with air while working as a nurse in the neonatal unit.
Letby has been remanded in custody to be sentenced on Monday at Manchester Crown Court at 10am, but the court was told she has said she will not attend court and does not wish to follow the hearing via videolink from prison.
The reasons for her refusal to attend have not yet been disclosed by the judge. Members of the victims’ families will attend the hearing to give victim impact statements.
For such horrific crimes, Letby can only receive a mandatory life sentence and will likely spend the majority of her life behind bars, without the possibility of release, which can be applied in cases of a planned murder of two or more people.
However, there is still uncertainty about what her minimum tariff will be, which is the minimum amount of time she must spend in prison before she is eligible for release.
The starting point for the minimum time served in prison ranges from 15 to 30 years, depending on facts of the offence.
When deciding the sentence, the judge will take into account the aggravating factors as well as Letby’s level of premeditation, along with the fact that the victims were vulnerable newborns.
Letby’s occupation as a nurse at the time of the offences will also be taken into consideration as she abused her role as a public servant.
It is likely she will be placed in HMP Low Newton, a maximum security prison that is home to many of the deadliest female killers in recent history.
The jail, which was opened in 1965, has housed Britain’s youngest female murderer Sharon Carr, as well as Baby P’s mother Tracey Connelly. Dubbed ‘The Devil’s Daughter’, Carr murdered an 18-year-old woman after picking her out at random when she was just 12 years old.
The prison’s most infamous inmate was ‘House of Horrors’ killer Rosemary West, who sexually abused and murdered 10 women and children alongside her husband Fred West. She was eventually moved from HMP Low Newton in 2019, after another vicious killer, Joanna Dennehy, allegedly threatened to kill her.