UK court sentences nurse to whole-life imprisonment for killing seven babies
By Tunde Karounwi
A court in the United Kingdom has sentenced Lucy Letby, a serial child killer, to whole-life imprisonment.
According to BBC, the 33-year-old was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six other infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
Letby was said to have deliberately injected the babies with air, force fed others milk and poisoned two of the infants with insulin.
The murders and attempted killings took place between June 2015 and June 2016, when Letby was a nurse in the neonatal ward of the Countess of Chester hospital in northwestern England.
She was tasked with caring for premature babies.
Reading the sentence on Monday, Justice Goss, the judge, said the “cruelty and calculation” of Letby’s actions were “truly horrific”.
“You acted in a way that was completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies and in gross breach of the trust that all citizens place in those who work in the medical and caring professions,” he said.
“There was a malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions.
“During the course of this trial, you have coldly denied any responsibility for your wrongdoing. You have no remorse. There are no mitigating factors.”
Letby refused to appear in court for her sentencing hearing.
WHAT IS A WHOLE-LIFE SENTENCE?
The whole-life sentence, which is reserved for the country’s most heinous offenses, means she will spend the rest of her life in prison.
A whole-life sentence is different from a regular life sentence.
When a judge passes a life sentence, they must specify the minimum term an offender must spend in prison before becoming eligible to apply for parole.
But when an offender is given a whole-life sentence, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison, with no minimum term and no chance of early release.
Her conviction also makes her the UK’s most prolific child serial killer in modern times.
The mother of a baby boy killed by the nurse said she was “horrified that someone so evil exists”.
The mother of one of the other babies had also told the court that knowing her son’s murderer was watching over them was like “something out of a horror story”.
