London.- The British nurse Lucy Letby, 33, has been sentenced this Monday by an English court to life imprisonment for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of another six in a hospital in Chester (northwest England) between 2015 and 2016.
Judge James Goss, of the Manchester Crown Court (northern English), announced the sentence after mentioning each of the charges against the nurse, of whom he said “there was premeditation, calculation and cunning” in his actions.
According to the evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office during the trial, Letby killed the newborns by injecting them with air with an intravenous syringe while working at the Countess Hospital in the city of Chester.
The woman refused to appear in court today to hear the accounts of the children’s parents and the magistrate’s ruling, after she was found guilty of the murders on Friday.
In a message addressed directly to the nurse, the judge said: “He is now 33 years old… I have to determine if the severity of the offenses is high enough that he should not do a minimum period. They are crimes of a very exceptional gravity.”
“This was a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder involving the youngest and most vulnerable children,” he added.
“There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism… you have no remorse… no mitigating factors,” he added.
“I sentence you to prison for life. I direct that the early release provisions be waived. An order of life imprisonment for each crime and you will spend the rest of your life in prison, “concluded the judge when announcing the sentence.
Lety had been suspected of the crimes since 2018, when she was first arrested, but was arrested again two years later and charged by the police after receiving authorization from the Prosecutor’s Office about the murders that occurred in Chester.
The woman, whose case shocked the UK, is considered the most prolific child murderer in the country’s history.
The nurse was also found guilty of attempting to murder six other babies by methods that included, in addition to injecting air, insulin poisoning or the administration of excessive amounts of food.
The jury in the case took more than 110 hours to reach a guilty verdict last Friday.
The murders occurred between June 2015 and June 2016, when there were several unexplained deaths of newborns at the Countess of Chester hospital.
Letby worked as a trainee student at the public center for three years, before finishing her studies at the local university and specializing as a children’s nurse.
Since then, the convicted woman has worked in the neonatal unit, specializing in babies who require different levels of care.
Each year, this unit cares for about 400 babies, but since the end of July 2016 it stopped admitting children born before 32 weeks of gestation, since which time no more deaths have been recorded.
