British nurse who murdered seven babies sentenced to life in prison

MADRID, 21 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The British Justice has sentenced nurse Lucy Letby to life imprisonment this Monday, at the end of a process in which she had already been found guilty last week of the murder of seven babies and six other attempts at a hospital in the English town of Chester.

"He acted in a way absolutely contrary to human instinct", also breaking "the trust that all citizens place in medical and assistance professionals," Judge James Goss determined during the reading of the sentence.

Letby, 33, committed his crimes between June 2015 and June 2016, injecting babies with air, milk or insulin, among other products that would end up being "lethal" for them, as the Prosecutor's Office pointed out. The nurse, however, had denied any responsibility.

This absence of "remorse" has also caught the attention of the judge, who believes that "there are no mitigating factors" that could even make him propose an alternative sentence to life imprisonment. "There was a malice close to sadism in his actions," he determined, according to the BBC.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak, has dismissed as "cowardly" that Letby did not want to coincide in the courtroom with the families of the victims. The Minister of Justice, Alex Chalk, has also made this behavior ugly and has announced that the Government will try to change the law "so that criminals are obliged to attend sentencing hearings."

Some 70 people are serving a life sentence in the United Kingdom, which means that, except for humanitarian reasons, they will not be released from prison. Before Letby, only three other women had received this sentence, one of whom already died in 2002.

Letby was not removed from her post until the death of two triplets and another baby on three consecutive days. Initially, she was relegated to administrative work and appealed the transfer, thanks to which she should have returned to the neonatal unit in March 2017 if the hospital had not contacted the Police then.

Subsequent investigations led to a first arrest of the nurse in July 2018. In subsequent searches at her home, the agents located several notes in which she veiledly acknowledged criminal actions that, in the eyes of the Prosecutor's Office, served as written confession.

In addition to the seven murders and the six attempts for which she has been found guilty, during the trial her possible responsibility in other suspicious cases has also been examined, without the jury being able to reliably determine her guilt.