Robert Goudie@rob_goudie
So - who said what, and when - to the best of my knowledge, and subject to correction:
▪ 17 February 2016: Baby K incident.
▪ 3–4 May 2017: the email chain in question, with Dr Jayaram’s reply sent on 4 May 2017 at 13:23.
▪ 18 September 2017: an Inquiry opening transcript refers to Dr Jayaram’s police statement of that date about the 17 February 2016 event.
▪ 17 April 2018: In a witness statement of this date, Dr Jayaram wrote that Letby had not called him in. This statement was reported in Private Eye (issue 1647, 18 April 2025). The Thirlwall Inquiry (opening transcript) also refers to a police statement dated 17 April 2018.
▪ 10 October 2022: the first trial jury were sworn.
▪ End November 2023 / December 2023 / January 2024: one possible route by which Trust-held material reached the Thirlwall Inquiry; the Trust says material received from Facere Melius at the end of November 2023 was reviewed and disclosed to the Inquiry on various dates in December 2023 and January 2024.
▪ 11 March 2024: the exhibits to the Trust’s three corporate Rule 9 statements were provided to the Inquiry.
▪ 15, 18 and 19 March 2024: further documentation was provided in response to an Inquiry request of 12 March 2024.
▪ 22 March 2024: consultants’ group-chat material for the relevant period was provided to the Inquiry.
▪ 3 May 2024: in a second possible pre-retrial route, the Trust says remaining relevant Trust documents processed from the Epiq/Facere Melius material were provided to the Inquiry on that date.
▪ 10 June 2024: Baby K retrial begins.
▪ 19 June 2024: Dr Jayaram gives evidence at the retrial.
▪ 24 October 2024: the Court of Appeal application judgment says there was "an inconsistency between his evidence and the contemporaneous record."
▪ 13 November 2024: Dr Jayaram appears before the Thirlwall Inquiry.
So when did awareness of Dr Jayaram's email of 4 May 2017 become operative in practice?
The Trust’s disclosure chronology suggests a possibility material of this kind was already within the Inquiry’s hands before Letby’s second trial began on 10 June 2024.
Granted, the public record does not prove that this specific email had been identified and read by then.
But the Court of Appeal’s later reference to an inconsistency with contemporaneous records is at least suggestive that either this or an issue of similar importance had gained visibility at some level and was now worthy of judicial comment.
If so, one would have expected a measure of elevated scrutiny of the underlying documents before Dr Jayaram’s appearance before the Inquiry on 13 November 2024.
At the very least, this appears capable of being argued as constituting fresh evidence – warranting renewed scrutiny in a case where Dr Jayaram's testimony played such a pivotal role.
The Court of Appeal has already flagged an inconsistency with the contemporaneous record: that fact, combined with the potential pre-retrial availability of this material, supplies the CCRC with the sort of properly arguable point of the unsafety it exists to examine – warranting referral and thus renewed judicial scrutiny of the entire case.
The bottom line - if the email Dr Jayaram sent to many of his colleagues in May 2017 is, in fact, an accurate rendering of what happened in respect of Baby K, a jury convicted on the basis of its opposite.
#LucyLetby ▪
