Nurse Lucy Letby will spend the rest of her life behind bars with no chance of release. She has been found guilty of murdering seven newborns, injecting them with air or insulin or overfeeding them with milk.
British nurse Lucy Letby was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of release on Monday for killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill another six.
Letby, who is considered the country's most prolific serial child killer in modern times, committed her crimes at the neonatal unit of Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England over 13 months from 2015.
The 33-year-old convict killed five baby boys and two baby girls. She would inject the newborns with insulin or air, or force-feed them milk.
The prosecution said Letby mostly used night shifts to attack her prematurely born victims. Letby was removed from the neonatal unit and given clerical duties after the June 2016 deaths of two of a set of triplets. She was first arrested two years later and only charged and placed in custody on her third arrest in late 2020.
The jury first deemed her guilty earlier in August of seven counts of murder and seven of attempted murder.
Jurors could not agree on whether she had attempted to kill six. She was acquitted of two other attempted murder charges.
On Monday, Letby refused to leave the cells to hear her sentence being handed down. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said it was "cowardly that people who commit such horrendous crimes do not face their victims."
"This was a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children," said the judge, James Goss.
Goss stressed Letby's actions exhibited a "deep malevolence bordering on sadism," adding that she has "no remorse."
"There are no mitigating factors," he said. "You will spend the rest of your life in prison."
Whole-life prison sentences are very rare in Britain. Only three women have received them before.
