Britain’s serial killer nurse gets life imprisonment

London: Lucy Letby, the British nurse convicted last week of killing seven newborns and trying to kill six others, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison without parole, the culmination of a yearslong case that has horrified Britain and led to questions over the management culture that allowed her crimes to continue for so long.

Judge James Goss handed Ms. Letby a “whole life order,” meaning she will spend the rest of her life in prison, a sentence reserved for the country’s worst offenses. She is only the fourth woman to have ever been handed the sentence.

The verdicts reached last week made Ms. Letby the most prolific serial killer of children in modern British history.

Judge Goss told the courtroom that Ms.Letby “acted completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies” and that her actions caused a majority of her victims to suffer “acute pain.”

“There was premeditation, calculation and cunning in your actions,” the judge said, later describing “a deep malevolence bordering on sadism” in Ms. Letby’s crimes.

The murders and attempted killings took place between June 2015 and June 2016, when Ms. Letby was a nurse in the neonatal ward of the Countess of Chester hospital in northwestern England, tasked with caring for premature and vulnerable babies. She refused to appear in court during her sentencing on Monday, but the court heard heart-wrenching testimony from the parents of babies who were killed.

After the first guilty verdicts were announced, Ms. Letby told her legal team that she would refuse to attend any further court proceedings, and she did not leave her jail cell on Monday, prompting politicians to debate ways to force convicted criminals to hear their sentencing.

The case has also led to calls for an investigation into the possible systemic failures that led to Ms. Letby’s continued employment as a nurse in the hospital, even after doctors raised concerns about her work, details of which were revealed during her trial and in its immediate aftermath.

The mother of a baby boy killed by Ms. Letby addressed the absent former nurse in court on Monday, saying, “There is no sentence that will ever compare to the excruciating agony that we have suffered as a consequence of your actions,” according to the BBC.