Cheshire Police are an incompetent bunch of useless bastards

The Letby case is massively complicated due to the medical information, statistics and other issues involved, that I highly doubt either the judge or jury had the intellect to process the information. However intelligent these judges are, they're not going to possess the necessary level of scientific or medical knowledge to deal with a case like this.

This jury was pretty much instructed to misuse statistics - i.e. the judge instructed them that if they found Letby guilty on some charges, they could consider her more likely to be guilty on other charges, without knowing how the crime had been committed, even though the question of whether a crime of committed was at that stage in dispute.

I wouldn't worry about juries so much as judges ...

I have long thought that juries can't be trusted to interpret statistical evidence. Look at the thread on the Civil Service exam question. If that's the standard of basic arithmetic in the general population then statistics hasn't got a hope.

Thank you, I'll check that out.

This case has really got under my skin, and I can't help but think "there but the grace of God go I". It would have been so easy to wave "reports" around in court and paint me as a monster, and I'm thankful, if a little bemused, that it didn't go that way.

One thing is certain - cases with dubious medical evidence at their core should not become tabloid fodder, and the concept of reasonable doubt needs a serious re-evaluation. The "balance of probabilities" should never be the basis of criminal proceedings. And in fact, the probability that Lucy Letby was a serial killer is so much less likely given all the other issues on the ward, such as the paucity of consultant rounds, that it makes a mockery of the whole concept.

There is a short thread on the documentary in Chat too, in case you haven't seen it:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5385519-lucy-letby-programme-on-itv-now?reply=146180862

I thought of you and the story you have shared here when Neena Modi said how troubled she was that a legal procedure could be so flawed.

I thought it was really excellent. Quick, clear, unsentimental, and it didn't patronize viewers with long pauses, creepy music etc.

Lucy Mangam has written a great review of it in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/aug/03/lucy-letby-beyond-reasonable-doubt-review-documentary-itv1-itvx.

I thought Helen Shannon, Neena Modi and Jane Hutton were extremely impressive.

Any thoughts on the ITV documentary last night?

I thought it gave a good clear explanation of how we are where we are.

Very much so - there's a record in Thirlwall docs of them discussing how to regain access with the transport team.

Coffey and Moritz, who invented that story with selective quotations from Letby's police interview, are very deferential towards the consultants.

From what I gather, Bohins complaints include being accused of mis-using safeguarding and suspicions of MSBP / FII when parents had asked for second opinions or disagreed with her opinions regarding their children's diagnoses.

I'm really beginning to think that some in the medical profession are really cheesed off that a neat psychological catch all (blame the "deranged" parents - or nurse - if we can't figure out the answer) isn't just being accepted these days since Meadows and Southall fell from grace. I think plenty would like to see it resurrected because once that suspicion or label is thrown around, looking for other answers tends to grind to a halt (ask me how I know), and clinical mismanagement and malpractice get buried.

I've always wondered why no psychologists or psychiatrists gave evidence at Lucy's trial. Were reports done but not submitted because they showed nothing useful to the prosecution?

Dr Sandie Bohin, is being sued by the parents of eight babies she’d treated, accusing her of poor / negligent care.

Oof! I didn't know that.

Really? Not one doubt whatsoever? Can I ask what you base that certainty on?

Have you watched the Panorama documentary (incomplete as that was)? Or read the many articles in Private Eye or the post-trial coverage in almost all of the Broadsheets?

What makes you put so much faith in the evidence of an ‘expert’ (Evans) who was criticised by the judge in a previous trial he’d participated in? The judge in that case was so concerned that he wrote to Letby’s trial judge saying Evans shouldn’t be used as an expert witness! And the other main prosecution witness, Dr Sandie Bohin, is being sued by the parents of eight babies she’d treated, accusing her of poor / negligent care.

Same

It's a corrupt way of thinking. His duty is to the court, not to one side or the other.

I don’t. I am in no doubt she did
it.

@autocorrupt Evans was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds. It can be very lucrative being an expert witness!

He's on record as saying he's only "lost" one case out of the many he's been EW for, which I think is an odd way of thinking.

And I do get people who say that anyone who thinks she may be innocent are “armchair detectives”. I can even understand the sniggering and saying how can you know over a jury who sat through it all, etc.

My main issue though is a load of neonatal experts and statistical experts who have been given all the evidence don’t think she’s guilty. So do we believe world leading experts who are best placed to understand the evidence or 12 lay people? 12 lay people who appear to have been misdirected by a rather fired up retired ex paediatrician, who I believe was not a neonatal specialist?

Remember Evans approached the police and offered his services (odd). He was paid a very good wage for doing so, tens of thousands of pounds. He had set up his own medical-legal expert witness business and obviously had a vested interest in a guilty verdict. A guilty verdict was going to increase his standing as an expert witness and get him more work and money.

its also important that nobody needs to prove she’s innocent. The question is not is she innocent but is there enough evidence to say she’s guilty. That’s a big difference. And I would say there isn’t.

And in a room full of people, in three cases, with others working directly on the babies at the time in two of them.

The whole case is like some sort of dystopian experiment on how many people you can blind with pseudo-science

Yet at the time of their deaths on an individual basis nothing untoward was suspected. They were given non suspicious causes of death.

To backtrack on that seems crazy. Especially in view of the fact there is no new evidence concerning their causes of death. The babies had been buried/cremated. Evan’s theories on things like air via the NG tube don’t make sense to me (as a midwife who has worked in a neonatal unit). None of my former colleagues think she’s guilty. 🤷‍♀️. I get none of us have been to the trial but I for one read the newspaper journalists live bullet points most days, listened to the podcasts, read the court papers which were released about the medical evidence for each baby. There was something not great at that hospital but i don’t think it was criminal or down to one individual.

Injecting air into a NG tube can’t cause air embolism

And that’s leaving aside that it would be fiddly and difficult to do under most circumstances and particularly difficult to pull off unobserved.

Yet, in many of the proposed ‘murders,’ Letby would have had to have managed it in seconds and with nobody seeing her do it!

Yes, of course they do, but there’s no actual evidence that the babies who Evans said had died of air embolism had actually died of air embolism. The original pathologists did not suggest it, and Evans’s misinterpretation of Shoo Lee’s paper has been thoroughly debunked by the author.

Injecting air into a NG tube can’t cause air embolism.

I think some of the comments on this post point to a worrying (and, on past evidence, unwarranted) faith in the British justice system.

There are more than enough doubts about the way the prosecution of Letby was conducted to point to the need for (at least) a swift retrial. Unfortunately, nobody within the Govt or Justice system hierarchy has the slightest inclination to have a spotlight cast on prior convictions. Which is why the process is glacial.

And unless she can prove that the prosecution was malicious, she’ll end up with nothing to compensate for her loss of livelihood, pension, reputation or the eventual years she’ll have served in a high category prison.