To think that Lucy Letby will get a new trial?

The defence did ask for details of how the collapses were selected but they were refused permission for this.

They were also not allowed to present information on any babies not in the indictment.

That would be nice, but unfortunately we have recent examples of our system failing to identify clear MOJs for a long time. The Post Office and Andrew Malkinson are the highest profile recent ones. So if there has been an MOJ in this case, and I'm not saying there was, no guarantee it will be addressed quickly.

If there is a chance she is innocent, Surely the system shouldn’t take years to come around.

Thanks for sharing that Private Eye, OP. I am a lawyer (tho not practising in crime) and I’m very interested in this case. I don’t know the thresholds that must be met before a retrial is granted. Having watched some documentaries about her case though, I’d be very shocked if the case plus subsequent debunking of evidence in her trial plus new evidence didn’t result in an acquittal.

I think the fact her defence team seems not to have adequately challenged that chart the prosecution relied on (showing her being on shift for every one of the baby death cases in respect of which she was being tried) is a facet of lawyers being shit at maths - so not immediately looking for the holes in the stats. The challenge for that was to ask for disclosure of the other baby deaths she wasn’t on shift for and wasn’t being blamed for. But nobody seems to have bothered doing that.

Either way, the standard of proof is high in criminal cases and I don’t think there’s any way a jury can be sure to the beyond reasonable doubt standard that she committed these baby murders.

Same. I could foresee problems getting expert witnesses for the prosecution given what this has turned into- pretty much the dictionary definition of going to cause you more trouble than it's worth. Multiple consultants from Chester have very good reason not to want to take the stand, so if it did get to court, wouldn't surprise me if we had some conveniently timed long term sick leave episodes.

And the case has sparked so much online discussion, the risk must be much higher than usual that it emerges during the trial one of the jurors was in an argument about it on social media at some point or whatever.

Wild that you’d actually post something straight out of AI as though it was the truth.

If you read what it regurgitated for you, you can see that it’s lacking in detail, equivocal and flabby, and doesn’t really support your view in any meaningful way.

Hint: “rare” is not synonymous with “impossible”. “Strongly indicate” does not mean “prove”.

To obtain good information you have to ask it much more structured questions, and then check the answers independently, in case of hallucination.

I don’t think you have very good scientific understanding at all.
Insulin testing and modelling is not within the skillset of endocrinologists, generally. They are physicians - often brilliant ones. They understand and treat disease, and make massive differences to people’s lives. They do not design laboratory equipment; they do not design drug assays, conduct them or research them.

Engineers on the other hand, biomedical mechanical engineers, do.

It’s quite bizarre that you persist with your ignorance despite having had this explained to you many times.

Moreover, you seem to think that all endocrinologists agree with Hindmarsh. This is demonstrably untrue.

Edited for quote fail. See next post.

This is what I'm wondering, I would imagine it would be very difficult for the CPS to bring the case again, Dewi Evans is retired, Sandie Bohin said she wouldn't take the stand again. There's also problems with Jayarams evidence etc.

Also it's the special division of the CPS who would be bringing the case, not the Chesire CPS and it's the special division that decided they weren't proceeding with the second set of cases that Chesire police put forward because there wasn't enough evidence.

Step father, brother, brother in law all barristers, grandfather judge. All say 100% she'll get a retrial.

Here, on the other hand, is an instance where the swipe data exposes serious problems with the prosecution account:

Original Trial (from Chester Standard)

The court is shown swipe data for Joanne Williams, who left the neonatal unit at 3.47am.

Mr Myers says it is very precise in coinciding with Dr Jayaram's recollection of waiting two-three minutes before the desaturation is timed at 3.50am, and asks if Dr Jayaram always has such a precise memory.

Dr Jayaram says "In this event, I did."
He adds: "I kept telling myself, don't be ridiculous [about my suspicions]. I looked at my watch - I didn't have a stopwatch."

Dr Jayaram says he has never seen the swipe data, nor had cause to look at any data.

The problem? This was the reversed data. That means the child's nurse didn't leave the unit at 3.47 (leaving the child with Lucy Letby). It means she returned at that time. In the retrial, accordingly, Dr Jayaram made no mention of the time of this event ...

There's an excellent account of his ever shifting story on this incident at
https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/comments/1irru42/who_what_when_why_how_the_evolution_of_dr_ravi/

That's getting a bit desperate now. I've explained why it wouldn't work in my previous post.

That failure with ChatGPT is a perfect example of why we can't say, we can only believe what has been tested in court. If the jury wasn't given relevant information, any conclusions involving that information haven't been tested in court.

That is very different from saying that she was on shift when the sample was taken, and if we do reach the stage of assuming anyone was coming in by the back stairs covertly while off shift, the evidence against Lucy Letby is obviously undermined since there is no reason for that person to be Lucy Letby.

There was also (if we want to go further into the case of Baby Y) no way for Lucy Letby or anyone else to produce prolonged hypoglycemia in that child, since the child was not on TPN - unlike baby F - not dextrose - unlike baby L - at that point. Their hypoglycemia persisted through new prescribed bags, again while Lucy Letby was off shift. Injected insulin would have affected the child only briefly and couldn't account for the later longer bouts of hypoglycemia. So we are having to postulate a scenario where Lucy Letby (or someone else) sneaks into the unit in the early hours of the morning, enters the nursery where a child is receiving one-to-one care, and injects him with a syringe, unnoticed. Then later he develops hypoglycemia independently for a longer period ...

That really is not plausible

Well yeah but I thought they might have a timeline for it but that was the answer-it wasn't established in court so no. I guess even chatGPT doesn't have the info you have. I'd put money on her being there.

As a PP said, she was known to come in early or stay late and that's exactly the type of thing she'd want to do that day to distance herself from the poisoning.

There's a significant period for which the unit had lost its swipe card data. The prosecution implied that this would have implicated Lucy Letby in a couple of cases, if it had existed. Obviously that's pure speculation.

That's different from the issue of the reversed swipe card data. I've never seen a claim that makes this unfavourable to Lucy Letby. It did, however, undermine at least two of the cases on which she was convicted. These were the cases of baby K and baby N.

But if the door entry data wasn't reliable and lots of staff were using the back stairs, do we know Letby wasn't in the building earlier than the start of her shift or at another time?

This is what's bugging me about the 'back stairs' revelations and entry cards. If what's now being said is that we can't actually know for sure who was there at what time, AND it's been said that staff were coming and going all the time even when not on duty (and who stated this? It's in part 7 of the Private Eye reports but not attributed) then you can't rule out anyone being there. Including Letby.

Lol how does chatGPT know I'm not a truther?

Note that the information on children with results comparable to the LL cases doesn't come from case reports, but from a dataset.

Note too that the court wasn't told the results were strongly indicative of poisoning. It was told that they left no other possibility.

ChatGPT isn't doing much to help your cause there. It's well known that it will do its best to give you the answer you ask it for, so it is not much use as a tool to convince.

Of course the timeline for the third insulin case wasn't established in court. The case wasn't put before the court. Documents referring to it are among the non disclosures Lucy Letby's defence has listed as grounds for referral in the CCRC documentation.

These documents show that the tests were ordered before Lucy Letby came on shift.

The question of whether I had breakfast this morning hadn't been established in court either. But I did.

I just asked chatgpt the same question, then followed up by asking How strong and capable is this current model of chatgpt of assessing how rare that the insulin test results were and of accounting for things that may have affected the results?

Good question — and it gets right to the limits of what a model like this can and can’t do.
Short answer
This model is good at explaining medical logic and probability in general terms, but it is not capable of independently determining how rare a specific test result was in a rigorous scientific sense, nor can it fully account for all lab-specific variables the way a forensic endocrinologist or toxicologist could.

What it can do well

1. Explain the biology accurately It can reliably describe things like:

• how insulin and C-peptide normally behave
• what patterns are expected in endogenous vs exogenous insulin
• why certain combinations are considered suspicious in clinical toxicology

• why courts or expert witnesses considered a result unusual
• what arguments were made on both sides in a case like Lucy Letby’s
• what kinds of methodological criticisms are commonly raised (e.g., assay limitations, sample handling, neonatal variability)

• “this pattern fits A vs B vs C explanations”
• which explanations are more or less consistent with medical literature generally
• where uncertainty exists in interpretation

• large neonatal ICU datasets
• validated distributions of insulin/C-peptide under different conditions
• lab-specific assay performance data
• case-control comparisons

• which immunoassay was used
• cross-reactivity and antibody interference
• sample timing and storage
• neonatal blood volume constraints
• lab reference ranges for preterm infants

• they weight lab uncertainty differently
• they interpret “extreme rarity” vs “possible artefact” differently
• they may have access to different subsets of data

• Strong at conceptual reasoning (high reliability)physiology
• mechanism-based interpretation
• explaining why evidence is considered significant
• Moderate at evidential synthesissummarising competing arguments
• identifying potential confounders
• Weak at forensic quantificationexact rarity estimates
• lab error probability in a specific real case
• definitive conclusions about causation

I asked chatGPT about how rare these insulin results were-

3. Reported literature

• Case reports of insulin:C-peptide ratios like the Letby babies’ are extremely rare.
• Most published cases of high insulin / low C-peptide in infants are either due to deliberate insulin injection or serious assay interference.

Summary

• In most medical literature, the ratio seen in the Letby trial is considered strongly indicative of exogenous insulin.
• Rare exceptions exist, mostly in complex neonatal metabolic disorders or technical lab issues, but these are far less common than insulin injection explanations.
• That’s why the original prosecution and most endocrinologists considered it compelling evidence — while critics argue that in neonates and with assay limitations, the result might not be absolutely definitive.

Bottom line

• The insulin/C-peptide pattern seen in the trial cases is very rare naturally.
• There are known exceptions, but they typically don’t match the full pattern as neatly.
• That’s why it has been treated as one of the strongest medical signals in the case — while still being debated in terms of evidential certainty.

ChatGPT also said it's unknown where Letby was when the third insulin test was conducted as the timeline hasn't been established in court. So any claim that she was only on shift AFTER the test was done (convenient) is pure conjecture.

That is in the summary I linked. I've pasted it below:

SUMMARY OF JOINT OPINION

In the report we present convincing new evidence from multiple sources that the Roche immunoassay test used can give rise to falsely high insulin results due to the presence of antibodies that can react with this type of immunoassay test. We also highlight evidence these antibodies can pass across the placenta to unborn babies and cause hypoglycaemia and apparently high insulin levels in the newborn period.

Furthermore, new evidence has been
published which increases our awareness and understanding about hyperinsulinism in the neonatal period. This information has provided greater insight into how adverse perinatal factors can cause hyperinsulinism in some newborn and premature infants. This is termed Perinatal Stress-Induced Hyper-Insulinism (PSIHI).

We have concluded that the Jury were misled in important areas as follows:

a) Medical facts: the evidence for sepsis, leakage of the central line into surrounding
Vssues, and consideration of alternative causes for the hypoglycaemia.

b) Evidential facts: errors in the glucose results presented, changes in the glucose levels in response to TPN infusion connection/disconnection, ward-based blood glucose tests presented as if they were laboratory results.

c) Testing: that the results of the immunoassay tests can be relied upon, and that the Roche immunoassay method used at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital (RLUH) was specific for identification of insulin alone (endogenous or exogenous)- neither of which are correct.

d) Background error rate: this is at least 0.5-2% despite excellent quality control for the
type of insulin immunoassay test used, which the jury were not made aware of.

e) Quality Control testing information was not revealed to the Court in expert witness
evidence. The results showed a quality control test with high insulin and a low C-
peptide.

f) Abnormal results: it is essential requirement according to published standards to undertake confirmatory testing of the immunoassay result using a different, more specific methodology, such as liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS).

g) Reference ranges not applicable in small preterm infants for C-peptide results and
insulin/C- peptide ratios. Studies in adults and older children were quoted which are
not relevant, and the limited appropriate information was not referred to.

h) The testing did not meet acceptable forensic standards at the Liverpool laboratory in terms of analytical specificity, chain of custody, control testing for interfering substances, and obtaining confirmatory result using alternative available methods or another laboratory.

The new evidence undermines the validity of the results of the insulin and C-peptide testing presented in Court and shows that these immunoassay results cannot be safely relied upon (without undertaking further confirmatory testing).

There is now evidence that:

• shows that the presence of antibodies (IAA insulin autoantibodies and other
antibodies such as HAMA) can interfere with the immunoassay result and cause falsely high insulin results

• demonstrates that insulin autoantibodies can be transferred from mother to baby
during pregnancy causing hypoglycaemia in the baby and falsely high insulin levels

• that IAA (insulin autoantibodies) can be found in pregnancy and in the umbilical cord
blood of infants, that this is not rare, and that the prevalence can vary over time

• In the context of a falsely high insulin result the insulin/C-peptide ratio is meaningless

• demonstrates there are alternative medical explanations which explain the
hypoglycaemia in both babies, such as line failure, sepsis and perinatal stress-induced
hyper-Insulinism (PSIHI). These alternative possibilities were not considered.

• indicates that the testng undertaken did not meet acceptable standards of clinical,
laboratory or forensic practice, and therefore cannot safely be relied upon

Our inescapable conclusion is that this evidence significantly undermines the validity of the assertions made about the insulin and C-peptide testing presented in Court.

So how are the new endocrinologists explaining the insulin results then?

That's why McDonald's submission includes work by neonatologists and endocrinologists as well.

You seem determined to ignore this point, so I will just put that here for anyone in danger of being misled by your posts.

As well as Chase and Shannon, he has submitted a report on the two insulin cases from:

Dr Neil Aiton MBBS MD MRCPI FRCPCH
Dr Adel Ismail, PhD FRCPath
Professor Matthew Johil PhD
Professor Alan Wayne Jones BSc, PhD, DSc
Professor Charles Stanley MD
Dr Richard Taylor MBBS FRCPC
Dr Hilde Wilkinson-Herbots MSc, PhD

That's two neonatologists (Aiton and Taylor), two endocrinologists (Ismail and Stanley), a forensic chemist and toxicologist (Johil and Jones) and a statistician (Wilkinson-Herbots)

Their qualifications and experience are listed in the summary linked from: https://lucyletbyinnocence.com/shoo-lee/Summary%20of%20Joint%20Expert%20Witness%20Insulin%20Report%20on%20Babies%20F%20and%20L.pdf