Lucy Letby (2)

Obviously her parents and friends (who didn't work with her) believe she's innocent-publicly at least. What does that prove? You could just as easily say well what would you think if you were one of the babies parents and people feel sorry for the thing that killed your child and want to put you through another trial (which will end with exactly the same verdict) when you know 100% that she's guilty.

I cannot fathom how anyone could be so blase about murder convictions being reliable even when there is no tangible or forensic evidence to support the accusation, just a load of retrofitted character analysis and circumstantial "evidence" applied with no objectivity.

I've asked the question on more than one thread of those who think the way this case has been handled is just tickety boo - if you or a loved one were being prosecuted for a murder you hadn't committed, where the cause of death was unascertained, but you were in the vicinity and someone said they "thought it was suspicious and that you gave them a funny feeling, would you be taking one for the judicial team and accepting it was a fair cop, while tugging your forlock because it's just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes?

I don't think I've ever gotten a sensible answer from anyone firmly in the "she's guilty" camp.

She was 21!

So it sounds like she was pretty adamant she shouldn't be practicing. She actually said she didn't think Lucy possessed the qualities to be a successful nurse.

In her final report on the then University of Chester student in July 2011 she wrote: “At the moment Lucy requires much more support, prompting and supervision than I would expect at this stage to allow her to qualify as a competent practitioner.

“However I strongly feel if Lucy continues to take on board feedback, continues to work on her weaker areas and develop her practice accordingly then this is achievable in the future.”

If this was your family member what would you think about the case against them? Would you think it was just as damning? 100% convinced?

And by the by, LL was the only, the only nurse an assessor ever failed for lack of empathy during her training.

People defending her always say there were no red flags in her background but I'd say this is quite a big one! Can you imagine how badly she must've come across for her assessor to note that?

I did find an article with some other comments I hadn't heard before. Apparently her assessor said this-"I have to be sure that this person is ready and safe to practice and I wasn't prepared to put my professional reputation and registration on the line at that point"

So it sounds like she was pretty adamant she shouldn't be practicing. She actually said she didn't think Lucy possessed the qualities to be a successful nurse.

And then this from her mentor-

“I think she felt comfortable working with me but she remained quiet and never appeared particularly animated or to be enjoying herself."

Although as we all know, she would get very animated when making up memory boxes and discussing baby deaths...

I also found this from someone who worked with her-

Her colleague Vicky Blamire said: “It wasn’t until finding out about more and more fatalities that questions were asked about which members of staff were present at the time as this would have had a big impact on their mental health.
“Hearing Lucy’s name with every occasion made me feel very uncomfortable as she didn’t show any kind of emotion.
“I remember feeling very shocked and confused as to why she didn’t seem to be upset. This was very unnerving.”

But she's totally innocent, yeah.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/lucy-letby-lucy-countess-of-chester-hospital-manchester-crown-court-hereford-b2629561.html

Don't you have any concerns about what's come on since the trial? e.g insulin tests being withheld from the jury/Jayaram lying on the stand/Dewi peddling back on the cause of death for multiple babies?

I have read everything on the case both in the papers and here on MN. I am 100% convinced of her guilt and hope that she is never released from prison.

Murder in a medical setting is different fron 'usual' murders. Patients are at the mercy of their killers and are vulnerable and usually sick or frail.

It's true that murder in a medical setting may be easier to hide because victims are already ill. (Though the close monitoring in NICUs compared to most other settings makes it harder to hide). But that's doesn't change the basic calculus that It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. If we are to stay true to that, the consequence has to be that we accept more guilty people escaping in the medical setting, not that we accept lesser proof there and punish more innocents.

Two additional considerations specific to medical settings point in the same direction. One, medical murder is exceedingly rare, so accepting less proof won't catch many more criminals, while snaring many more innocents. Two, accepting less proof will scare people off from medical work, worsening already-bad staff shortages and causing more harm to patients than healthcare killers ever would.

I know it is not up to Letby or her team, but in the long run, it would be better for her to get a retrial than to have the conviction quashed. If it is quashed without a trial, how many people are going to decide the CoA Judge clearly fancied Letby and, to quote certain posters, "loves baby murderers"?

She's going to live with suspicion for the rest of her life regardless. A third party could confess, produce irrefutable forensic evidence to support their confession, and there are still people who would refuse to believe it was anyone/thing other than Letby.

I do feel like a retrial, and the chance to re-examine the evidence and bring to light fresh evidence, would reduce the suspicion she's going to have to live under.

Depends what the CCRC and then potentially court of appeal say. However if the court of appeal determine that no crimes actually took place, then there wouldn’t be a retrial, she would just be let go.

Well I've read there was evidence but not enough substantive evidence. I wonder if she will get a new trial.

My problem with the "bigger picture" is that as soon as you start to look at any part of it in detail, the evidence doesn't hold up very well. For example, the handover notes - if the argument is that she shouldn't have had them and therefore was breaking rules then yes that's something against her character, but it doesn't indicate that she caused harm to anyone. If the argument is that they were kept as trophies then it doesn't stand up. There were over 200 handover notes but only 21 related to the babies she's convicted of harming and 4 of those babies weren't mentioned at all. They were generally stuffed in bags (apart from her first one) not carefully preserved. They were also her own notes, not something belonging to the babies or their families. If they're trophies then they're not very good ones.

Googling/Facebook searches of the parents. If you're arguing that she shouldn't look up things related to patients on the internet then maybe it's unprofessional, but it's information that they themselves have made public. If it was looking up private or medical information then that would be criminal in itself. There's also the scale here - 31 searches related to the families against a total over over 2200 in the period. To me that seems like poor evidence of "obsession".

The "confessions" scribbled on post it notes also contain a lot saying that she's scared or innocent, which also seems very cherry picked to me.

I think the number of cases she was charged with are also supposed to indicate that she must have done something to be accused of so many things but to me that indicates weak evidence, not strong. The fact that the incidents were not seen as suspicous at the time but only found after a trawl through notes and they cover a range of supposed harms including insulin poisoning (including a time when she wasn't present), injury to liver (how?), overfeeding with milk (never before seen as an attempt at murder) seems more like throwing anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks.

If we're looking for a pattern that matches "serial killer" - trophies, moving around if suspicion falls on them, escalating behaviour, developing m.o. then I don't think it meets the standard.

Whatever you look at it always seems that somehow it's supposed to be the volume of weak indications that should be convincing. There's also never any comparison with anyone else either. Presumably if someone else had been accused then there would have been a whole other set of behaviours that would be considered suspicious. Can we determine whether someone has commited a crime based on their other behaviour?

Given enough time to pick through someone's character and possessions (and they had a lot), I think you'd expect to find much clearer evidence of wrongdoing even before you get to the medical evidence if that's what you're considering as circumstantial evidence.

There's no clarity on how events were selected as "suspicious" or not and "unexpected" is a bit subjective. By not looking at the maternity notes and not allowing consideration of other comparable babies (e.g. baby Y the other "insulin" case) and the selective rota chart used showing that she was "always there", I think they built a case that made it seem like that the ones she was charged with (and only those) were definitely deliberate harm.

There are an awful lot of qualified and credible people who have come along since who say that you can't treat statistics like that and that the evidence of deliberate harm is shaky.

None of this is to say that she's definitely innocent, only that there is some serious doubt as to the evidence presented in the trial. Even if she's guilty as charged, the fact that she's been found guilty in this way means that innocent people could also be convicted and that's worrying.

Two trials full of missing evidence and flawed medical theories. We have no idea if the jury would have convicted her had they seen the missing insulin tests or been aware that she DID call for Jayaram when the baby collapsed, the alarm DID go off, and that standing and watching is what she is supposed to do in that situation.

Nor do we know if having the correct stats would have made a difference, or if the full rota chart had been shown.

Also, the CPS don't decide to not charge someone with murder if they're already in prison. That is not how justice works. If the evidence meets the bar for prosecution, they prosecute. The evidence did not meet the threshold for murder charges. There is no conspiracy or ulterior motive. There simply wasn't any evidence to support a murder charge.

Two trials and a jury thought she was guilty. If you think she's innocent that's up to you but I don't. And she was already in prison convicted of the other murders they didnt think it was worth another trial to try and prove more murders.

They said not enough evidence to prosecute although the police wanted to. They didn't say no evidence.

It's the bigger picture. Everything considered. Her own team didnt even call any witnesses for her defence. Why not. Why did she do the things she did. Macabre hoarding of notes and googling the parents. Babies suddenly dying. Other deaths at another hospital she worked at. But not enough evidence to prosecute.

The reason people are concerned that Dewi didn't ask to see the maternity notes is that you cannot make a diagnosis by exclusion without first ruling out everything, including birth complications or genetic/hereditary conditions.

DD was 18 when she was diagnosed with POTS by exclusion. The investigation into what was causing her sudden fainting started when she was 16, it took two years, dozens of tests, and multiple consultants and specialists to exclude all other causes- not 10 minutes over a cup of coffee.

Even though she was 16 when they started investigating, they still asked about her family history and birth, at one point, they asked her permission to view her dad's medical records. They wanted to see the coroner's report on his death to check whether any missing pieces could be explained by DD's condition or vice versa.

Genuine question. What evidence convinces you of her guilt?

I think she is guilty. Murder in a medical setting is different fron 'usual' murders. Patients are at the mercy of their killers and are vulnerable and usually sick or frail. That's why Shipman got away with hundreds of crimes for such a long time. I know circumstances were different as he operated alone.

One of the most shocking things to me was the statistical evidence presented to the jury, which showed Lucy Letby had been on duty when all the deaths occurred. Yet that had deliberately excluded all other deaths from the data where it didn’t fit the narrative that Leby had done it.

i believe that alone renders the conviction unsafe.

I remember as a trainee healthcare professional (pharmacist) being given feedback that I’d focus too much on the technical info and not sufficiently on the patient- I saw the same in lots of us, it takes a while to develop the ability to multitask as a HCP and its particularly difficult in stressful/high risk situations. Experience and time made all the difference for me. I’d be amazed if Lucy was the only nurse the assessor had encountered who struggled with this.

Being on the other side (kids who’ve required a lot of medical intervention), it really is a mixed bag- some are amazing at it (both consultants and nurses), and others are disinterested and display little empathy/interest in the patient. It didn’t cross my mind that they were in it to murder people.