If you were previously on the fence about Lucy Letby’s guilt, have the Thirlwall findings swayed you either way?

The Sun! To think I get criticised if I mention the daily mail...well I'm sure it'll be high quality journalism.

That is all in preparation for a documentary tomorrow night on Channel 5

I think the insulin information may be slightly oversimplified in that article - at least some of those values made it to the trial in some form. Perhaps they were ignored in the prosecution's reports or something.

I have seen the claim on Dr Brearey rearranging the timeline for Baby O's death before, from Phil Hammond in Private Eye. At that stage it was about a missing page in the clinical records and I found it quite incredible. If there are missing clinical notes how on earth can the case stand?

Couple of interesting articles in the Sun I believe. One on poor reporting of insulin results and the needle aspiration that probably affected the trial hugely. I'm phrasing it like that because I'm trying to control my disgust. And one about air embolism - or lack of it, with Dewi Evans holding out for his hero status against challenges from another expert who doesn't believe the available evidence supports the theory. The plot thickens. And gets ever grubbier.

I seem to remember reading they were planning on charging her with all the deaths but then narrowed it down to ones she was actually on shift for… apart from the ludicrous ‘tampering with the feeding bag so it would be used when she wasn’t there’ claim.

I don’t say she didn’t do any of them (and IF she did she deserves a long time in prison) but Im not at all convinced the convictions were safe.

I pray you never get asked to do jury duty. You cannot convict someone to life in prison just because there were likely murders and they probably committed them. The verdict has to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

I never said she should be convicted on that my point was her behaviour shouldn't be ignored completely, you have to take it into account with everything else. The prosecution put her post it note and handover sheets before the jury not me...they obviously thought them relevent.

Although to be fair you could go with medical evidence alone because the experts at trial were largely in agreement this was deliberate harm. And she was the only one who could've done it. That just isn't good enough for some on here.

And the hospital's lawyers pointed this out to them at the time, but they agreed they needed to put risk reduction first and restrict admissions, and that they could afford to be sued by a nurse easily enough for constructive dismissal if it came to it.

Specialist services: she was one of only two level 5 (cheaper) nurses with a qualification in providing intensive care. All the more expensive level six nurses had this. Normal minimal staffing for a shift was two level six and two level five nurses.

Chester had a small intensive care unit within the neonatal unit. Some nights it was empty. Some nights only one child. This isn't a good thing, by the way. The NHS likes to see more nights of ICU occupancy so that the hospital keeps its skill base up.

Children in ICU required someone with the intensive care qualification to care for them one to one. Most nights the unit only needed one of the level six nurses at most to do this because there were no or one children in there. (The other would be shift lead). So on the rarer nights when there were two or three infants in there, they needed a third nurse with the qualification, preferably from the cheaper level 5 band. That's where Lucy Letby's availability for extra work and willingness to swap shifts comes in. Every time an indictment baby died, there were multiple babies in ICU, and this was not the usual state of things in Chester. When there were multiple babies in ICU, that's when Letby was needed and assigned to shifts.

We know the unit started to take on more acute cases shortly before the indictment deaths started. So comparisons with what happened before are of limited value.

Yes, when the arguments that there were deaths are clearly unscientific and relevant professionals (original pathologists and reviewers as well as later experts) have found natural deaths, I believe that all useful evidence is pointing to natural deaths. If you believe that character can prove murder in this case, there would be a lot more serial killer nurses around.

The judge was not particularly impartial.

I do think this was the problem. The consultants thought she did it. So the police thought she did it, so the judge thought she did it, so the jury thought she did it.

Both sides by now (including me to be fair) struggle to be impartial and objective. But the starting point needs to be ‘were there murders?’

I mean, let’s say a woman is found collapsed in an alley and later dies and it’s discovered that someone who was there at the same time has some incriminating searches on their phone about accosting women and harming them and maybe has previous for sexual offences and when his house is searched there’s loads of newspaper clippings about it. It looks bad but then if it emerges actually the woman had a previous condition and died of that all the above is not important.

And that has happened, twice to my memory. Not the exact scenario but a woman has been murdered and someone who fit the profile was there in the same place and same time. And people exclaim sarcastically ‘well what a coincidence!’ But yes. Yes, it was actually just a coincidence.

I’m quite sure the jury that convicted Letby were well briefed by the judge on their role.

Everyone always says the deaths stopped when she left so it must have been her, but they got downgraded and couldn’t take the sickest babies!

I pray you never get asked to do jury duty. You cannot convict someone to life in prison just because there were likely murders and they probably committed them. The verdict has to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

There were likely murders, and she probably did it because you, not a psychologist, or indeed anyone who has met her, just you, a layperson and a stranger, believes her behaviour is odd, is not beyond a reasonable doubt. Not even close. At this point, it doesn't even sound like you're convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.

Specialist services? She was less than a few years into her career. She was not one of the most experienced nurses on this unit, she'd only just gotten access to intensive care babies! Another coincidence there. What do you think the unit did prior to super-nurse Letby qualifying to work in room 1? Well we know that they were managing to keep babies alive perfectly well weren't they...

What's left after that? Character, social media, notes at home. Why would they matter if the deaths are natural and the pattern of events doesn't need any extraordinary explanations.

Because she's displayed classic serial killer behaviour and they tip the weight from likely to be natural causes to potential deliberate harm. It's like if you had a murder and there were 10 suspects and one of them happened to be a stalker/flasher/violent misogynist-he's probably going to be the culprit based on previous behaviour. Now I know you don't believe there were any murders in the first place, but I feel this behaviour definitely warrants considering not just brushing away with "oh I've decided it was all natural causes so none of that matters"-we don't know for sure they were natural causes.

Hope that answers your question.

It does, it's wild how we can see the same case so differently.

I was hearing about the horrendous case of wrongful breast removal and yes it seems the NHS can sometimes throw up extreme outcomes.

I’ve never believed she’s guilty. I’ve had my fair share of awful NHS experiences and have worked in the NHS, and I can easily see how cover ups would happen.

Yes Try reading a section of her cross examination in any of the cases and you will see what a Kafkaesque nightmare she was living in lucyletbyinnocence.com/transcripts.html

If it were 1%, we could still expect to see it at more than one hospital a year. So is that murder?

It’s a very depressing thought if this is the case. She’s living a Cat A kafkaesque nightmare.

I have read the online trial transcripts and their summaries. The methods of death proposed are not logically presented and defended. Their proponents happily switch position on which events were sinister, which not. They cite opposite indicators as proof of the same thing. They bluster, snipe, and change the rules as they go along. They rely on obvious sleights of hand.

So - where does that leave me? I don't have access to the medical notes. The chief prosecution experts, who did, are obviously seriously unreliable. Everyone who has looked at them since the trial and expresses an opinion in public says natural death. The initial autopsies said natural (or iatrogenic) death. The hospital's external reviews said natural or iatrogenic death. Why should I believe it's anything other than natural or iatrogenic death?

The statistics, some people say. Deaths went up. But that's easily explained and happens continuously at other hospitals. She was present at all the deaths and incidents? I am not a statistician but I have some training and some experience in this area. I can very easily how a cheap but specialist nurse ended up on shift for the worst events so often, in a hospital which only needed her specialist services about a third of the time.

What's left after that? Character, social media, notes at home. Why would they matter if the deaths are natural and the pattern of events doesn't need any extraordinary explanations.

I would suggest that it's worth people having a look at the prosecution evidence: Evans and Bohin especially, and seeing what they think. Nearly all of it is now online:
https://lucyletbyinnocence.com/transcripts.html

It's quite a depressing read for anyone who thought a court could make judgements on science. But why should a court be able to do that? Nothing in our system is set up to support it.

I do read any new information and contributions carefully, but nothing has undermined that position yet. Hope that answers your question.

Great post. I believe Lucy Letby failed her final nursing placement for not having empathy or something similar but it still doesn’t make her a murderer.

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The insulin could be deliberate harm; there are other explanations that are just as, if not more, plausible, but I agree that deliberate harm could also be an explanation for the high insulin levels. What I don't accept is that there is any evidence that Letby administered the insulin. The poisoned TPN bags are far too far-fetched to be believable.

We don't know if insulin can be delivered that way. We don't know how much insulin it would take if that was the delivery route or whether that would be a noticeable amount to go missing, and there is no explanation as to how she managed to inject insulin into a tamper-proof TPN bag on a small and busy neonatal ward without anyone seeing her.

I'm not saying she's innocent; I don't know whether she is or isn't. I am saying none of what she was convicted of is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

@Oftenaddled why are you SO sure she's innocent? Like I get having doubts or thinking the trial was a shitshow or whatever but even you admit the insulin could be deliberate harm amongst other things so why are you so closed off to the possiblity?

So you admit that the drop in figures is down to the unit being downgraded, yet refuse to see that the increase could and probably would be due to an increase in takling in babies that have more extreme issues?

Who calculated that? I think it's increasingly clear that anything the prosecution put forward cannot be relied upon as factual. It's certainly not what Sir David Spiegelhalter, a leading statistician at Cambridge University, put forward to Thirlwall.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpdxn4x5477o

On the spike this came up

Not an Extreme Outlier: Statistical experts, including statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter and mathematics professor John O'Quigley, testified and concluded that the mortality rate at the Countess of Chester Hospital was only about 10% higher than the average for similar neonatal units.

A spike like there was in a unit like the Countess of Chester has been calculated as less than 1% probability of occurring by random chance, so no, they probably aren’t “harbouring murderers”.