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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

I agree with the poster who says she displayed classic seial killer behaviour. Taking trophies, googling information on the parents. She's guilty

It's reportinh to do with a new documentary.

It’s made me even more certain she’s guilty
I had all 3 of my DC at COCH
i know quite a few very experienced, exceptional, dedicated ITU nurses who work there
i also know one of the consultants giving evidence and I think he is arrogant, misogynistic and self-absorbed

still believe she is 💯 guilty

Mark mcdonald’s quote
‘This child, this vulnerable neonate, not a baby, not a fully formed baby, but one that was still developing was seriously ill and that's why they died."
absolutely disgraceful

I think people have pointed out a few times that the presenters of the Mail's podcast, the Trial, which built a profitable new platform out of the Letby case, didn't disclose payments to the company one of them owns. The other had worked for the company.

These payments came not just from Chester police but specifically from the Operation Hummingbird budget, before, during, and since the trial. I am happy to read and assess sources wherever they are, but whenever I listen to the Trial I am amazed at how little Liz Hull understands of the relevant law and science after three years covering the case.

I don't believe that is exactly right, but ten incidents were stopped from the roster of suspicious events early on after she was found not to be on shift, according to an alleged police leak: https://archive.ph/Z6t3c

Yet you've no issue with the journalism from The Sun where the 'unnamed sources' say that Letby hangs around with other child killers in prison which is basically unsubstantiated prison gossip but you treat it as fact and evidence of Letbys character, but when it’s a documentary that has a vascular doctor discussing the medical evidence The Sun is to be ridiculed.............

The guy behind the documentary was on a podcast I was listening to earlier (no idea which one. Things stream in the background while I work).

The Sun's intention when they started researching for the documentary was to silence all the concern around the conviction and find more evidence to prove Letby's guilt. The more questions they got answered, the more questions they had.

He now believes this is the biggest miscarriage of justice in modern history.

They played a short clip of Dewi's interview, and it was clear he was wholly out of his depth being face-to-face with a vascular/embolism specialist. He kept insisting he was right and the vascular specialist was wrong, but was unable to explain why or produce any studies to support his theories.

I think for every single newspaper we could scoff and exclaim ‘the sun! The mail! The Guardian - left wing hyperbole! The Torygraph!’ But what we shouldn’t ignore is how unusual and bizarre it is for the above publications to broadly agree with one another, although the way they put it across of course differs.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/40451301/doctor-accused-lucy-letby-uncertain-retrial/

This is looking more and more unsound as a conviction and the Sun (a typical throw away the keys or hang them) tabloid is coming out with really quite convincing stories

in support. The Thirlwall enquiry emphasised catastrophic failures of governance which adds to the increasing possibility that the ward was just incredibly unsafe generally and maybe Lucy was caught up in a political maelstrom of arse covering.