Lucy Letby guilty - part 2

[twoandcooplease]

Thread 1 Lucy Letby guilty www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/4875009-lucy-letby-guilty

Just in case anyone wants to keep the conversation going

Totally agree. They should be held to account and prosecuted!

Tbh there will always be people who think this is a miscarriage of justice. Her parents and any friends who don't see that side of her.

I feel nothing but sympathy for them, they are guilty of nothing more than believing in her. Families and friends of serial killers are often shocked because they hide in plain sight. Dennis Radar's daughter in the US has spoken openly about the shock and disbelief of finding out her Dad was a serial killer. She now agrees he is guilty but initially she struggled with this.

Awful situation for them all. Nothing compared to what the parents are experiencing but traumatic nonetheless.

I havent followed this as much as some of you, but all those staff who knew and reported issues, i assume they thought they were reporting an incompetent nurse not fit for practice rather than murderer?
Like in safeguarding in school if you think your dsl hasnt done the right thing in response to your safeguarding issue you are supposed to report it to the mash yourself.

I have followed this case since the start as I am a nurse. I struggled to get my head around it with each episode of the podcast.

I do think she is guilty though and we are unlikely to ever understand why. However one of my theories is that she actually did not intend to kill but to make these babies critically ill. She preferred looking after ITU babies, which is not wrong in itself. I know plenty of nurses that prefer working with critically ill patients. She tampered with their care to create more acuity, she enjoyed the drama, maybe a bit of a hero complex. When they died though, she seemed to equally enjoy consoling the parents and helping/ supporting other staff with their first neonatal death. It was like she was creating all the problems so people could see how good she was at dealing with them. Good in a crisis etc, basically hero worship.
So I am not convinced she initially set out to kill, but when babies did die she didn't stop. And tampering with their care regardless is attempted murder so just as bad. I may be totally wrong, but it's the only explanation that even slightly makes sense to me. I don't think she has any long term mental health problems, she has PTSD but this was after her investigation.

Yes now this is where I find it strange. If I had started to notice patients deteriorating under one nurses care I would immediately think of competence and raise it this way. But in the interviews with the consultants they say they were suspicious intentional harm was been done quite early on. I doubt that very much. Really having a murderer in the department is the last thing anyone would think, you would think they are not safe to practise here and need their competence re assessed. Over a period of time you may think this was deliberate. But the way they word it in their interviews they are stating they knew she was doing deliberate harm after the 4th baby. I am not convinced tbh.

Just because someone is young and blond, it doesn't make them less likely to be a psychopath. Jodi Arias?

Would you be questioning the jury's ability if this was a man? True that women are less likely to be killers than men but female serial killers unfortunately exist.

It seems to me that an unfortunate combination of circumstantial and personality factors culminated in this terrible outcome for these babies (based on the limited info I’ve read). It’s not a straightforward picture.

I think a Cluster B personality disorder is in the mix somewhere, perhaps set off by some trauma (I have thoughts about how this might have arisen) or an abreaction to ‘being/feeling different’. Factitious disorder imposed on another (Munchausen’s) is part of this picture.

The situation with the doctor is perhaps the key to this: had Letby not needed to garner his attention, this appalling situation might not have arisen, and she might still be a nurse looking after babies.

@WhisperingHi I think it is probably the amount of evidence and sensitivity of it that means we haven't seen it all yet. Besides, it's not really our business since we aren't judge or jury.

I imagine much of it will come out in time as more is written and reported on the case.

where is tony chambers now?
this will have repercussions in all hospitals

managers had better pull their socks up and build their relationships with clinicians and others.
we have a speak up guardian now and have done since before covid
so much closing of ranks goes on - not just in NHS.

If there's more evidence, as a member of the public with a public interest, I want to see it. I'm open to being swayed. go and order a court transcript then and read it.

honestly the people going on about evidence and somehow expecting the press to have published it all just come across as wanting to be deliberately contrary.

@Lemieux7 I can't say for sure how I'd feel about a different trial with someone with different demographics. I'm pretty certain her age and looks aren't very relevant to me but I could be unconsciously biased and obviously I wouldn't recognise that. I agree with you that many people struggle to think she could do it because perhaps they relate to her, see her as a young, sociable, seemingly likable person, and question how she could do it.

That's not what I'm doing though. I'm simply wondering why we aren't being shown all of the evidence. Why would a reporter home in on a phrase such as 'back to work with a bang' with the insinuation that she said that to prewarn colleagues shes back to cause more harm 🥴 when that's a very normal phrase to use when going back to a busy role, but not share something more compelling? I'm not disputing that there's more evidence, I just struggle to understand why it's not publically available when other, much less substantive evidence has been reported.

But I do understand your comment about bias, whether unconscious or conscious and I agree that it is at play in many cases, including this one.

@BeenThereDoneThat101 it's a shame that's how you're perceiving me. It's not what I mean at all, and I've tried to make that clear, but if that's how I'm coming across to you, perhaps it's better you ignore me.

I know it's ideal when everyone has the same opinion, but it's ok that some people still have questions. That doesn't make me contrary, "Lucy's friend", or anything else. It just means, I still have questions, mainly around the quality of evidence. That's ok. I'm not calling for a retrial.

It must be very difficult if it's your daughter ,son ,parent etc
I watched a documentary about the Yorkshire ripper and his brother was interviewed and he was saying at the time he was thinking is that really " Our peter" they are talking about how do you get your head around it particularly her parents?

@KinellMate and you sound horrible. What a horrible attitude you have towards a stranger, that's on you, not me. If people want to rip me apart on Reddit, so be it, I genuinely couldn't care less! Not in the playground anymore, I'm allowed to have an opinion.

I can kind of see where whispering is coming from. I followed the trial info throughout and I did not hear much that ass compelling. However the main thing for me was the insulin reports regarding one of the babies, there was no other reason for this to have been given when it wasn’t required, which indicated somebody did something intentionally and the only thing worse than what has happened would be if letby was found guilty but there is someone else still out there who actually did this!
However the only staff member with a pattern that would allow them does appear to have been Letby. When all the pieces are viewed together maybe this was the compelling evidence that led the jury to convict

This is what has made me really struggle with this case. I was wrongly accused of munchausens (they called it fabricated induced illness) and my experience was the ‘evidence’ either being opinion or wrong info plus one piece of totally made up evidence.

Ive followed the case but kept wondering about things (although I know the police are more thorough For a criminal investigation) but whereas before I’d have been 100% sure the verdict was correct I do have that little feeling in the back of my mind after what happened to me.

Im not saying I think LL is innocent-I don’t as I do trust the courts and police , I’m just so acutely aware that for me evidence wasn’t always genuine evidence. It’s a very very said case

Wow, uncalled for. What’s is wrong with questioning something. And Reddit? Who cares!

@WhisperingHi

I saw most of the documentary last night. If I remember they said something about if insulin was naturally present there is also something else that would be there. That wasn't there so it means the insulin was introduced not natural.

I suspect unconscious and potentially conscious bias played a role how the hospital investigated the concerns and how staff who worked with her thought about the issues. If she had been a BAME nurse, potentially from a different country rather than a English, young, blonde, middle class, "sociable" women.

It's also odd that her father attended the meetings with Letby that did occur during the hospital's investigations, and as one of the hospital manager's said in court was pressing for the formal "apology" letter to her from the consultants. Of course, any parent would be angry if they thought an employer was being unfair to their child and making false accusations, but it would be exceptionally unusual in any NHS investigation or poor performance process for your other person not be a union rep and for someone to bring along a parent.

I think it's insulting to the jury that people who have followed the case from a distance are questioning their verdicts when they have spent months hearing evidence and listening to testimonies and many hours deliberating over their decisions. The fact that they didn't find her guilty of all the charges presented shows that they carefully considered each case before deciding.

In the meantime careers were put on hold, lives put on hold and they couldn't discuss what they were hearing day by day with anyone. They have done a great service.

I’d be vaguely interested to know if all the people with opinions contrary to the guilty verdicts take the time to do a detailed analysis of the evidence when it becomes available. And then assess it against the burden of proof required for a criminal court. I’m guessing not.

They called it 'fabricated induced illness' because that's the correct term.

Munchausens or MBP isn't a DSM diagnosis any more.

@WhisperingHi A lot of the evidence/testimony not shared by the media would be complex medical information. It's one of the reasons this trial took so long (apart from the number of victims). The jury would have had to spend time understanding terminology, what medical stats meant, how those stats showed that these babies had been murdered, etc.

(a) it’s just not possible for the volume of evidence that there must have been to be fully reported . The reporters had to report on other stories as well. There would have been nothing but this news story on the news for months.
(b) it seems that there were some reporting restrictions. Presumably more important considerations at play eg avoiding prejudice to the accused, privacy, then every piece of evidence being made public
(c) if you were that invested you could have gone to sit in the public gallery and listened to the evidence in its entirety
(d) we don’t get to hear the entirety of the evidence in any case so why would we in this one?