Lucy letby - New threads (Part 3)

[WhiteFire]

The last thread has closed. I have kept the thread title in line with the previous one for continuity.

I have just started listening to the Daily Mail podcasts which gives a good overview.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-trial-of-lucy-letby/id1653090985

I've downloaded an app called Radio net so I can download them and then listen off line.

The evidence against her is compelling, the defence is pretty much "it wasn't me"

Thanks @Tambatamba. I’d like to listen to the rest, who’s done the video?

It's Crime Scene 2 courtroom on YouTube :)

Thank you. 💕

I've listened to a few of his. He actually thought she could be innocent. But he said as soon as she started talking and giving her defence it completely changed his mind!

He's really good at giving both sides.

Yeah he thought that at the very beginning of the trial I think before he'd have seen any evidence?

Well it’s being reported she was given nearly a million in legal aid. Which I guess with a top legal team and a ten month trial, never mind all the months of preparation before hand is to be expected, but god what a lot of tax payers money to ensure she got a fair trial.

Quite right too.

If you were accused of something you'd want a fair trial as well. Especially if you were innocent, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

I also agree with pps that it is not distasteful to say miscarriages of justice happen. They do. It's a bit like saying that vaccine damage does not happen. It does. No conspiracy, simply fact. That doesn't mean you think there's one in the case, merely pointing out that they happen.

"I also agree with pps that it is not distasteful to say miscarriages of justice happen. They do. It's a bit like saying that vaccine damage does not happen. It does. No conspiracy, simply fact. That doesn't mean you think there's one in the case, merely pointing out that they happen."

I am old enough to remember the Guildford 4 and the extreme hate the convicted bombers were subjected to from the media, the public and the judicial system.They subsequently had convictions quashed and this process took many years and attempts. Obviously a totally different case but yes, miscarriages of justice do happen.

It was absolutely right that she was given access to a top legal team if only to block that route of appeal. Had she only been able to have Ben from Lawyers 'r' Us it could have been deemed an unfair trial. A bit of 'speculate to accumulate'.

It therefore isn't about how the defence was presented, it is basically that there was no defence other than 'It wasn't me'. By allowing Ben Myers KC it put the prosecution and defence teams on a level field (bar the lack of evidence)

I’m very pleased she was given the best legal defence money can buy. Nobody can now legitimately say she didn’t have a fair trial.

I don't really care what you think I sound like. I know what I believe. I don't believe any appeal would succeed, but it's clearly not automatically distasteful to discuss the possibility.

I have no idea who those two people are, and yet again I don't believe Lucy Letby was wrongly accused. You need to get it straight in your mind that acknowledging that an appeal might happen and even succeed in relation to one or two of the charges (e.g. if there were found to be an error in the judge's summing up) does not equate to believing that she is innocent of them.

I hate these reports saying a criminal was "given" £X in legal aid. It's not as if they see one penny of it.

This was in effect several trials altogether given that there were 22 charges, so divided between them it's not that high. You also need to bear in mind that it wouldn't all have gone to lawyers, a hefty chunk would have gone to expert witnesses - to say nothing of the fact that 20% goes straight back to the Treasury as VAT. When you think that we had the privilege of paying out around £250K for millionaire Boris Johnson's representation before the Privileges Committee, nearly a million for this case is positively economical.

Sky News announcement in Parliament of statutory enquiry to be led by Lady Justice Thirlwall.

I'll just add that the National patient safety training Steve Barclay refers to is some e-learning which I doubt is going to contribute much to the sum of patient safety.

Do you not think that these days it's much easier to prove crimes though? Mainly because of the evolution of technology. I don't really think that you can compare a single nurse murdering babies in a hospital with terrorist attacks from years ago when people didn't have mobile phones and there weren't mobile phone masts that could verify the whereabouts of someone or record their conversations and by extension, their intentions.

I completely agree.

I don’t understand your emotional response. Factually she was. The money was all used in defence, I think most of us understand how it works. The amount is directly correlated to cost and she doesn’t see a penny of it. I think everyone knows this?

i also understand the reason she was given so much legal aid was so there could be no argument of an unfair trial. Her defence team had to be as good as or better than the prosecution

i support this decision. However I think it’s just more salt in the wound that a million bucks of hard earned tax payers money had to be spent to defend the monstrously indefensible. That money could have been spent so much better on other things, schools, hospitals, police etc. but it had to be spent defending this monster.

however does that mean it was a bad decision. No. Not remotely.

The reason I hate it is that it's a headline frequently used by the more excitable tabloids to whip up their readers who regularly respond by ranting on about how accused people shouldn't be allowed any help with legal fees at all. I don't think their more excitable readers do really get it that it's not a nice present to the criminal. It's also regularly accompanied by rants about fat cat legal aid lawyers leaching off crime and making up defences, which couldn't be further from the truth. Remember those idiots doing their utmost to prejudice the trials of child abuse gangs?

People on MN may well understand that it's to all our benefit that people like LL get a good defence, but you only have to look at the comment columns under these reports to see that that is in no way universal.

A fair trial is a cornerstone of both our justice system and democratic principles.
All the stops were pulled out to ensure Letby got hers. Frequent breaks, accommodations made for her requests in view of her mental health - and money. A lot of it. She was entitled to the best defence team available and to a robust defence which would ensure all the evidence was tried properly.

She got it. That's a good thing. It all adds up to a fair trial and makes her case much less vulnerable to appeal.

Money well spent, IMO.

I don’t understand why she told lies on the stand relating to things like being arrested and led away in her PJs and not being able to contact her friends in the unit whilst under investigation. The prosecution produced evidence in court to refute these claims and evidence has to be disclosed to the other side in advance doesn’t it?

She was playing the victim, trying to make the jury feel sorry for her, creating the image of someone being arrested at 6am and marched out of her house in pyjamas.

I know, but if she knew that the prosecution had evidence to disprove those claims then why try to say them in court in the first place? 🤔

Impossible for us to know. She's not stupid, but maybe she thought she might con enough of the jury to make it worth doing, or that the prosecution wouldn't bother to challenge it, or maybe somehow in her mind she built up this picture of herself as this hard done-by misunderstood saint and that was all part of it?

My BIL is a narcissist. He will tell bare faced lies to gain sympathy. Even tell you about events you were there at that aren’t even slightly true to make him look like a victim.

I'm still listening to the podcasts, it almost seems like when she was carrying out the acts that she was completely detached from reality. She is certainly an enigma.

Her testimony was seriously damaging to her case. She managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the hospital CEOs very successfully because there was a strong incentive to their protection of her: that being the reputation of their hospital. I've seen the same kind of culture in operation in other contexts, and can see what those seven consultants might have been up against.

It's not so easy to hoodwink seasoned professional detectives and legal experts, which KCs in involved cases like this invariably are. Arrests in cases like these almost always take place at dawn - cf. the Ipswich serial killer - largely because it enables police to track their movements and ensure they are available when they go in to arrest the suspect.

Continuing to lie about the unimportant details might not have undone her - the evidence against her was compelling to start with - but it certainly won't have helped. It's always a mistake to assume everyone else is more stupid than you are. It also takes, shall we say, certain kinds of personality type.

Liars like this are a strange breed. The continue to lie to your face, even when they know you know they're lying. It almost seems a compulsion with them.