Lucy Letby denied leave to appeal

[Viviennemary]

Just heard on the news Lucy Letby the convicted serial killer has been denied leave to appeal. Good decision I think. She should stay behind bars for the rest of her life.

The problem isn't just what happened when she was removed. It was the fact that deaths happened during the day when she was on day shift; when she moved to the night shift, they didn't happen during the day, they happened at night; they stopped when she went on holiday and restarted when she came back. Put that together with the evidence showing she was not just on duty but in the room every single time and much, much else, and it goes way beyond coincidence.

And yet they still acquitted in a number of instances.

I didn’t state that it was the same as a real trial process. However, it did do a good job at highlighting some of the possible ways in which discussions within juries take place - which we don’t otherwise ever have access to, by the nature of their confidentiality.

Juries will have bias. Regardless of how seriously they take their position. This has been shown over and over again in death penalty cases. Just look at what the OJ Simpson jury have been saying many years after the fact.

I would implore anyone to take a closer look at this case and I say that as someone who followed the trial closely and was convinced the jury had made the right decision.

The evidence was misleading and went unchallenged.

That hospital was wholly incapable of providing those babies with the care they required.

I fear Lucy Letby has been scapegoated to cover for their failings.

The deaths and injuries were all avoidable and the families and babies deserve justice but not at the expense of an innocent nurse.

The negligence case the NYer referred to was not the only one that happened at the unit during that time. There as another that the hospital settled for around £7 million: Mistakes were made by doctors prior to a baby’s transfer to Alder Hey. Alder Hey medics corrected the mistakes but sadly they led to the baby developing cerebral palsy nonetheless.

The Royal College of Paediatrics report also mentioned that nurses had reported multiple concerns about a particular (locum) doctor but he/she was re-employed by the unit nonetheless.

In all practical terms, it is. You have 15 days from sentencing to appeal against sentence. You have 28 days from conviction to appeal against conviction. The post to which this was replying suggested that Letby could now appeal against sentence having had her appeal against convictions dismissed - but she couldn't.

Strongly agree with this, and have done from the start.

Please can everyone interested just have a look at the actual "evidence" and the sequence of events. I'll find some links in a bit.

This could be anyone.

Maybe no-one will know for certain what happened in this tragic situation, but the facts certainly are not beyond reasonable doubt.

This isn’t proof of no bias or infallibility or even careful consideration of each case so I have no idea why you keep repeating it.

It could have been a simple thumbs up, or thumbs down around the room. Roman arena style for all we know.

It kind of is, but don't bother to explain your argument, will you. Yes, it's not generally a matter of the defence waiting for someone to volunteer themselves. Nevertheless, you can be sure they looked long and hard for appropriate experts, including making wider inquiries if the experts of which they had direct knowledge could not help; they only found one who they intended to call at the beginning of the trial, but ultimately they did not call that expert, and it is obvious that that is because they knew that expert would not in fact help their case. We don't know why - it may be that some fatal flaw in their evidence emerged, it may be that the expert themselves changed their mind, who knows.

If it was as obvious as has been claimed on here that the prosecution expert evidence was so weak, it is reasonable to assume that, somehow or other, the relevant expert would have presented themselves - whether by writing a scientific paper, contacting the defence, or whatever. In the Sally Clark case, for instance, the defects in the statistical evidence came to light as a result of the publication of a public statement by the Royal Statistical Society expressing concern about the misuse of statistics in court, and their letter to the Lord Chancellor setting out what they calculations were wrong. But nothing like that has happened here.. Instead, we have a number of enthusiastic amateurs like the NYT journalist making wild claims about the evidence which just have not been borne out by the facts.

Gosh, wrong on all points. The author of the New Yorker - one of the more well-respected publications - article didn't make up a "bollocks conspiracy theory". If you had read the article, you would know she wrote:

To describe her experiences, I drew from more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts, which included police interviews and text messages, and from internal hospital records that were leaked to me.

Again, if you had read the article, you would know she has shown enormous sympathy for those babies; you would know the prosecution evidence was in fact weak; and you would know the defence expert was never called.

Michael Hall, the defense expert, had expected to testify at the trial—he was prepared to point to flaws in the prosecution’s theory of air embolism and to undetected signs of illness in the babies—but he was never called.

She absolutely has a right to appeal.

I've not read this in great detail but sort of parallels my thinking.

https://gill1109.com/category/lucy-letby/

It really has to be a certainty that the defence didn't call this witness because his evidence would not have helped and would probably have hindered Letby's case. The expert may well think he would have made a convincing witness, that doesn't mean he would. Letby's lawyers are bound by their duty of confidentiality and cannot explain their reasons, but you can bet this was not a decision they took lightly. Why do you think you know better than they do?

The jury knew about the criticisms of Evans' evidence in the previous case. They clearly didn't take the same view as you, and again just maybe they know more about it than you?

Not all the evidence available to the trial is online. It was pretty voluminous, and much of it is confidential medical records that can't be published. You also cannot look at those records in isolation, you have to look at the whole picture of all the evidence, not excluding Letby's own evidence.

Having read the article and especially the lack of scientific rigor in the theories put forward by doctors regarding air embolism and insulin, I think she should have been given the right to appeal.

It sounds like the babies were reaching the nurses in very poor shape following poor maternal care and there were then not enough nurses as well as doctors with the required clinical skills. This is acknowledged and the hospital no longer attempts to care for these babies which is an admission of sorts that they were unable to provide safe care at a systemic level.

It is interesting that the drop in deaths coincided with the hospital acknowledging that it couldn't provide safe care for babies as sick as those cared for by Lucy. Her departure may have had nothing to do with that.

I can imagine writing the kinds of things that Lucy wrote as notes if I was traumatised by hearing allegations. It's an odd but understandable response to control the pain by inflicting it. Especially with someone as impressionable as Lucy. She seems to have put all her eggs in one basket (her work) and was therefore vulnerable to losing the respect and acceptance of her colleagues.

It's also interesting that the unexplained deaths were cherry picked to coincide with Lucy's shifts and there were others which didn't; these weren't added to the diagram even after the error was highlighted.

Much was made of special 'codes' in Lucy's diary but any nurse knows what these abbreviations stand for and would also use them.

Lucy's habit of looking up patients seems in a different light if one considers that she seems to have made a habit of googling everyone she ever came into contact with. It is very surprising that no searches were found regarding anything that would point towards a plan to sabotage care. I find it really unlikely that someone as meticulous as Lucy would not research anything around this area before attempting to carry out a crime.

As tiny babies sometimes do die without a clear cause, it seems like it was very difficult for the defence to give evidence against the quality of the prosecution's evidence because the prosecution at least had 'the answer' as opposed to no answer - this is just a psychological trick because there unfortunately is sometimes no answer, or an answer that involves a string of events starting with labour that don't individually seem compelling taken separately.

The doctors involved were clearly emotional as many NHS doctors are - the downgrading of the hospital makes it likely that they were under considerable strain and would have been coping with the difficult experience of personally failing to save patients' lives or provide safe care. It is perhaps easier to believe tragic deaths are the work of one individual as it is a much cleaner explanation and locates blame outside the institution and the other medics.

I don't know if she is responsible but I think she deserves a retrial.

Honestly, posting "some links" is not going to be in any way comparable to being on a jury for ten months, seeing the documents, paying close attention to all the evidence, hearing how the witnesses and accused give evidence, and then spending days carefully examining all that evidence in order to give a verdict.

The links between the British main stream media and the case are very interesting as well - BBC documentaries were being made "ready to go" for a guilty verdict, Netflix documentaries and interviews putting the police and consultants in a very flattering light.

David Davies tried to raise the issue of why the New Yorker article was banned so strongly after publication.

If it's just a crank talking shit on the internet/silly American conspiracy theorist why take all that action?

A retrial will almost certainly end with the same verdict. There was masses and masses of medical evidence presented during the trial which largely disproves the idea that most of these babies were very sick babies who were declining due to substandard care.

They were very sick but for the most part were improving or stable until they very suddenly and unexpectedly weren’t. And even if they weren’t it doesn’t explain Letby deliberately falsifying medical records or provably lying to the court.

There is no certainty in the case: we were not on the defence team and can only speculate. Michael Hall himself does not know, so I am not sure why you claim to do so.

We can speculate that the defence may have thought an expert witness without a clear alternative cause of death would not have helped - but if so I think they are incorrect. Another medical opinion on the case was important. Particularly an expert explaining to the jury that Evans’ wild theories had no real evidence to support them; and that there were alternative explanations to account for the baby deaths - none of which were deemed suspicious at the time.

I’ve no idea why you’d think a KC and his team infallible. Various of my friend/family are KCs and I don’t hold them to be so.

By no means all the scientific data is published online but quite enough of it to see how deeply flawed it is.

The message to which I was responding alleged that one juror who had allegedly made up his or her mind in advance could have had a massive influence over their fellow jurors and thus led them to believe that there was no reasonable doubt that Letby was guilty. If they had such uncanny powers over at least nine strangers, how come those powers failed them in a number of cases?

But I have to say that I haven't been able to find any report about this juror so I'm sceptical that they even exist.

What evidence was falsified and what did she lie about?

It happens all too often that expert witnesses think that their evidence is strong when it just isn't. Does anyone remember that dodgy expert who turned up in one of the right to life cases who gave very confident evidence on behalf of the unfortunate parents who had put faith in him - till it turned out he had never even seen their child's notes? Suppose he hadn't been called, and had then gone whinging to some journalist that if only he had been, he would have made all the difference - that journalist would have had no way of knowing the fatal flaw in what he was claiming.

I deal with this more in the SEN world, and know of one expert whose reports always contained lots of convincing-looking graphs which worked quite well till someone got a maths expert to look at his graphs who then explained that they simply did not show what this person claimed; and another one who produced really convincing-looking reports till you had seen two or three of them and realised they were all more or less the same. Sadly it happens only too often that a bad expert is worse than no expert at all.

I deal with this more in the SEN world, and know of one expert whose reports always contained lots of convincing-looking graphs which worked quite well till someone got a maths expert to look at his graphs who then explained that they simply did not show what this person claimed; and another one who produced really convincing-looking reports till you had seen two or three of them and realised they were all more or less the same. Sadly it happens only too often that a bad expert is worse than no expert at all.

Did you read the article being discussed in this thread? What you have just described seems to describe the prosecution's case and their expert witness's testimony.

Both Gill's and his mate Sarrita Adams' views and writings on this case have been comprehensively debunked. The fact that the NYT article refers to them without explaining that fact massively devalues the whole thing, and I'm really surprised that the NYT entertained any of it given that major flaw.

Richard Gill (the guy I've linked to earlier, Dutch statistician who is a lot more eloquent than me) says he was basically physically visited by Dutch police and told he would be arrested if he entered the UK.

He's refused to back down or take down his blog.

His suggestion is that police and NHS trusts have had bad publicity for years (all public services are sadly to massive underfunding) and leapt on this to paint themselves as heroes.

Various investigations were happening into the failing unit and a problem simply was that the unit was completely understaffed and the consultants were rarely there.

Far from being a vulnerable underdog, one of the consultants was a regular participant in TV shows, so had links with the media.

Letby just worked a lot of shifts at that time, so the doctors produced this fairly inadequate "correlation" (the "smoking gun" data omits a lot of other factors which would put the events more into context).

If you go through it point by point, the "direct" medical evidence is non-existent or speculation or language like Paula Vennells uses. It looks like the doctors were trawling through the literature looking for any obscure paper to support their hypothesis.

There's a reference to skin discolouration which the original author has suggested it was interpreted incorrectly.

Hall says he does not know. You don't know whether that is actually true.

Letby's KC said at the beginning of the case he would be calling Hall. He had attended pre-trial discussions with other experts in the case in the capacity of an expert witness for the defence. Why do you think he and the rest of the team changed their minds if Hal was going to be such a convincing witness? I don't claim they were infallible, but I think it is much more likely than not that, given their experience and extensive knowledge of the case, they made a reasoned and logical decision about it. I also think that that is much more likely than your claim to the contrary based, it would appear, solely on having some KCs amongst your relatives and friends. After all, this decision would never have been down to one KC alone; if the other barrister and solicitors involved disagreed, ultimately they could have advised Letby to override him.

If you haven't seen all the data you really cannot claim that you know it is deeply flawed, especially as, judging by the reports, no-one has produced a reputable expert who has given new evidence to that effect on which any application for leave to appeal was based