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 article doesn't say that juror admitted that they had already decided LL was guilty before hearing all the evidence. What it says is:

Toward the end of the trial, the court received an e-mail from someone who claimed to have overheard one of the jurors at a café saying that jurors had “already made up their minds about her case from the start.” Goss reviewed the complaint but ultimately allowed the juror to continue serving.

So all that happened was that someone claimed to have heard a juror allegedly saying that some jurors had made up their minds about the case from the start. We don't even know whether the conversation happened or, if it did, whether it was actually a juror who was speaking. If it did happen, it's hardly surprising that Goss let the juror continue serving as the individual juror wasn't claiming that he or she had made up his or her mind before hearing the evidence.

This is another aspect which makes me wonder about the fact checking. The implication seems to be that the juror should have been dismissed, but the author seem to have misinterpreted the report that she is quoting.

Pulling that article doesn't help her to have a fair trial.

There's no blocks on any other articles about her, the ones which say she did it and she took pleasure from killing babies, the only block is on one that puts forward the idea that it may have been a miscarriage of justice/cover up.

Perhaps you could direct me to the part of the article where the author "cites" this report?

I read the New Yorker article as I’m outside the UK. I think there is a decent chance this is an unsafe conviction. I hope there are people who will campaign on her behalf for a new trial. Historically this takes a long time so she will spend many years in gaol in the meantime.

What is this “wildly inaccurate” report you claim they cite?

I thought the cited report was in fact a report that cites "wild innaccuracies" in the statistical analysis used in other convictions, including Letby's.

Is it Richard Gill and the other ...Sarita I think?

Can someone say why they think these two are "wildly inaccurate"?

This letter which the police insisted was hand delivered to his home has requested Gill take his blog down, but doesn't say why.

Saying "well known cranks and everyone who disagrees like baby murderers" doesn't make sense.

I'm genuinely interested as I only found them yesterday. I am fairly proficient at science and data analysis, so I am sure someone can explain and I can respond

(Stuck at home with whooping cough except it isn't whooping cough as we're not allowed to say because the NHS doesn't want to record cases).

From Gills blog, he's stated that he was visited at home by Dutch police officers passing on this fairly ominous letter...he was happy to engage but obviously this looks a bit heavy handed.

https://gill1109.com/2023/09/20/contempt-of-court/

(Got to love an oblivious maths guy).

Here's a quote from Richard Gill.

"Cheshire Constabulary kept a close eye on social media and dedicated websites and became more and more active in trying to suppress any support of the defence of Lucy Letby, though all those Twitter users calling for the return of hanging and for Lucy to be assassinated as soon as possible in the most horrific way, were presumably encouraged by Cheshire Constabulary.

Around May, while the trial still had a few months to run, the police apparently started to become nervous. Threatening emails were sent to myself, Peter Elston, and to Sarrita Adams, telling us that our websites must be taken down and links to those sites on social media should be removed."

The New Yorker, which is widely respected internationally and has almost a hundred years of solid investigative journalism behind it? The New Yorker, which is particularly lauded for its rigorous fact checking process? Are you thinking of some other publication? The Daily Mail or the Weekly World News perhaps?

Attempting to smear a publication like the New Yorker, as if they would tank their long held reputation in the field of journalism for Lucy Letby just makes you look irrational and a bit panicky. Every time someone tries to smear the New Yorker like this it simply further entrenches the (rather unsettling) impression that there are a lot of people heavily emotionally invested in her being guilty. People who simply do not want to entertain any possibility of an unsafe conviction no matter what the cost is, even if it means sleep walking into a future where any one of us might be wrongly convicted and have no recourse.

Argue against the points raised all you like, but pretending the New Yorker is a tabloid rag that we all should ignore is just plain silly.

This is on David Davies raising the question on the article in Parliament.

Comments section has more links.

That article is very well written and summarises in a much better way than I ever could why I have always felt this is a miscarriage of justice having followed the trial very closely. It's unbelievable that she's been convicted of such serious crimes on such flimsy "evidence".

I found this of interest:

Unlucky numbers: Fighting murder convictions that rest on shoddy stats | Science | AAAS

The electric chair or hanging would be too good for her.

It wasn't statistics that convicted her. It was the injection of babies with air or insulin. If she didn't do it who did. It was proved beyond doubt it was her IMHO. But I wasn't on the jury and neither were those folk supporting her. Doctors were threatened because they voiced their concerns. It was a very safe conviction .

What I'm saying is i think there are miscarriages of justices against other groups (BAME, men, old haggard folk!) where people don't care

The Birminham Six and Guildford Four had a lot of supporters and were not young pretty women. Many of the sub-postmasters in the Horizon scandal were BAME and/or male and a lot of people are concerned about that miscarriage of justice.

Whilst not a miscarriage of justice, the Windrush lost boarding pass scandal was an abuse of State power that, by its nature, exclusively affected Black people, and there was public outcry about that.

But all of those were groups of people and none were about the death of babies?

I do take the point that maybe I am overly cynical from the various replies. But equally, I don't think people would be rallying around (for e.g.) a male nurse convicted of killing multiple babies. I just don't. I don't think these articles looking to see if justice has been served would even exist if it was an immigrant nurse who had been convicted. I simply don't think people would have had an appetite to go looking for contrary evidence, I think the courts decision would have been accepted far more readily by the masses and the effort to find a potentially contrary position would not have been made.

But reality is, I'll never know if I'm right or wrong, as it's such a unique case - thankfully, there aren't too many serial killers out there, especially of babies!

Totally off the point but Cheshire police have a specially created hummingbird logo/ printed stationery for this?

The dynamic with Dr Bawa Garba (if she's a consultant now Ms or Mrs?) was similar.

• Working in what someone described as a "perfect storm" of conditions...

• May have made some errors of judgement, which the working conditions/systemic failure strongly exacerbated.

• Very very sadly, a child died whilst she was the (incredibly stressed, overworked) person in charge.

Her consultant and hospital then pushed to create a case for a manslaughter charge and get her struck off. Subsequently overturned after a campaign.

Unfortunately I think the media was encouraging the family of the poor young boy to push for punishment, which wasn't really helpful to them or anyone (but stories like this sell papers and get viewers clicking).

And don't forget these systemic NHS failures she was working under have either continued or are worse now....

Non-white lady wearing a headscarf, other doctors supported her and crowdfunded a significant amount for her appeal costs, I recall seeing posts flashing up on here and on social media.

Long supportive posts and messages from white posh Cambridge educated doctors (on my socials) explaining why they supported her.

@PufferBees There is a significant difference in that case between the Doctor and Nurse involved in the case - the nurse was struck off by the NMC but the Dr was not removed from the medical register.

https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2019/04/17/sacrificing-the-career-of-an-otherwise-competent-and-useful-doctor-nurse-doctor-differences-after-gross-negligence-manslaughter/

It's also interesting that Doctors tend to support each other whereas nurses are known to 'eat their young'

I think because of how many years LL's name was in the media before the trial, this prejudiced her case hugely.

It isn’t actually evidentially established that anyone injected air or insulin into those babies. Originally they were all ruled as natural deaths. Murder was decided years after they died, and on very shaky ground.

The expert who wrote the 1989 study upon which the whole air embolism idea rested himself has said on record that these deaths did not match air embolism. The laboratory who returned those insulin tests said on record that their test was only indicative of the possibility and shouldn’t be used forensically. There is a further forensic insulin test the samples should have been sent for, especially when accusing someone of something like this, but that step wasn’t taken.

Furthermore, neither of the supposedly insulin poisoned babies died and there was a third baby who also returned the same result from that lab but that case was not included in the evidence against her. Funny enough Lucy Letby was not working when this baby’s sample was taken.

I always assumed she was guilty and never really thought much about it until I saw this article (on holiday abroad at the time so could access it) and then dug further. Far from being a safe conviction it is potentially one of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern British history. This should matter to all of us. Our justice system needs to be rigorous and accountable for all of our sakes.

@Ohfuckrucksack

I did wonder that, as like you say there was a nurse involved too.

One doesn't really hear her perspective and I don't believe she appealed.

It does look with LL like there may have been a thorough campaign to squash any voices who might offer any alternatives to the opinions of the consultants on the ward and Dewi Evans.

I think there definitely were a few doctors whose names were specifically heading the Dr Bawa-Garba fundraiser, but from my recall the support was pretty much unanimous for her from medics.

Like you say one wonders what the difference with nurses is. If there's any nurses who want to comment I'd be interested.

I think theres someone on Gills site who suggests everyone is scared to speak up (Gill is retired and lives abroad and can't be sacked) but I guess people need to come to their own judgement on things.

I followed the trial to some degree and came to these conclusions at the time.

It is not just that there is no hard evidence linking LL to the collapses or deaths, there is no hard evidence of the use of insulin or air embolism in any of the cases. These are simply theories applied retrospectively with little to support them and as such represent very bad science.

The man who devised the test for insulin, Professor Vincent Marks - who was until retirement a leading expert in diabetes and vice-chairman of the Royal College of Pathologists, who appeared as an expert witness in some high profile criminal trials involving insulin - said that high insulin readings should never been taken in isolation due to the possibility of false positives.

If they found high insulin levels in a baby that was not on insulin, you would think they would have repeated the test to confirm this wasn't a lab error, repeated the test later to confirm the levels were dropping, and investigated why this happened.

But they didn't do any of that. They just ignored it. Why? Either the medics are completely incompetent, or they didn't think the result was significant. Who took the blood? What method was used?

The expert who wrote the 1989 study upon which the whole air embolism idea rested himself has said on record that these deaths did not match air embolism

Science has moved on rather a lot since 1989, and the problem with this homicide method for tiny babies is that it would obviously be wholly unethical to experiment to research it properly. The scientific link between the use of air embolism and the splinting, mottling, breathing distress and other symptoms recorded was explained and wasn't contradicted by expert evidence to the contrary.

I think they didn't repeat it because the babies got better.