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.

Why are you assuming no one else has? I’ve also listened to the podcast etc. In fact I used to think she was guilty too. I’m not even sure about her guilt/innocence now, but I am sure there are valid questions. The more people like you keep deflecting with “you just think she’s pretty!” (No one said that) or “the New Yorker is a tabloid rag!” (It isn’t) the more I start to worry that there are a LOT of people who are hugely emotionally invested in her being guilty, regardless of whether that will mean us all sleep walking into a situation where any one of us could be convicted on a while life order on very shaky evidence. It’s extremely unsettling. If you could engage in good faith and with a level head instead of slinging ad hominems and slurs it would be welcomed. We are all adults here after all.

I think it highlights how hugely flawed the case against her is.

It's a bit rude to accuse anyone interested in this of being part of the "Lucy Letby Fan Club" and then to say this is just outrageously rude:

I think people need to examine their own prejudice and realise just how much their beliefs are centered around looks.

Given I had no particular belief one way or another, and just assumed all the other news articles I read about her were accurate, and the evidence must be overwhelming, I was taken aback by some of the information presented in the article. But then I do also have a memory of other women falsely imprisoned on shoddy evidence - for example, Lindy Chamberlain, with a London "dingo expert", etc; and others mentioned previously on this thread.

Actually this thread is about her being denied an appeal, not about the article.

And I disagree that it isn’t based on looks. Of course it is

Maybe you should read the actual thread.

And it has been

She had a trial that lasted six month, with an incredibly trying defence team who were unable to put any expert witnesses forward who could counter the huge mountain of evidence against her.

IIRrC her psychology reports werent put forward as evidence either by her defence team?

I didn’t say the New Yorker is a ‘rag’. I just think the article is flawed and missing very relevant information.

So if Letby didn’t kill the babies - what happened? Who did it? Because there must have been LOADS ls staff in on a murder if it wasn’t her

It’s clearly about looks for you.

So - there’s plenty of people NOT wrongly jailed as well.

How was her case hugely flawed? She had a very fair trial and an extremely competent legal defence team.

I think the article we've been discussing outlines the flaws in the case fairly well.

I have no idea what your first sentence is supposed to mean.

I find it chilling too. It’s pure deflection and totally irrelevant to whether or not there are legitimate questions here. It’s unsettling and frustrating, but mostly unsettling. The integrity of our justice system matters hugely to all of us, and our children. It’s massively important that we be able to ask questions and hold it to a rigorous standard. It’s about much more than just Lucy Letby. The fact that people are attempting to shut that down by calling us “fans” and insinuating we love “baby killers” is symptomatic of the same sort of emotionally driven hysteria behind literal witch trials. It’s genuinely grim.

Where is the "huge wave of support"? I have been unable to find anything in the national response even hinting at support?

The incorrect intubation that led to death in that baby’s case was sadly not the only case of negligence. I mentioned upthread there was another contemporaneous case where doctors incorrectly treated a baby who was being transferred to Alder Hey hospital. This was discovered and corrected by the Alder Hey team - but too late to save the baby from developing cerebral palsy. That case cost the hospital around £7 million in damages. What would have happened if that baby had not be transferred to a more experienced team? Would anyone have noticed the mistakes?

According Royal College of Paediatrics report, there was a locum doctor nurses repeatedly flagged concerns about - who was allowed to continue on the wards nonetheless.

Who are the doctors responsible for these mistakes? What other mistakes did they make?

You didn’t say that, but others have. Have you read the rest of the thread? It seems not.

It has not been forensically established that anyone murdered those babies. The deaths were originally listed as natural causes. The 1989 paper on which the air embolism in neonates evidence was based was written by a man who says this case does not fit with the presentation (rashes etc) of neonatal air embolisms. The lab that did the insulin test on two baby’s samples said that their test is not forensic and can return false positives so any positive result should be subject to a more rigorous test before any attempt is made to use the result forensically.

In addition neither of the supposedly insulin poisoned babies died and there was a third baby who returned a positive insulin lab result from the same lab in the same period, but that baby was not included in LL’s case as she was not working at the time.

It is possible that no one killed those babies. It is possible that they died from natural causes (as it was believed they had for years) in a hospital that was understaffed, under pressure, and already making big mistakes.

It’s possible that she did do it, sure, I make no claim either way. We should, however, be able to ask questions and hold the justice system we all live under to account if we wish without being monstered and silenced with silly statements like “you just think she’s pretty” when none of us have said anything of the sort and there are genuine issues being discussed.

Look hard enough and Lucy fan club members are everywhere

Quite! The British tabloid press are very good at following public mood. It’s their bread and butter. If there was such a wave of support we would see it in Daily Mail headlines, but we don’t. We instead see the same “baby killer!” hysteria that’s being parroted here.

What Lucy Letby was convicted for was absolutely appalling and rightly provokes a visceral reaction of disgust. However, the alternative - ie that the deaths were a result of systemic understaffing and incompetence/negligence (plus a miscarriage of justice) - remains even worse. Easier for the deaths to be a murder by an evil or unwell woman than a systematic failure that put all babies t risk in that unit and other similarly affected maternity and neonatal services

How does incompetence lead to an unnatural amount of insulin on a baby’s bloodstream though? Or a healthy baby on the verge of being discharged suddenly becoming mottled and dying?

I agree. Like many others I don't have an opinion on her guilt or innocence and I too assumed she was probably guilty before I started looking into it. After reading about it and listening to the podcast (long before the New Yorker article) I just didn't think the evidence of her guilt was compelling and I had lots of questions.

I was surprised her defence only called one witness and would liked to have been a fly in the wall when they were discussing the defence strategy. Even if the evidence had been more convincing I would have expected them to call more witnesses. I find it all quite strange.

I didn't give her age, sex or hair colour a thought.

Why are you ignoring facts already raised in response to your questions about this? The insulin test came from a lab who categorically state that it is not a forensic test and can return false positives. You are supposed to take samples for a further more accurate test if this test returns a positive, particularly if you have concerns of such a serious nature. The doctor who wrote the paper upon which the neonatal air embolism evidence was based has said that these cases do not fit with his research on air embolism in neonates.

If babies were routinely dying somewhere I was working, I would not leave myself exposed to potential accusations. I would want protocol to be changed and if this wasn't possible, I would insist on a minuted meeting with my managers and log everything in detail at the end of every shift. I wouldn't blindly keep going, on shift alone with babies, with access to lethal medicines.

With the benefit of hindsight given to us by this case I think most of us would agree.

Arse covering isn't a new concept though. It happens everywhere. Procedures in place so that no one can raid the stationery cupboard without signing out a biro. Without stating the bleeding obvious, there was much, much more at stake here.

Do we have any other examples of wards with high mortality like in this case recently? I’m assuming there is an average that is monitored nationally before flags get raised.

1 A contaminated blood sample, 2. A false positive reading, 3. Insulin given by mistake. (Medical error is the third highest cause of death in the US). Neonate c peptide kinetics are relatively unstudied because serial sampling isn’t practically or ethically possible. They differ significantly from adults though.

When wards are over-stretched key observations are overlooked, and that can lead to patients being discharged when they shouldn’t be.

Lucy Letby, regardless of whether you think she’s guilty or innocent or are unsure, was definitely not someone who was prone to arse covering. If she was she would never have done half the things she actually did. Even, or especially, the most villainous version of her. It’s clear that she was very naive. This is particularly true if she is guilty. By no means is she a master schemer.