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.

That is because the medics who compiled the list selected only the “incidents” when LL was on shift. They did not include “incidents” when she was not on shift, or “incidents” involving mishaps by doctors. How are these incidents being defined? Why are those involving doctors not included?

If we had a full list of all of those the case would look very different.

I think the discussions above and the New Yorker article which people can access in the UK with a little effort really do show that a reasonable doubt is creeping into this conviction.

I feel for the families of the babies who now possibly are possibly having flickers of doubt about the whole legal process as well as processing the immeasurable pain of their losses. Technical arguments about statistics and sub optimal medical practice will be hard to absorb.

There would not be such doubt about other child serial killers e.g. Hindley and West and maybe the public narrative has to subtly change given some of these doubts. One thing that has always alarmed me is that no motivation was forthcoming and there was no diagnosis of any sort of mental health problem or personality disorder that could possibly explain the behaviour.

Yes because Child E had died at that point.

The doctor for the prosecution tried to make out that no insulin was ordered at the time for any of the babies....but yet Child Fs twin was, and had been up until the day before when he died, Was there any extra insulin left? And if so was it disposed of correctly? We don't know because they didn't clarify any of that.

I keep thinking if the unit Drs got a feeling about her that must be based on something but then if there was no scapegoat they'd also have been held accountable when the inevitable enquiry into why there were so many poor outcomes happened.

I don't understand how anyone would think that accusing a colleague of being a serial killer would somehow be easier than dealing with an internal inquiry/exec oversight of/quality improvement for a poorly performing unit. This sort of performance management is really not that unusual in NHS trusts and very rarely are there any heads on the block.

The New Yorker article covers no new ground and misses out loads of evidence. You could write an article to make anyone seem innocent if you miss the evidence out.

In order to have opinion, people need to read and understand all the medical records. This is why both the defence and prosecution had access to medical advisers. The fact that people can read an article and decide all the legal and medical experts are all incompetent is ridiculous.

Details of "incidents" outside the indictment have not been released to the public, so no one can knows anything about them.

I really hope none of the families have been upset by this thread. They have suffered enough.

It wasn't supposed to be or trying to be objective.
And likewise you could write an article to make anyone seem guilty if you miss the evidence out.

The defence had access to the medical records and didn't seem to bother doing anything with them.

As for the families being upset I don't think anyone wants that, however I would imagine some of the families still believe that there was a lot of failings at the hospital even without a serial killer so I don't think the verdicts were the end of it for them. There are also the families of those who got Not guilty verdicts, or no verdicts, they will still want answers. The trial was not the end.

I doubt it tbh.
I'm not from the UK so wouldn't apply to me anyway but I would say that in a couple of decades time if there are strong grounds for appeal pushed by experts/scientists etc that then perhaps UK citizens could help to put pressure on them to have an appeal

I also don't think it would be the right time for a successful appeal anyway, If she's innocent then I think she's going to be in jail for a long time before she's out.

She used the same defence team for her appeal application, and they're beyond useless so if there is scope for the citizens to push for an appeal I would wait until she has a new defence team.

It's going to be very very interesting to see how her defence handles the retrial. As I said previously I can't see Letby taking the stand again so does that mean the defence are going to call no one?

In order to have opinion, people need to read and understand all the medical records. This is why both the defence and prosecution had access to medical advisers. The fact that people can read an article and decide all the legal and medical experts are all incompetent is ridiculous.

I followed the trial and I read through the evidence. Anyone who is vaguely scientifically literate, who can understand the evidence, can see there are serious problems with the quality of it.

Now you might not understand that the evidence is poor quality, and that’s ok. You may not be able to distinguish between hard evidence and theory and opinion. You may not understand why there are articles and blogs expressing deep concern about the case. But please understand this: the NYer article merely highlighted existing concerns it is not the cause of them.

In a democratic society it is extremely important that people have a right to hold their justice system to high account. Attempting to shut down such conversations with emotional blackmail (by invoking the idea of upset parents) is insidious and presumptive. All of us in the UK are affected by flaws in the system. All of us have a right to think about, talk about, and examine cases that interest us. In any case you have no idea how the parents feel in light of the NYer article, but regardless, as I say, we ALL have a right to discuss this case without cloying attempts to shut us down with emotional blackmail.

As to the rest of your comment, the article very much does cover new ground. That’s a trivially wrong statement to make. Furthermore, the writer had access to every day of court transcripts (at the cost of $100 per day of the trial), plus something like 7000 medical and other documents - certainly more than any of us as individuals had access to. The writer was examining evidence overlooked in the trial, not presenting all of the various arguments of the trial (I don’t know why you keep acting like that version of the article would be a valuable or even desirable piece of investigative journalism. It isn’t how IV works). The New Yorker had two fact checkers allocated to working alongside the journalist, support from the editor of the New Yorker (again, one of the most highly regarded investigative journalism publications in the world), and a long period of research before publishing the piece. The fact that it is a thoughtful and valuable piece of journalism isn’t in question by anyone who knows what they are talking about.

How did you have access to all the evidence, including confidential medical records?

What is the evidence for that?

Every investigation has to have a starting point. It's hardly surprising. It would be ludicrous for those responsible for the investigation to ignore that starting point, but it doesn't mean they take it as gospel. We know that hospital investigators did the reverse - their starting point was that it was nothing more than coincidence. They presented the case to the police with their starting point that this was not adequate evidence, and the police took it from there. The police went to great efforts to ensure that each incident was investigated separately and individually, so that again the statistics were taken off the table as a starting point.

It's very convenient to assume that the process was the reverse, but it just isn't what actually happened.

The evidence presented to the trial.

Well yes. That's kind of my point. In order to accuse someone of that you'd have to have be really sure. A really strong gut feeling, but would that really be enough? We've already seen that there's big problems with the shift stats they compiled. The Drs had no other evidence other than their own suspicions. I'm thinking it's a possibility Drs convinced themselves it was a malevolent force rather than exceptionally, horribly shit practice. I don't know how being involved in a maternity ward scandal akin to Shrewsbury would affect someone's career..let alone mental wellbeing. Knowing that collectively they caused lots of babies to die completely unnecessarily. Maybe that would be enough of a motive to look elsewhere and find a convenient explanation. To me the strongest evidence against LL is that her colleagues suspected her. But when you pull it apart does it really stand up? That's what I'm pondering.

What evidence have you seen, and how?

The spreadsheet is a self selection of all the incidents LL was present at. No incidents involving death or injury or mistake by doctors on the spreadsheet. No spreadsheet of total incidents over the period. 4 “unusual” deaths not brought to trial. We need the data on them to compare.

You’re simply proving the point.

I’m not assuming anything. This is what happened. The police used the doctors who had already decided, based on misuse of stats, that Letby was the target suspect, to gather further evidence for them. Even discounting the misuse of stats in this case there are lots of other issues too - the reliance on the inconclusive insulin test, the total lack of scientific basis for the air embolus diagnosis, the fact that all of this is being investigated years after the babies had died and ruled as natural deaths with post mortems for almost all of them etc etc.

All the evidence discussed at the trial was typed up as a live feed by the Chester Standard every day. Possibly not word for word but very good in depth summaries.

example here https://www.chesterstandard.co.uk/news/23351305.recap-lucy-letby-trial-tuesday-february-28/

the journalist was there every day.
Afaik that’s as much as anyone would have seen/heard? But it’s pretty thorough.

That is one piece of paper drawn up for the purposes of the original investigation. What is your evidence that no-one ever looked at other incidents?

The thing is, of course, that it takes us nowhere anyway. As people keep pointing out, deaths and serious incidents will happen in neo-natal units. They may happen because of understaffing, poor equipment, mistakes by other staff or whatever. If you can point to some incidents for which Letby cannot have been responsible, and/or some for which there is not enough evidence to justify a prosecution, it still doesn't mean that she could not be responsible for the charges for which she was found guilty, or even that it casts reasonable doubt on her guilt.

Sef-evidently, it's not as much as the jury saw and heard.

As per evidence cited by the prosecution - Stephen Brearley created the table showing LL on shift for certain collapses and deaths in February 2016. The doctors on the wards are missing from the table.

The group of consultants who reported her to the police gave them details of the times she had been on the ward and the files on deaths and incidents - specifically only those at which Lucy had been present.

For there to be a proper and thorough police investigation, everyone who worked on the ward should have been a potential suspect, including the very doctors who defined the terms of the police investigation!

It is most irregular for the persons reporting a crime to be excluded from an investigation before it has even started.

As per FOI requests and statistical analysis by scientists, it turns that the rate of “incidents” (ie collapses and deaths) is equally high when LL is not on the ward as when she is.

This increased rate returned to normal after the unit was down-graded, the drains were rebuilt, & a senior consultant retired - all of which happened shortly after the police investigation started. Interestingly the rate of still-births and miscarriages followed the same pattern.

I live overseas so most of this case passed me by at the time. I've come to it just recently as a result of MN threads.

Listened to all of The Trial podcast and now working my way through "We Need to talk about Lucy Letby".

Wow. The latter podcast is convinced it is a miscarriage of justice. Hosted by a statistician and a medic. Very interesting: has anyone else listened?

I agree and would add that it is most irregular for potential suspects to be the decision makers regarding what is an incident and what isn't. Every death or deterioration should have been assessed by an independent third party with the appropriate expertise and that this party should not have been given information about whether Lucy Letby was involved in their care. But even then one would have to assume the medical notes were accurate.