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 new yorker article leaves a lot of stuff out that was covered in the documentary about it, she's guilty.

if anything she's guilty of more than she's been accused of.

there is 0 room for doubt by anyone who has any sense of logic or science.

On what grounds put forward by the defence do you think leave to appeal should have been given?

You don't have to be.

The jury are the ones who sat through ten months of harrowing evidence day in, day out.

And they were.

Yes, it does show that the jury thought the case hadn't been proved beyond reasonable doubt in some cases. Which seems to me to demonstrate the great care they took with each individual charge, and therefore strengthens the reliability of the convictions where they found the charges to be proved.

That rather depends upon whether the directions given to the jury were correct and whether the evidence was put forward with honesty and integrity, and whether all kinds of legal process and procedure was correctly followed.

You only have to look at a few miscarriages of justice to see that it really isn't that simple.

I am not saying she didn't do it but there is an appeals process for a reason and we should respect that.

Don't forget many of those sub postmasters were found guilty by a jury who heard the evidence.

Just said on 10 o'clock news reporting is restricted as she is to face a retrial on the murder of one baby the jury was unable to reach a verdict on. It must be torture for the parents. I saw a documentary and was totally convinced of her guilt,.Senior doctors were gagged and threatened by management when they voiced their concerns.

Letby took and passed a training course allowing her administer medicine via cannula two weeks before the death of her first victim. During that course the dangers of air embolus were highlighted, as is routine for such training. She didn't need to google it.

When asked about her knowledge of air embolism, she said in evidence that she was only aware of them in adults. However, in a workbook about blood transfusions, she answered a question asking about potential complications of having a UAC/UVC line in place, and he gave the example of air embolism. Those initials stand for umbilical arterial and venous catheters, i.e. they relate to babies. So she lied about her knowledge.

Why did the babies stop dying when she was removed? It can't have been a coincidence.

Let's not forget Sally Clark

A jury heard all the extensive evidence regarding the death of her babies too. She was the only person present when they died.

She was found guilty and her first appeal was unsuccessful. She was ultimately acquitted because the evidence the expert gave was flawed.

Miscarriages of justice happen.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the American reporter doesn't fully understand the English legal system, and what is suggested to be subterfuge and red tape are in fact standard precautions to ensure a fair trial, particularly in retain to the charge on which Letby is due to be retried.

She received a fair trial. Her defence has put the strongest points to the contrary that they can find to an entirely separate court which would not hesitate to give leave to appeal if they felt the trial was unfair. Clearly they didn't.

What do you claim to know that they and the jury do not?

The right verdict was reached in the trial. The decision to give a guilty verdict wasn't taken lightly at all. She deserves to rot in jail for the rest of her life for what she did to those poor babies and the lifelong suffering inflicted on the families

Why did the babies stop dying when she was removed? It can't have been a coincidence.

It wasn't. At around the same time that LL was removed from clinical duties, there was an enquiry which revealed that the unit was understaffed. As a result of the enquiry, the unit stopped providing intensive care, and women delivering before 32/40 were sent to a different hospital. So the babies that came into the unit after that had a much higher chance of survival from the outset.

Also, the enquiry found that the higher death rate of babies in the hospital in 2015 wasn't just restricted to the neonatal unit, there was a higher rate of stillbirths on the maternity ward.

Everyone quoting and linking to this New Yorker piece is potentially prejudicing a criminal trial. It's embargoed for a reason.

It’s bizarre to me that some of the comments here read as if juries can’t get it wrong. The recent show with two juries seeing the same evidence and coming to two totally different conclusions, with much of their process showing how much group think and peer pressure comes into play, really hits home about how utterly flawed a jury system is. That’s not to say it isn’t the best we currently have, but best doesn’t mean infallible.

Personally, I think there is a lot of doubt in the LL case. There is seemingly no motive and no direct evidence, with plenty of potential incorrect conclusions.

I also think this will end up going down as a miscarriage of justice down the line.

Those are completely different cases, but nice try.

I think that perception that all the babies were enormously fragile is one of the misconceptions that surround this case. In most cases they were not. The unit didn't take really sick babies, it was a level 2 unit. It is level 3 and 4 units which take "enormously fragile" babies: level 2 units are basically special care nurseries who need a bit of an eye kept on them but who are fully expected to survive and do well. That was one reason why concerns were raised - these were babies most of whom were expected to spend a few days in the unit before going home, and who were doing well - until they suddenly crashed and became seriously ill or died - and this was happening over and over again.

I think sooner or later she will be removed from prison to somewhere like Broadmoor or Rampton, she has some kind of mental health problem, a personality disorder maybe. All the stuff she wrote about being evil, the stalking of victims families, the wanting to be an angel of mercy in trying to save the babies after she had caused them to become ill in the first place, the fixation on the doctor whose attention she was trying to attract by doing what she did.

I am also not convinced LL is guilty.

She was one of only 3 FT nurses in the unit and the one who volunteered for the most overtime, so it actually makes sense that she would be on shift for the "suspicious events". But in fact that widely circulated diagram with an X under LL's name for all of them, does not include all the deaths on the unit. If it did, it would not look so damning. There were also 27 other suspicious events that weren't included. One baby on that diagram died 3 minutes into LL's shift, but the baby had already deteriorated before LL arrived.

The insulin cases were charged as attempted murders but both babies recovered.

The judge told the jury they could still find LL guilty even if they didn't know how the babies were killed. One jury member admitted that they'd already decided LL was guilty before they heard the evidence.

Suspecting that a conviction might be unsafe is not the same as supporting a child murderer.

Unsafe conviction is the worst possible outcome outcome of a trial so it's imperative to avoid it.

But neither of those are new pieces of information. The defence said they were going to call their own expert at the beginning of the case, and then didn't call him. That can only have been because they realised the expert's evidence wasn't going to help their case, and almost certainly would have helped to convict Letby.

The application to throw out Evans' evidence was fully reported at the time. I strongly suspect it formed part of the appeal grounds as they are said to relate to applications which the judge didn't accede to, and if so it appears that the Court of Appeal judges consider the judge didn't get that wrong.

Clearly the numerous experts involved in this case didn't see what you see. Do your qualifications outweigh theirs? When did you see the medical evidence in this case?

This may have been grounds for the "not proven" verdict they have in the Scottish legal system. I do think of the two other nurses in similar situations that had to have this whole song and dance done before being acquitted. I can't say the NHS, in its present state, isn't going to be chock full of possible negligence on a criminal scale.

The reasons in this case will be shared with the public. The problem with giving them now is that they may prejudiced Letby's fair retrial in the Baby K case. There is nothing mysterious or underhand about this. Presumably if her lawyers think that the full judgements should be released and that they won't prejudice her trial, they are free to say so and apply for publication.

The decision puts to an end her current right of appeal. It does not stop her from applying again in the event of new evidence coming to light in the future, and no-one has suggested that it would.

But in fact that widely circulated diagram with an X under LL's name for all of them, does not include all the deaths on the unit. If it did, it would not look so damning.

In academia, we'd call that omission of data points that don't support our hypothesis "cherrypicking the results" and, if discovered, it would result in papers being rejected and retracted. It's unethical and just plain bad science.

See also: correlation does not prove causality.

My god, there are some seriously hard of thinking posters on this thread. Shrieking evil and child murderer without any real thoughts beyond that. Terrifying to think people like that end up on juries.

I followed the case closely and always thought she could be innocent. Totally agree that in however many years it'll probably be revealed as a huge miscarriage of justice.