We need to talk about Lucy Letby

[HardwickHall]

As the “Lucy Letby denied leave to appeal” thread has filled up, I thought I’d start another thread to discuss the case, hopefully for discussion of the trial, evidence, prosecution and defence etc rather than fact free frothing.

I’ve just listened to episode 15 of “We Need To Talk About Lucy Letby” where they discuss the New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv and specifically the problems with the roster data table which was shown (several times as I understand it) by the prosecution during the trial. It’s quite shocking actually. Recommended listening.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/we-need-to-talk-about-lucy-letby/id1736761161?i=1000658160398

It's pretty basic, they decide to charge her based on the merits of each case, whether it's in the public interest, and also based the views of the police on each case, and taking into account the views of the parents of the babies.

Can you explain that a bit more please?

I don’t have a strong view either way. But I would like to know if she was working/caring for those other 10 babies. Do they think she probably killed them too and there wasn’t evidence ? or that they died of other causes?

I’m so unsure how I feel about this. So many times when I was in nicu if ds alarms sounded the nurses would silence them ? We were obviously there but they did it a lot. Sometimes they tickled his feet if needed but 9/10 they watched him a bit and made sure cpap/ prongs were all in ok (when. He had nasal prongs they came out a lot) but they kept turning alarms off and for other babies too yet in these cases it’s portrayed as evil behaviour and we saw it daily . I just feel like I’m very unsure over all this with LL

Letby found guilty of a further attempted murder. That's two juries who've had to be convinced of her intent to harm babies.

I hope this verdict brings some peace and closure to the family of Baby K.

A 2 hour old baby . By this time she had murdered five babies and attempted to murder three others. Like any serial killer, she was definitely escalating, this time targeting the youngest and most defenceless baby.

I'm not in the profession but the way I see it as CPS use public funds, which are not unlimited, so they need to conduct a legal test for proceeding with prosecutions.

For the initial trial, they prosecuted the Letby cases that they had the best evidence for. And similarly for the retrials, they carried out the legal test to see which cases they should proceed with for a retrial.

They’ve released why they refused her appeal

www.judiciary.uk/judgments/r-v-letby-3/

Oh I’ve misread it. The juror’s girlfriend was assaulted by a cafe owner over payment of a phone and it looks like said cafe owner made the accusation that the juror was blabbing about the case and verdicts 😯

It can't be too unusual, as I was just reading the other day about the man who's currently standing trial for the Holly Willoughby kidnap plot. His previous convictions for false imprisonment and attempted kidnap were revealed to the jury.

As I understand it ,the prosecution can bring evidence of other convictions if it is probative of a propensity to commit the type of crime in question. The rules around it are complex but presumably it was accepted on that basis here.

Well either way, I think her defence was absolute rubbish. Not to bring up the other deaths that she wasn’t associated with or the report into the hospital that listed so many issues with staffing and expertise. She may or may not be guilty but I don’t think based on the trial it’s a safe conviction.

Interesting article on BBC website by Judith Moritz on Lucy Letby today. I'd say it was the most sympathetic article I've ever read about a convicted multiple murderer.

Yes. Interesting to read that one of the experts whose research was relied on by the prosecution during the trial (regarding air embolisms) appeared for the defence during the appeal. He effectively said his research had been misapplied and none of the babies showed the specific type of skin discolouration which occurs with air embolism, as the prosecution alleged.

Having read the reasoning behind the refusal of an appeal, I was prompted to go looking for the following

https://nation.cymru/news/the-welsh-doctor-whose-evidence-convicted-baby-killer-lucy-letby/

This is almost a year old but seems to suggest that the case was built backwards. Normally, the police identify suspect(s), build a case and (in cases where the only evidence is circumstantial) find expert witnesses to support the prosecution case.

According to this article, Dr Dewi Evans put himself forward

“Since 2013 I’ve been involved with a couple of dozen cases for police authorities via the National Crime Agency, so my name was well known to them, and I thought this was a case that I was suited to. I had the clinical experience, because I had been involved with the care of babies from my mid-20s, throughout my professional career, and in addition I was familiar with the medical legal system, so this was my kind of case.”

He then received the medical notes - with no suggestion of a suspect -

He said he had got involved in the case in May 2017, and told Cheshire Police not to tell him if they suspected anyone of being responsible for criminality: “In other words, I wanted to investigate the cause of the deaths of these babies. I was not there to investigate the crime.

Some of these cases you could understand why the babies had died.

“Other babies collapsed in my opinion as a result of someone injecting loads and loads of milk, or milk and air, directly to the stomach.

“Other babies collapsed in my opinion as a result of someone injecting loads and loads of milk, or milk and air, directly to the stomach.

Dr Evans said he had sent the reports to Cheshire Police and told them they needed to look at the duty rosters for each of the events, to see which nurses and which doctors had been on duty at the times when the babies were harmed.

So Dr Evans identified cases that he considered suspicious. The police then joined the dots, cherry-picking pieces of evidence that fitted Dr Evans' theories and isolated a single defendant. In court Dr Evans then acted as an Expert Witness to confirm theories that he had supplied to police before they had specific crimes to prosecute and anyone to accuse.

Like others here, I can't say that Lucy Letby is innocent, but it does appear to me that an extraordinary series of events suggest that justice has not been seen to be done.

Ben Myers had neonatalist, Dr Michael Hall, guiding him through the trial. He didn’t call him to give evidence because Hall, himself, stated he could only say he didn’t know how the babies died. “I don’t know” is hardly helping the defence case is it? And would most likely get Myers in trouble with the Judge for wasting Court time.

All of the babies who died, bar one, had post mortems that were accepted and uncontroversial until Lucy Letby was suspected of murder based on a schoolboy’s error in understanding statistics. One baby did not have a post mortem at all because the consultant on duty felt secure that NEC was the cause and advised against it. She changed her opinion, years later, only after Letby had been well and truly turned into a folk devil.

All of those post mortems were done by a pathologist of esteem at Alder Hey - who had the opportunity that the prosecution experts did not have of examining the babies in real life. That pathologist did not note any evidence of “air embolism” or “lung splinting” or any other of Evans’ diagnostic conclusions, described as “fantastical”, “ridiculous”, “implausible”, and “medically inaccurate” by the many experts - who far outweigh Dewi Evans & Co in experience and standing - who have spoken out since the reporting ban was lifted.

The pathologist who conducted the post mortems was - notably - not called to the trial even though the case essentially rested on overturning his post mortems.

There is no reason for Dr Hall to doubt the original post mortems and he doesn’t doubt them. I think what you mean is that Dr Hall, if asked, could not give a reason as to why the 2015/2016 spike in numbers of deaths happened. In statistics sometimes random clusters occur. That is just the reality.

“John O’Quigley, a professor of statistical science at University College London, said: ‘People get the wrong end of the stick with statistics. In my opinion there was nothing out of the ordinary statistically in the* *spike in deaths, and all the shift chart shows is that when Letby was on duty, Letby was on duty.’”

O’Quigley actually wrote a paper about this blunder, “Suspected serial killers and unsuspected statistical blunders”
referencing the Letby case in particular. I’ve linked it below.

An even worse spike happened in 2017/2018 before Letby worked there, and no one is trawling through those post mortems looking for entirely made up reasons to blame that rise in numbers on some nurse or other.

While it might be the case that a jury will find an honest doctor telling the truth (I.e he can’t be definitive about why any random cluster occurred at any particular point) less convincing than a dramatic serial killer narrative concocted and presented by a charlatan, it doesn’t make the findings of the original post mortems for the individual babies less real.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00258024241242549

I remember hearing the news years ago that a nurse had been arrested. My immediate thought was how bonkers, because at the time of the babies deaths it wasn’t thought to be murder. I didn’t think the police/cps/prosecution would have a hope in hell of a conviction because if the deaths weren’t thought to be suspicious at the time then there would be no evidence of suspicious death (on an individual basis) months/years after the babies had died.

people compare this case to the Beverley Allit case, the difference there is everyone at the hospital and the police knew someone was killing babies at Grantham hospital while it was ongoing. There were literally police posted on every exit/entrance and staff had to sign in and out with the police.

Thank you for the link - poorly understood probabilities are powerful tools for the prosecution that are hard to defend against.
Judges need to be aware of the scope for misleading evidence - particularly when there are people involved who will financially benefit from a particular outcome.
In Sally Clark's case, she was the bereaved mother, but in other cases, the pain for parents dragged through the legal process, not knowing who or what led to the loss of their child but having to relive that terrible time again and again is unimaginably awful.

This must be so awful for the bereaved parents.

Obviously people online haven’t seen all the evidence but there do seem to be some odd elements in the prosecution case eg the shift chart just seems like theatre - why were the excluded cases excluded? If it’s because she was on shift but they weren’t suspicious, then that could be interpreted in different ways eg it could support a random, tragic spike or an under resourced hospital. If it’s because she wasn’t on shift, then the chart is just prejudicial.

If it’s true that the defence didn’t call an expert, that’s really problematic.

For the decision today, if I recall correctly (don’t have any expertise), propensity evidence is often excluded because it’s prejudicial without being probative.

The case reminds me too much of some problematic cases here in Australia and particularly one where a woman was accused of murdering her 4 poor babies. She also had distraught diary entries. The first child’s death was not considered suspicious at the time but was brought into the case only because the subsequent 3 were considered unexplained. New evidence was identified that a genetic condition fitted the pattern of those 3. With an explanation for the 3, the case about the first child was no longer strong.