The Guardian today on the safety of the Lucy Letby convictions

[Kittybythelighthouse]

This article was apparently months in the making but it was delayed by the reporting restrictions https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question

“A Guardian investigation has interviewed dozens of these experts and seen further evidence from emails and documents. Those raising concerns include several leading consultant neonatologists, some with current or recent leadership roles, and several senior neonatal nurses. Others are public health professionals, GPs, biochemists, a leading government microbiologist, and lawyers. Several of those still working in the NHS have asked to remain anonymous, fearing the impact if they are named.

These experts said they were acutely aware of the suffering of the families involved and did not want to reopen their trauma, but were so troubled they felt compelled to become involved”

I search for people on social media. Probably most people do. Sometimes because of a film I've seen, sometimes because Facebook suggests 'you may know this person.' Sometimes no valid reason. It's not unusual and it's not a crime.

I had doubts about her conviction as no-one actually witnessed any crime.

There have been so many cover ups from institutions - the police, the post office, the banks, the government . A cover up by the NHS wouldn't surprise me at all.

Once, my medical notes said that I had missed a telephone appointment from the hospital. It wasn't true - they never called. It took weeks to get that comment deleted, and only after I sent in all my phone records to prove there were no missed calls.

So they do lie and try to cover themselves.

I'm not saying that it's relevant to this case, only that it wouldn't surprise me.

I don't know about this particular case but I do know that in previous instances of medical staff "killers" there have been quite a few that were later found to be innocent.

OP has been measured and provided sources for her discussion points

She couldn't even get the year that LL started working in that NNICU correct.

She stated that she'd been working in the NICU for 3 years before the unexpected & unexplained collapses spiked (with the inference that that indicated LL wasn't responsible). That's totally incorrect.

Not measured, no source.

I have no idea what the odds are. Do you? What assumptions did you use to make your calculation?

I’ll be totally honest, in my personal opinion I don’t think she is guilty.

It's easy with hindsight to say that about this case.

At the time, it's more "hmmm, something seems a bit strange, am I imagining this, what do other people think?" Then when no-one backs you up, maybe you'd think you were wrong.

How many innocent lives would be destroyed if someone went to the police immediately they had any suspicion at all. They would also likely be ending their career over nothing. As all the discussion about stats above shows, it's easy to find patterns where there might not be any.

"Once, my medical notes said that I had missed a telephone appointment from the hospital. It wasn't true - they never called. It took weeks to get that comment deleted, and only after I sent in all my phone records to prove there were no missed calls."

This definitely happens a lot. Things are misrecorded as happening when someone records they did an action for one patient they actually did for another.

Errors in records are common. But deliberately creating records to suggest that Letby was present or accessing drugs or doing actions at certain times in order to cover up other people's negligence on the ward would be difficult. Records are stored in computers which can show who has accessed them and when. the police had access to the records when investigating. the hospital own data compliance team will have been asked to assess who accessed te records and when. The conspiracy to frame Letby would require all the other staff on the ward AND a whole load of independent administrators working in a separate department to conspire to frame her. One whistleblower could blow the whole thing.

Importantly, there wasn;t one alternative culprit, like a specific senior doctor trying to protect the unit reputation. Quite the opposite. The other clinicians on the ward were saying say things are going badly wrong and lots of babies seem to be dying in our care. They reported this to management repeatedly and got agreement to invite the RCPCH into conduct an independent review in 2016. This would be a weird thing to do if they were covering up their own negligence.

There is no parallel with the Post Office case where the commercial interests of both Fujitsu and Royal Mail conspired to prevent them considering how how unlikely it is that all their subpostmasters would suddenly decide to steal from them. There's literally nothing in the behaviour of the only people who could have framed Letby to suggest they did frame Letby.

Where have you got this information from?

As they were with Sally Clarke. And Barry George. And all the victims of the post office scandal. And no doubt many, many others who weren't deemed important enough by the media for their trials to be covered

Her diary entries were those of someone with a very troubled mind. They could possibly be written by someone traumatised by the babies’ deaths and blaming herself. I think the evidence only sounds circumstantial and her convictions were based on probabilities, it doesn’t really sound like beyond all reasonable doubt to me.

What reason did she give for keeping the handover sheets and blood results

That she "collects paper" and that she brought them home accidentally in a pocket.

257 items.

Apparently she also "collects paper" out of bins after Drs have trashed them.

But she denied doing that.

She also had a shredder that she shredded bank etc documents with, but somehow didn't use it for the documents she brought home accidentally that shouldn't have been outside the unit.

They were all reported as being stated by parents and colleagues during the trial.

The thing I've struggled to understand with this case is, does someone really live as a murderous psychopath in plain sight for over 30 years, then do something like this without some kind of previous track record?

Wouldn't you expect people to come out from the woodwork, even a couple, who knew her at school or uni and say... actually yes there was this disturbing incident one time/there was something off about her etc.

Does someone really go from nothing for over two decades to the worst mass murder of children the NHS has ever seen?

What papers were the doctors putting in bins, why weren't they shredded. Its all very odd.

And the NYT. I had no idea that these so-called respected newspapers were stuffed to the gills with pseudo journalists spouting conspiracy theories, it's very worrying. Luckily the Daily Mail made a podcast that said there was nothing to worry about with the safety of the conviction. How lucky we are to have a news source of such honesty and diligence!

Thank you. 🙏

It was a paper towel that a doctor hurriedly and temporarily recorded what drugs they used when trying to recover the collapsed baby (during the collapse).

Apparently they then binned it

It was found in LL's 257 papers.

Other documents related to the baby, blood gas record etc. were also found.

The prosecuting QC raised it.

She denied retrieving it from the bin, but obviously had no explanation for how it got out of the bin and was found in her bag of papers.

@Kittybythelighthouse @Bigcoatlady

It seems that there may now be a campaign underway to improve the way that expert witnesses are not/used in court:

"It should be mandatory for the jury to hear expert witnesses from both sides or - better still - it should be a duty of, say, the Royal Colleges and Royal Statistical Society to provide a team of the best, current expert witnesses on behalf of the court, not paid and employed by one side or the other. This is vital both for justice to be done and justice being seen to be done. In the current system, the jury may only hear a highly selective and curated version of the science from a single side, and experts will later disclose evidence that they believe should have been heard in the court hearings after the verdict, which must be extremely distressing for the parents of children who died, the friends relatives of Lucy Letby and members of the jury who would have wanted the complete scientific picture."

Again, potentially something good to come from an awful situation.

x.com/drphilhammond/status/1810630891649073506?t=CQ36-94XapE01u3FcTmtJA&s=19

This is the view that led to the conviction of Lucia de Berk - who was subsequently cleared of all charges (after years in prison) because it turns out that if you have hundreds of thousands of medical professionals seeing millions of patients over the course of a year (in other words, you’re rolling the coincidences dice that many times) - sometimes, ostensibly unlikely coincidences do happen.

Oh yes, it's all coming back to me now. She's an absolute psychopath who only got away with it for so long because the management of the hospital was so bad. She had a nice facade and would do lots of extra shifts so the managers didn't want investigate or suspend her and be even more understaffed.

The local newspaper coverage of the case is brilliant. Tattle has done a wiki where they’ve gathered it all.

Ok but how many convictions based on circumstantial evidence haven’t been overturned?

I'm going to conjure up an imaginary scenario (it is not meant to be an analogy for the LL case I'm just making a point about what circumstantial evidence is):

Person A's dead body is found in a storage unit next to a knife coated in their blood. There are stab wounds in their back which are determined to have caused their death.

Inside the unit itself there are no cameras, but CCTV captured person A entering the storage unit, followed by person B entering the storage unit, and then person B leaving alone, wearing clothing spattered with blood.

Person B recalls that they entered the storage unit but cannot recall what they did inside, not what happened to the clothes they were wearing, which have disappeared.

Person B's fingerprints were found on the knife with no other fingerprints present and the knife matches one missing from Person B's kitchen set.

Person C reports that a few days earlier Person B told them they planned to kill Person A with a knife in a storage unit.

All of the evidence in this imaginary scenario is circumstantial. Circumstantial evidence is not "bad" evidence and if convictions were only made on direct evidence we would basically be living in a lawless country.

People just don't want to accept that a white blue-eyed blonde haired woman can be capable of executing an act of pure evil.