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”

That's not at all what this article was about, though. The article was about the concern that there's a belief that that number of deaths in a neonatal unit in a year was statistically extraordinary. That's specifically the statistical issue that deliberately wasn't raised by the prosecution, and what Prof O'Quigley is focused on.

As to the data of her shift pattern, to call that 'statistical evidence' is to say essentially any evidence placing someone at the scene of an event- or multiple events- is statistical evidence. That evidence may be unsound, it certainly appears so, but it's a different issue to what the article is discussing.

But if the rate of deaths was not different to other poorly performing trusts then the whole entire premise of why suspicions fell on her is flawed and everything from that point onwards is a search for an explanation for something that isn't real.

I never understand how they keep saying the case didn't rely on statistical evidence. That's literally why they started looking so obviously it does.

The power of the shift chart is statistical it is suggesting that she was more likely to be present at an event than any other nurse. That's a probability analysis and it's flawed because not all the events were considered

Just because you say you are 'not using statistics' it doesn't mean you aren't you are just doing so unconsciously and badly.

The premise of not looking into all possible reasons why a trust is poorly performing is more alarming. Business as usual because it's not the worst of the worst? Chilling.

If the conviction in this matter is unsound that's one thing. But in general, if there is suspicion of foul play then that suspicion should rightfully be investigated.

There's a tendency on these boards to throw all your eggs in one basket. Both can be true- that this matter may have been a miscarriage of justice, and also that generally a concerning pattern identified or felt by doctors (the people with the most liability for life and death in a hospital) should be fearlessly investigated. You would want or expect the same if your children were at the centre of it. I would.

Yes absolutely the cause of the deaths should be investigated. My assertion is that by scapegoating LL hospital managers and senior clinicians avoided blame for the very real failings of their poorly performing institution and that is the real scandal here.

I wouldn't go quite as far as you in asserting that institutional failings are definitely the cause of those babies deaths... but I do agree that it seems a reasonable possibility that urgent needs proper investigation.

The NHS is in such astonishingly dire straits.

Of course a rise in deaths should trigger an investigation into all causes and indeed it did. The RCPCH did a detailed review of the unit in 2016 for this exact reason and concluded that the unit was very poorly run, it was taking in babies who were vulnerable beyond its level of capability, the doctors were not present enough, there were sewage issues, and there were clinical mistakes being made by junior doctors because the consultants were only doing ward rounds twice a week. That report praised Letby as being conscientious, diligent, and well liked. All of the babies had uncontroversial natural causes listed in their post mortems bar one baby who was not autopsied because the doctor in charge was so sure she had sepsis.

The issue is that murder was relentlessly fixed on after this based on evidence that has turned out to be very shaky indeed. The problem with this, beyond the obvious, is that nothing is learned going forward if the real complex reasons for the deaths isn’t understood. The UK has been undergoing a maternity and neonatal crisis for some years now. Shoving deaths under the rug as the isolated freak result of a serial murder does nothing to help anyone and means no lessons are learned.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/03/i-am-evil-i-did-this-lucy-letbys-so-called-confessions-were-written-on-advice-of-counsellors

There's a steady drip of articles at the moment, which is interesting.

Going back to the Spiked article, where that writer complains that armchair detectives aren't bothered by the causes of death, but by the other aspects of the case, he obviously isn't reading the Reddit threads where people with professional experience are picking it apart because some of it is so very implausible, nor seeing others in the field expressing their concerns publicly.

They are still the same but in the maternity department.

From 2022
Inspectors found several failings at the maternity unit. Notably there were not enough staff with the right qualifications or skills to keep women and babies safe, or suitable equipment.

The report also said the trust did not learn from compromised safety incidents to avoid them happening again.

It said between April and November last year five patients had major haemorrhages after giving birth at the hospital, resulting in a need for unplanned hysterectomies.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-61808681

I believe Snowdon admitted that the totality of his “research” before weighing in was listening to the daily mail podcast. Like a fool he assumed this was essentially transcripts via court reporting, in the way some conflate having “watched the whole trial” with watching a plainly biased YouTube series on the case and calling it quits there.

At this stage Snowdon is the only person speaking up for the prosecution and he once claimed that smoking cures Covid. Meanwhile Dr Phil Hammond is still waiting on a single prominent expert to provide counter balance to the multitude of prominent expert voices speaking up against the prosecution. It’s a farce.

And remember experts siding with the defence have to consider professional reputation for possibly being perceived as defending a 'baby killer' or causing distress to the parents. They do not do this lightly or without strong motivation.

I am also getting aggrieved by the inverse racism being applied here where people are assuming the level of scrutiny of the conviction is due to Lucy's ethnicity and appearance. This is wrong. It is as if some are trying to portray anyone critical of Asian clinica! staff as being closer racists which is patently absurd.

According to Liz Hull (from The Trial podcast this morning) there were 9 other babies who died in the same period. 4 of them died from infection. Are we buying that there was a death spike caused by a very well behaved infection that only killed 4 babies and a simultaneous unrelated death spike caused by a demonic killer nurse at the same time? Even though most of the deaths attributed to her years later were deemed in post mortems at the time to have also been down to infection? Come on. Every day something else collapses in this case.

When I read about this case there were so many anomalies, it seemed strange everyone was so certain LL was an evil baby killer when the evidence really just didn't to me seem to be overwhelming. Then I read about the Lucia de Berk case and it seemed there were a lot of parallels.

What did seem fairly obvious is that legitimate concerns about LL were shut down, repeatedly and in a very unprofessional way, rather than being investigated impartially. Then finally, it flipped to the opposite - a veering from one extreme (LL couldn't possibly be the cause, resisting investigation, the doctors raising concerns are all bullies who need to be punished for raising legitimate concerns) to the other (LL is a mass murderer with no motive). In veering to either extreme safeguarding and risk management didn't happen, professional managers paid a fortune with massive pensions avoided accountability for the basics of doing their job, and systemic failures were excused.

It's really disturbing that society seems more and more to be run this way. It's all about spin. Expertise, detail, nuance? Not so much. Professional accountability? Also missing.

LL's defence didn't seem to defend her properly. There were so many questions about some of the medical evidence presented...

I don't know either way whether she's guilty or innocent, but I really think scapegoating in either direction avoids accountability for those who ultimately are largely responsible and who will be free to do it again. If LL Is a murderer, she should not have been left on the ward for so long. Proper risk management and safeguarding should have removed her sooner. If she's not, why did so many babies die and why has LL been imprisoned?

I largely agree with you, but it seems important to note that there was an impartial investigation. The hospital brought in the RCPCH to investigate the unit in 2017 and they were made aware that two doctors had shared concerns about Letby as she was on duty for a certain number of deaths.

The RCPCH report was very critical of the unit generally, the management, and the consultants. There were issues with staffing (no neonatologists and no advanced neonatal nurses), poor clinical care, sewage/plumbing issues, issues with the old and cramped building itself, and outdated equipment.

The unit was not felt to be equipped with either the experience or the equipment to handle babies of the vulnerability that it had been accepting and was downgraded. They said that the consultants were not present enough (only doing twice weekly ward rounds) and junior doctors were making big mistakes without enough consultant oversight (e.g one baby died because a junior doctor intubated him into his food pipe and not his windpipe and then silenced 5 desaturation alarms assuming broken equipment). In general it was a damning report. They found no issue with Letby who was described as a good nurse, well liked by most of the staff, hard working, and diligent. I’m paraphrasing as I don’t have the exact quote to hand, but they were glowing about Letby. Very critical of pretty much everything else.

I'm curious for anyone who is familiar with the Lucia de Berk case, do some people still think that she did it?

I think this case is very troubling and I wouldn't be surprised if it's one in a few years as medical science moves on a new explanation for the deaths will come out .

I find it strange that the conviction is based on likelihood of guilt rather than factual proof . There are definitely questions to be answered and we've not heard the last of it .

Medical science already has the answers. This is what is so troubling!

This gets overlooked all the time. The babies all (bar one) had post mortems by experienced neonatal pathologists (bar one as the doctor on duty was so sure this death was due to infection). They all returned natural causes and the deaths were uncontroversial at the time. One was listed as “unascertained” which means “unascertained but natural” which is a common finding in neonatal death. The pathologists, of course, actually examined and autopsied the bodies. Nobody said “wait a minute! I think that baby may have been murdered!” at the time. Nobody.

Several years later those post mortems were essentially overturned by Dr Dewi Evans, a retired Paediatrician who was never in his life a neonatologist or a pathologist, without ever seeing the babies either in life or death, using the contemporaneous notes of the actual pathologists whose findings he was overturning.

In addition, the total number of deaths was finally revealed yesterday. There were 9 other deaths during the period that Letby was not there for. All of them had post mortems declaring natural causes (as did the 7 she was accused of murdering). 4 of these other 9 died of infection, which is exactly what most of the other post mortems returned (the ones Letby was later alleged to have murdered):

So now we know that Letby murdering babies isn’t the explanation for the spike in numbers of deaths, as there is still a significant spike when we remove those babies from the picture. Is the new argument that there was both a serial killer nurse spike and a simultaneous infection spike? Two random clusters at the same time, one of them being a serial killer, is a vanishingly unlikely scenario, particularly given that the Letby cases also had contemporaneous post mortems showing infection as the cause of death.

At the moment I think there is a low momentum for this conviction to be ruled unsafe and it is gradually seeping into the public conscious that this conviction is unsafe. A lot of the more serious media are happy to publish articles questioning evidence and so journalists are not afraid of being accused of defending a child killers in search of the truth.

One factor in this case has always been if the accusations were true then the crimes were truly heinous and maybe the media would have stayed silent as justice would have felt to be done including public shaming. This has not happended, Lucy is not mentioned in the same breath as other prisoners serving while life terms but in terms of a postal massive miscarriage of justice.

I would think the families of the babies are not shielded from this new perspective and maybe are having their grief compounded knowing portability there is an unsafe question. The families would want questions answered generally of the hospital and maybe some will not just accept 'oh psychopathic killer nurse' as the answer.

It is of course perhaps a shaming episode in our legal history and if the conviction is overturned would mean extremely serious questions about how the CPS being such cases to trial and how complex medical evidence should be handled in an archaic legal system but those questions I believe will come.

@mids2019 yes, I agree with you.

However, I don’t agree that momentum is low. As soon as reporting restrictions were lifted there was an overnight volte face in the media and public commentary with both The Guardian and The Independant publishing lengthy meticulous takedowns of the evidence. Once the floodgates were opened there have been almost daily new articles from all across the political spectrum casting doubt on the evidence and the investigation. The clamour of expert concerns and even outrage at some elements of the case includes Nobel laureates, heads of royal societies, the former forensic regulator for the UK, etc etc. Again this is all within weeks of reporting restrictions being lifted.

it’s an unprecedented response. There has never been a miscarriage of justice with this kind of attention before the verdict was overturned.

I personally have never really questioned the British justice system before, but between this, the postmasters, and Andrew Malkinson all happening in the past year, I have been doing much more research and I am shocked at how many pillars of British justice have been quietly removed over the past few decades. I have gone from blind faith “there’s no smoke without fire” (like most people) to actual horror at how broken the British justice system has become. I am far from the only one.

As you say, there will have to be very serious questions asked and changes made if/when this is found to have been a miscarriage of justice.

I am very sorry for the parents who have lost their babies. I will be even more sorry for them if it turns out they have been dragged into a years long nightmare for no reason. They were already several years into their grieving journeys before they were told “That nurse you liked? She murdered your baby”. What an horrendous situation for all if this case turns out to have been built on sand, and it increasingly looks like it will.

@Kittybythelighthouse

Inrerestilingly on the BBC.news today there was a statement from the children's families to say statements in the press about the innocence or potential innocence of Lucy were 'overblown'.

I think some has to gently explain in a democracy like ours with freedom of speech the media have an obligation to report on potential miscarriages if justice and have every right to publish stories about a complex case where there are many questions. It is not justice to suppress these stories and is quite Orwellian in fact

Without appearing unempathetic we cannot stop investigations by the press and suppress expert opinion simply because the parents are understandably horrendously confused now Miscarriages of justice do happen and it is often the media that carry the torch (often for a long time).

The parents are obviously seeing stories in the media and are distressed. The psychological impact of having being told your child was murdered, coming to terms with that, then having to possibly doubt the convictions is immense. The anger directed at Lucy might now be replaced by a horrendous confusion and if they start to believe there is an innocent woman in jail won't this just conpind their grief and confusion?

I couldn’t agree with you more. Public scrutiny, via the media, independent experts. And the general public, is a vital check on the justice system without which many (if not all) miscarriages of justice would never be overturned. Even if you don’t agree that there’s an issue you should not want such discussion to be silenced without the concerns being addressed.

People on here are very much like the Scott Peterson truthers. You’ve all been manipulated by a killer who is too narcissistic to ever feel like what she did was wrong. And like Peterson’s family, her parents and online adherents will never be able to bring themselves the believe they supported a monster.

If you have to keep explaining away expert with opinions and twisting facts to fit your narrative then you might want to look at whether you are are on the right side.

Don’t bother replying. I am not interested in the half- explained trash that people who haven’t read the trial transcripts have been pushing around the internet to prove their half baked theories. so much that has been said on this thread so far is untrue and is not relevant. It makes posters look narrow minded and ill informed.

And I’ll add to this that people in this online rabble are creating an environment where a medical witness for the prosecution was attacked last week by some totally looney with a Letby fixation. Perhaps stop spreading harmful misinformation in the name of your truth. She’s had an appeal refused. There are no grounds to over turn any of the convictions. Just think she was too nice to commit murder is not enough!

This is just an hysterical attempt to silence public debate about a matter that affects all of us - the integrity of the justice system - using emotional blackmail and smears.

In a democracy members of the public are entitled to engage in public scrutiny of the justice system. Public scrutiny via media, experts, and members of the public, is a crucial check on the justice system and is part of how miscarriages of justice eventually get righted. It is an important part of our democracy.

Feel free to not engage if the conversation isn’t for you.

The questions posed about this case are being put forward by reputable sources both from the media and the medical world. The questions and concerns are being put forward by people who are very careful about reputational damage so don't do it lightly or out is some perverse desire to inflict psychological harm on the parents. Justice and truth is in everyone's interest in society there fore we have to allow enquiry.

How do you think the postmasters were eventually acquitted or accused IRA terrorists in the 70s and 80s.

I think it is wrong to accuse all those involved in these discussions as spreading false rumours as if they are false there are laws to protect against this. No one would willingly subject themselves to legal action in this regard.

I assume that there will be a 'think of the families' reaction to continuing press releases but it is imperative justice is done and is seen to be done. If there are questions of such a magnitude as currently it may justice is not entirely being seen to be done