Lucy Letby in the news

[Viviennemary]

I've just been watching the BBC news and apparently some experts have been questioning the validity of Lucy Letbys conviction. I must say when I read the details of the trial she did sound 100% guilty. But it would be a tragedy if she is innocent Personally I don't think she is but who knows. Somebody on the news said the only person who knows is Lucy Letby.

I didn’t follow the case at the time and was, needless to say, as appalled and horrified as everyone else that this had happened - it was reported every night as an 'evil' young woman who'd murdered babies and was the 'worst' (I always think this is a terrible use of language - 'most prolific' is surely what they mean) serial killer of infants ever in this country.

But of course the news reports themselves presented the case this way. We’ve seen it on this thread too.

'She was on shift for every death/incident' - no, turns out she wasn’t; there were others that weren’t part of the case that she wasn’t involved in.
'She was often alone so she could get away with it because nobody saw her' - this just wasn’t true; multiple nurses/doctors were also present on every shift (usually working just feet or even inches away in the small nursery unit) but this was massively downplayed or downright ignored.
'She poisoned babies with insulin' - nobody can say this: the correct tests weren’t done so evidence doesn’t exist.
'The babies were deliberately harmed. And she chose the sickest anyway' - all the babies, who were in the unit because they were ill or very premature, were in need of medical support and some were very sick indeed with infections. Nobody saw LL deliberately harming babies (see previous posts about the doctor who claimed to have seen her standing by as an alarm sounded but himself did….precisely nothing, and never raised any concerns at the time). Their deaths were desperately sad but all were thoroughly investigated and not a single one raised any suspicions from a medical examiner. Only later did the unit’s doctors start to formulate a theory that there had been an unusual number of deaths and hit on LL as the common denominator.

There are many, many, many other examples like this. Not to mention all the evidence around the sewage problem in the ward, and the very recent revelation that there was a confirmed outbreak of potentially lethal Psedomonas bacteria at the C of C hospital at the time of the baby deaths, and it was known to be in taps in the neonatal unit.

I learned all these things well after LL had been tried and sentenced because I started to hear about the doubts expressed, and was curious enough to go in search of blogs, podcasts etc. But I’d never have known any of it from the widely-broadcast reporting, which tbh felt uncomfortably gloating to me at times even though I did assume then that the case was watertight.
I still don’t know whether she’s guilty but I do feel sure that major doubt exists and she shouldn’t have been convicted on the available evidence.

felt uncomfortably gloating to me at times even though I did assume then that the case was watertight.

This has been a feature of so many reports about it.

And the absolute nonsense that has been dragged out to ‘prove’ she has a psychotic mind - so she had a diary that was one a younger girl would use, she had a ‘sparkle’ thing on her wall, she did salsa dancing. I’m sat there thinking

I find it disturbing so called intelligent people can read a note like the one she wrote and take it at face value without even applying some tiny bit of context to it.

The whole thing has been most unpleasant. Tattle is a cesspit - there were Tattlers actually attending the trial and reporting back IIRC. The Reddit sub is also awful and aggressively puts down anyone who raises doubts. I’m not sure why some are so desperate for her to be guilty - and I don’t for a moment think it’s anything to do with ‘the poor parents.’

There are zero eyeball witnesses linking her to the deaths, not one. Not even a biased or unreliable one. Of all the staff and parents who'd have been buzzing around the neonatal unit, not a single person saw her do the slightest thing wrong, suspicious, or even unusual. No one even thinks they might have seen her doing anything untoward, not a single soul that can stand up and say "It was her, she did it, I saw her do it with my own eyes!".

This is untrue.

There were people who saw her working on babies she wasn't assigned to.

There was a DR who saw her stood by the bedside of a baby who had collapsed and alarms were going off and she wasn't responding to it.

And those are just wheat o can remember off the top of my head.

It's fine to question evidence. But it's odd to question something that was clearly in the media and reported as happened.

Maybe she liked night shift. I used to do shift work 12 hour shifts and I much preferred nights to days. But I worked with others who hated nights and would do anything to get out of them.

I read a statistician who did some rough numbers. If you look at the hours she did plus the overtime she was there about 40% of the time. And if you include the deaths and collapses she wasn’t charged with (which they got the number from dewi Evans testimony. He looked at over 60 ‘incidents’ and she was charged with 24 I think. So there you go 40%.

if they had all been included the chart would have looked less compelling.

Yes that was provided as evidence that she doctored some notes.

Also she took notes home relayed to these babies. That's a big no and the reason for this is questionable.

I'd be really interested to know those who describe it "unsafe conviction" whether you believe there's reasonable doubt in the evidence and she is still guilty or it's unsafe/ reasonable doubt because she's innocent.

Personally I think she's guilty. But I didn't when she was arrested.

I think an independent body should look at the case. What was stated as absolute proof now doesn’t seem to be.🤷‍♀️

There was a DR who saw her stood by the bedside of a baby who had collapsed and alarms were going off and she wasn't responding to it

But as mentioned above, @itsgettingweird, what did the doctor in question do in response, according to his own testimony? He did nothing. Precisely nothing. So how worried was he really?

IANA medical professional but many others who are have said it’s absolutely standard practice to wait for some seconds to see whether an alarm stops as the patient settles by themselves. Or the alarm is sounding for a trivial reason, eg it’s been detached accidentally.

Yes, it’s bothered me too, as I’ve written down all sorts of shit when MH bad. I believe LL’s explanation for the notes was her MH was so poor, as the accusations had gone on so long, that she followed advice from MH training/therapy: to write her thoughts down.

Also, I believe she left them in her home for some time, when she knew it was highly likely she’d be arrested, her home searched and they’d be found. This suggests she didn’t see them as incriminating. But, then, some murderers do incriminate themselves for various reasons. So, again, it’s a difficult one.

It's impossible to say.

You follow the evidence to decide guilt. That is all.

The evidence isn't as reliable as we were all led to believe.

The whole case needs retrying.

The problem is that once it's out there, people's memories adjust to what they've been told
Like the person up thread who had a scan at a bad time, felt the person was unsympathetic and linked them.
Or the doctor who came in, saw her standing over the baby with the alarm, and didn't say anything at the time, but later when he heard the accusations thought it was suspicious - even though people on here are saying it isn't.

I remember years back someone posted on our FB chat group that there was a suspicious red van who'd stopped and talked to their Ds and friends, who had run off when he did so.
The first reply had "seen" that red van driving recklessly. Followed by many people who had seen that red van also driving dangerously all over the town shortly after the incident.TBF he'd have had to drive recklessly to be in all those places at once.

Then the original poster came back red faced and saying they'd discovered that the van man had popped his head out of the window of the van to tell the kids that one of them had dropped their games kit at the corner and they'd run back to get it.
And the van... Well turned out he lived down that road and had gone into his own drive and been at home for the rest of the evening (neighbour of one of the boys).

There were three more posts after this on the thread
A: I've checked my CCTV and it was a blue van driving recklessly not red.
B: Omg I saw that too. Have you reported it
A: I was joking...

But that shows how people can be convinced by the suggestion of guilt. Every one of those was convinced they'd seen the van, and not just seen it, but driving dangerously.

It’s really not untrue.

in an ICU especially with patients who need 1:1 care, means exactly that they need 1:1 care every single second of the day. That means if their assigned nurse needs to get something from the cupboard, nip to the loo, go for lunch, help another colleague’s etc etc need to ensure somebody else is watching their patient, literally every single second of the day. If I need to walk 10 feet away to get something I will ask the nurse in the bedside next to me to mind my patient, it is that serious. So it’s not at all strange for her to be watching and caring for patients not assigned to her.

I already mentioned her standing over a “collapsed” baby doing nothing. Again not unusual at all. Experienced ICU nurses know that patients often have a wobble after an intervention and they quickly recover they just need a minute usually. If I came out screaming for help every time a patient desaturated the doctors wouldn’t get anything else done!

@mnahmnah
You can ask the hospital if you did, if you feel it plays on your mind. It'll be in your notes.
I'm sorry for your loss. Xx

Nurses don't carry out scans, that would be a sonographer??

I've read the New Yorker article. It has been discussed on here before.

I totally agree with you.

There are zero eyeball witnesses linking her to the deaths, not one. Not even a biased or unreliable one.

Because of course people who commit planned murders regularly do so within view of witnesses.

Which is what we would expect given that they stopped caring for such high risk babies at that neonatal unit not long after the initial investigation began....

It wouldn't have been her. She's not a doctor, midwife or sonographer.
Registered children's nurses don't do scans on adults.

What worries me is that, since the verdict (s), I’ve read and heard some incredibly, incredibly detailed blogs/podcasts going into all the points raised on this thread in minute detail. Many of them have comments from very experienced medical professionals of many years' experience, which really adds to the breadth of information being made available to reach a viewpoint. Some of it is highly complex and hard to understand, to the point where a clear-cut answer doesn’t actually seem possible. The statistical conclusions reached are also worrying and weren’t explored properly at trial.

The trial itself relied largely on Dewi Evans, the prosecution medical witness who'd volunteered his own services, who'd been retired for some years and who'd never been a neonatologist. The defence called one witness - a plumber.

How could the jury possibly have formed a balanced and informed view from the limited evidence they heard? I understand this is what’s troubling Phil Hammond (MD of Private Eye) who can’t understand why the defence didn’t call the medical witness they had ready and happy to testify. Dewi Evans' assertions went largely unchallenged but as I understand it they’ve been widely critiqued since by many respected medical professionals.

Well then you're simply making yourself sick because you see something and assign the incorrect meaning to it, instead of accepting the reason people give which is that they didn't find the evidence convincing.

Most of us never knew Letby or met Letby so we're not charmed or won over by her. We just aren't convinced by the evidence.

I don’t remember the specific details about the “altering” of the notes to make the time look different. Did she actually change the time or had she just written the wrong time.

because I’ve pulled up members of staff for incorrect times I don’t know how many times. I remember one investigation into an incident and when I looked at all the notes of patients cared for by a specific member of staff on a specific shift every set of notes had documented that “introduced to pt, etc, etc, etc, appears stable, baby feeding well, etc, etc” all at exactly the same time. For eight different women. I pointed out to her she could not have been at eight peoples bedsides at the same time. I know what she’d done, come out of handover, gone round all her women and 20 mins later when she’d done that gone and written in everyone’s notes retrospectively and made it appear contemporaneous. Not for any dodgy reason, just sloppy documentation.

@ToBeOrNotToBee

Convictions are overturned on a regular basis.

That's simply not true.

– In 2022/23 the CCRC received 1,424 applications for criminal convictions to be reviewed, 70% of which were from prisoners currently serving sentences.
– 1,275 cases were completed.
– 675 were passed for ‘substantial review’.
– 25 were referred to the appeal court.
– 17 were overturned.

If that's true that you knew Sally Clark was wrongly convicted at the time and you spoke out about it, people would have said the same about you "I have zero time for her or dogooders saying that the court got it wrong. They didn't."

And there was the weird diaries the police found in her house saying she was responsible. . They showed a page from them on the news. She did sound a bit unhinged. But I suppose that doesn't mean she's guilty.

This is factual imo.

If she was black/asian/arab people would not be writing think pieces about why she's innocent.

They're deluding themselves into thinking that they have a more acute understanding of the evidence gathered by police and investigative services.

The hospital staff, the investigative services and the courts that served the justice must all be filled with incompetent individuals that overlooked glaring evidence that she's innocent 🙄