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 think it's an unsafe conviction; I've got no idea if she's guilty or innocent. I belive critical evidence was misinterpreted and misrepresented. A lot of distinguished, respected experts feel the same way and most - if not all - have not said they believe she is innocent or guilty. Her innocence/guilt and her conviction being unsafe are two separate things.

Her guilt is being questioned everywhere.

There are 3 sub Reddits I know of - two questioning her guilt and one clinging to the verdict for dear life.

Tattle is a nest of vipers - its one useful contribution to the debate is the Tattle Wiki listing all the available evidence from online sources including the Chester Standard live feed for the trial.

Her guilt is being questioned everywhere not just mn from what I’ve seen- loads of newspaper articles, people speaking out and the usual places like Twitter Reddit etc.

Does anyone believe that all this growing buzz about her conviction being unsafe is going to mount to anything? Or just fizzle out?

what happens if it is determined the conviction is unsafe (and I’m not sure who/what makes that decision? I’m not very knowledgable with this sort of thing)

It means even if she is guilty they’ve messed the whole thing up. Could a fair trial even be done again? What would actually happen?

She testified she wrote the notes after she’d been moved off the unit under suspicion from colleagues.

"I wanted her to be innocent so much, nobody wants to think for a minute anyone is capable of commiting murder of the most small and vulnerable people to ever exist"

Actually, I think it's preferable to attribute baby deaths to a single malevolent individual than to systemic failings of a hospital that was supposed to look after them rather than poor care lead to their death

The chances of drawing 2 cards from a full deck of cards and them both being aces is 1/221 or 0.458. There is therefore a 20/221 or 99.542 chance of NOT drawing 2 aces on your first go. But lets say you were playing a game with someone where you each took it in turn to take 2 cards and the winner was the first person to get 2 aces in their hand. If your opponent went first and drew 2 Aces straight away that would probably be really annoying. You might suspect foul play where money is involved. But is there are 99.542 chance that they were cheating???

(The answer is no, almost certainly not. But actually calculating the probability would depend on taking other factors into account).

I think viewing the chances that one person was present at all the deaths in a hospital as the same thing as "beyond reasonable doubt" is a huge mistake. I don't know if she was guilty or not. But the "evidence" around Letby's presence at each death is not really as damning as first appears.

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

i disagree with this statement. I would have grave reservations about the safety of her conviction regardless of her looks or ethnicity

The Daily Mail is having a field day!!!!!

It’s not going to fizzle out. For a start there’s the inquiry coming up. The remit of that does not include questions of guilt or innocence but at best it’s going to be the most enormous elephant in the room. It might also be, as Private Eye suggested, that witnesses under oath having their own behaviour questioned won’t be able to answer without referring to it.
Secondly the issues that this is tied up with, NHS underfunding/inadequacy, nurse recruitment problems, are political issues which aren’t going away any time soon, so it is likely to be raised and raised again.

Definitely not true.
The r/lucyletby sub on reddit is incredibly biased because the mod bans anyone who questions the convictions, it's actually in the sub rules that that you're not allowed to.

Go to r/lucyletbytrials and r/sciencelucyletby and you will see that reddit is definitely unanimous.

And no one cares about the opinions of people on tattle.

"Speaks volumes" - yes, speaks volumes about Legal Aid perhaps

No hard evidence about the insulin.
There was no post mortem because both of those babies recovered.
They were hypoglycemic but many things can cause that.

Preterm neonates are uniquely predisposed to developing hypoglycemia and its associated complications due to their limited glycogen and fat stores, inability to generate new glucose using gluconeogenesis pathways, have higher metabolic demands due to a relatively larger brain size, and are unable to mount a counter-regulatory response to hypoglycemia.

https://tp.amegroups.org/article/view/17048/html#:~:text=Preterm%20neonates%20are%20uniquely%20predisposed,unable%20to%20mount%20a%20counter%2D

I think it’s an unsafe conviction which then means she is legally innocent. We have a system whereby any reasonable doubt should lead to a not guilt verdict. So I think in that sense there has been a miscarriage of justice. I do not know for certain she is innocent. But I don’t have to, to think the conviction should be overturned.

Some of the concerns I have are
-the statistics and data were presented in a misleading manner and are at best circumstantial.
-the babies were all extremely unwell and liable to sudden changes of condition
-she did lots of overtime which makes the chances of her being present for deaths much higher
-it was a chaotic and deeply unsafe NICU.
-the hospital has a very vested interest in showing it was a lone actor
-other babies died or got very poorly when she wasn’t on shift

• her writings could just as easily be a misplaced guilt as guilt from deliberate actions. When I worked with vulnerable children I remember feeling extremely guilty when something bad happened to them and I couldn’t save them from it.

-lots of testimony was about her looking guilty or behaving strangely. This is so incredibly open to interpretation and bias of knowing she had been arrested too. Being odd (maybe because you were suffering by from mental health difficulties, untreated PTSD or just plain exhausted) is not the same as being guilty of serial murders. -no motive has been offered really

If I had to say I’d say I think it’s 60% chance the babies died because of a conservative government drastically underfunding the NHS and 40% chance it was due to Lucy Letby’s intentional actions. On that basis I would find not guilty.

The insulin level and the C Peptide @Nc209 ? An extremely high level of insulin but a contradictory low level of C Peptide. One of my DCs had hypoglycaemia after birth but it was nothing like what’s being described re this baby.

On Reddit on another subreddit, you are not per,opted to question the safeness of her conviction:

"Verdicts in Lucy Letby's trial are fact and are law unless and until an appeal is granted
r/lucyletby respects the work of the jury and accepts their conclusions. We do not permit re-litigating of the verdicts rendered by the jury"

just posting this for a bit of balance about Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/lucyletby/

This is really getting so old.
Is your brain seriously just not able to comprehend that there could possibly be other reasons and that it's not because she's white?

Can you clarify your question? 🙂

Yes - you said there was no hard evidence and I assumed you meant of the insulin poisoning. I put a question mark as a way of asking re the high levels and the low C Peptide - ie, what about that as evidence?

Oh ok, well this is information from the lab regarding the test that they did, see the note in red.

https://pathlabs.rlbuht.nhs.uk/insulin.pdf

Please note that the insulin assay performed at RLUH is not suitable for the investigation of factitious hypoglycaemia. If exogenous insulin administration is suspected as the cause of hypoglycaemia, please inform the laboratory so that the sample can be referred externally for analysis.

Yet in court it was claimed that that's exactly what the test proved.

In court the lab backtracked on what it says there on the test information, does that mean that they have decided that in cases that the insulin assay is in fact suitable for the investigation of factitious hypogycaemia? 🤔

It certainly seems that the hospital disregarded the results at the time and didn't think at the time that they meant that exogenous insulin had been given or else surely they would have been investigating it?

Sorry what @Outliers?
This is factual in your opinion? So which is it fact or your opinion? It literally cannot be both!!!!
🤷🏻‍♀️

And no you're wrong! I don't give a damn about what skin colour she has. Or her background / ethnicity/ religion or any other factor you want to chuck in.

The evidence - or in this case the lack of it - speaks for itself.

Let’s say for arguments sake no one would give a shit if she was black or Asian. While that’s not completely true, I don’t disagree that there are differences in the way white British and non white British are treated in the media. Usually it’s when it’s is a victim of crime - we don’t have a black ‘killer nurse’ to compare with so let’s accept that it’s true, there wouldn’t be pieces in the New Yorker and the Telegraph and the Guardian and the BBC casting doubt on the safety of this conviction.

Why does that make it acceptable? Should we in order to ‘prove’ we’re not racist send LL to rot in jail for the rest of her life for crimes she may well not have committed because … because? Because what?

Yes - in fact, when I look back at the criminals who've received the most press coverage in my lifetime, they've almost all been white. The idea that the British public's minds are going to be blown by the existence of a white female serial killer doesn't add up.

Yes, I agree that they should have done more in depth testing. However, the very high insulin level coupled with the low C Peptide is important. If the insulin had been produced by the baby themselves, the C Peptide would be correspondingly high - but it wasn’t at all. Therefore the deduction was external administration of insulin.

As I understand it, there is a test that could have spotted that the insulin was engineered rather than natural insulin from the pancreas, and that test wasn’t done, but I can’t see any other credible answer to the high insulin/low C Peptide than that the baby was given insulin. The prosecution said this insulin was in a feed bag which would account for the sudden and severe hypoglycaemia, and the hypoglycaemia halted when the feed bag was changed.

I guess what I’m saying is that there might have been another test that could have been done in addition, but that this test seems pretty conclusive. Even Letby herself agreed that the baby had been given insulin but denied it was her who did it.

I think the alleged method of administration via feed bag, and the huge amount of insulin, is different from usual factitious insulin administration, which would be given by subcutaneous injection and lead to much smaller levels of insulin in the blood than were found in this baby.

This does appear to be a sticking point- but even the science suggests that the result is likely to be inaccurate.

https://www.scienceontrial.com/post/criminal-justice-in-england-disagreeable-facts