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.

We weren’t on the jury who listened to all of the evidence over many weeks so just accept the jury’s decision because they had all of the facts and reached their verdict on facts , not from keyboard warriors who just like to stir things up so they get attention.

When I read the New Yorker article, I wondered about the safety of Lucy Letby's conviction. Then I read the Court of Appeal judgement, and listened to some of the trial transcripts read out on YouTube videos by CrimeScene2Courtroom, and read some of fyrestaromega's posts on the r/lucyletby subreddit. She attended the trial and is extremely well-informed about the case.

Now I'm not at all worried about the safety of the conviction. IMO the under-informed fuss about it will fizzle out, Operation Hummingbird will find more murders Lucy Letby committed, and she will rightly never get out.

Many (if not all) of the doubts raised have been answered on previous MN threads. The people who answered have probably got fed up of saying the same things again and again.

Here's some of the case against her.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/30/the-case-against-lucy-letby/

I have sat on a jury twice. It is a frustrating experience, you can only go on the evidence that is presented to you, you can't question things, often there are what seem glaring omissions, but you can't have any more info. For instance, one of the trials I sat in, there was a weapon, there was doubt on who'd handled this weapon - But the police hadn't fingerprinted it. Why? Who knows? There was a witness who was mentioned several times - the witness wasn't questioned. Why? There was a whole other crime that the defendant seemed to have glaringly committed, but it wasn't mentioned. There were also jurors who'd made their minds up at the very first sight of the people involved.
Jury service is not infallible.
The jury in the LL case weren't presented with some of the evidence that is now being mentioned. If they had, would they have made the same decision, we don't know.

Just a few of the Crime Scene 2 Courtroom videos,

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2byzt3tQjyZUFDoOMgoo55U9lJkz7BMY&si=PDSmQNLCu2xzr9fR

Those two social media posters don’t have even the remotest grasp of the problems with the statistical and scientific evidence and neither does Christopher Snowdon. If anyone is a “Poundshop Poriot” it’s him.

If anyone looks objectively at both sides, I think they'll see which one has the best grasp.

Oh indeed.

The note is just one of the first things that comes to mind. I followed the trial at the time daily, but there is so much info and so many babies (and I have a bad memory) I'd have to go read back over it all to talk about any of the evidence accurately. But I know from following at the time it's damning. The coincidences around her are just not believable.

The only way to really get to grips with the case is probably to go through the evidence chronologically but that's probably past the scope of any MN thread. The jury painstakingly discussed it for weeks and poured over all the evidence, I'm not sure why that's suddenly not good enough.

My point about the note was that if a man wrote it no one would be saying oh he was just traumatised, he didn't mean it. I stand by that. Not sure what that has to do with me serving on a jury, obviously I wouldn't just be looking at her insane post-it scribblings if I was deciding on her guilt. It's far from the only thing, she would've still been sent down without anyone finding those notes.

I have no idea where these weird ‘if a man / ugly person / black woman / old woman’ things come from with LL, but they do.

Those notes are absolutely someone in absolute anguish, male, female, black, white, old, young. I’ll actually stick my neck out and say innocent or guilty. I think even if she is guilty the note isn’t an admission of guilt.

I actually think the note is for me one of the more compelling things for her innocence. Before the New Yorker article I couldn’t marry the anguish in the note with the cold, detached attitude you’d need to harm babies.

The note is a thing you've referred to a lot and had an emotional response too. You're not alone in that either. But people who think that's an indication of guilt are short sighted. It's incredibly obvious that a person who is innocent, even if Letby isn't that person, might still blame themselves.

Anyway, if your point was baseless speculation about what would happen if a man wrote that, you should really have been clearer. You can stand by it all you like, you still haven't the foggiest if it's true or not. And nor is it actually relevant to the question of whether it's been given inappropriate weight by some people.

Also I haven't mentioned you being on a jury.

You can question things. The jury can submit questions via the judge. When I was a juror, there were several occasions when the jurors asked questions. There are them rules about what can be asked, but the judge asked questions on our behalf a handful of times.

That's actually not "some of the case against her". It's an opinion piece which is full of holes. Anyone with an ounce of critical thinking wouldn't put faith in that article. To be clear, I am very aware that the public hasn't seen more than a tiny proportion of what has been seen and heard in court.

I think you mean clinical degree, not medical degree. That would be a doctor.

A judge does not decide whether someone is guilty. The judge sentences on the basis of the jury's verdict. Which was guilty. That is the reason the judge gave a whole life order.

Another legal point:
Someone mentioned "beyond reasonable doubt". Courts no longer use this wording. The wording is now "so that you are sure".

I'm in Ireland and I read it and it made me cry. Of course for the babies & families but also for Lucy. Totally convinced she is innocent. My heart breaks for her being totally scapegoated. Her life is ruined when she was just trying to do her best. Praying that the truth will set her free

I think the truth will do anything but set her free.

@RSSN can't tell if that's sarcasm or not!

Many well known people are talking about the safety of the convictions without having attended the trial or read all the court transcripts. As the trial lasted from October 2022 to August 2023 (including the deliberations) there was a huge amount of evidence which the jury sat through and spent a lot of time deliberating over. I attended the trial on numerous occasions and have tried to read the transcripts that have been made available. She had an excellent KC defending her (I listened to him in action) and I do not believe she is innocent of these crimes.

We submitted a question to the judge about the victim, can't go into details obviously, but it was a practical question about how the court was treating her and we were concerned.
We also had a few questions about majority verdicts as 2 jurors were adamantly against the rest of us, but were going against the judge's advice. He was able to check with the victim and reply to us. But we absolutely could not question the evidence or as per my example ask why on earth had the police not taken fingerprints.
Edited for crap grammar

Anyone who is ‘convinced’ by the notes, look up Kathleen Folbig. She was convicted of murdering her 4 children, on the basis of statistical evidence (I believe it was actually a uk doctor who wrote the paper calculating the statistics of 4 babies in one family dying of Sid’s). He wrote, 1 is a tragedy, 2 is a coincidence, 3 is murder. He was flown out to testify.

she also wrote damming diary confessions too confessing to killing them which was a large part of the evidence against her.

she has since been cleared. All 4 of her children had a genetic condition that made them susceptible to SIDS. She spend 20
years or something in jail labelled the most hated woman in Australia.

https://time.com/6509648/kathleen-folbigg-case-children-murder-conviction-overturned-australia/

My baby was on neonatal at the Countess the same time she was there. The neonatal unit was a horrible, dysfunctional place honestly it was not a nurturing environment like you would expect from a place caring for tiny babies and new mums, I couldn't wait to get out of there with my baby it was horrible.

Interesting, I’m sorry to hear of your experience. What about it did you find “dysfunctional”.

When I was under a lot of strain being bullied at work, I wrote a lot of things down.
A lot of the things I wrote when I was beginning to realise how much stress I was under did blame myself, wonder what I had done. Why they were behaving like that to me and assuming I had done something to cause it. Feeling that maybe I deserved it. If you saw those notes I wrote at that time you could take them as an admission of guilt that I had been the aggressor.
I can tell you, from a distance removed now, that I was the victim throughout. That I didn't do anything. Others who saw it happening, confirm this.

If she had been guilty, unless she wanted to be caught though, why didn't she destroy them? It wasn't as though they retrieved them from a long-since deleted file hidden on the computer. Or did she think she was too clever to be caught.
Or was she innocent and so never occurred to her that people could use them to show her guilt because she knew she hadn't written them as guilty, so didn't see through them.

One thing I discovered in the situation I was in, is that it can be a lot easier to hide when someone is guilty than when someone is innocent.
It's like the Wind in the Willows situation.
"One of those rabbits is a weasel"
"I'm not, I'm a rabbit."
We can see as as a watcher that the only way that "rabbit" could jump into denial is if it knows that they're speaking about him. And the only way it can know that it's speaking about him is if he is, indeed, a weasel.

In the same way an accusation can be easier to hide if you are guilty because you've thought of the excuses and can fend them off without even the person investigating realising.
For example, an item was broken that I needed. I knew that the only person who could have done this was the bully due to timing. Now the person I told didn't really want to accuse them directly. So they went to them and said "I'm looking for this item".
So they got the response "I haven't seen it since X dropped it on the floor last week, and Margaret told me that she was going to say I did it" they took that as innocent and the reason for it being broken, and that they were being accused unfairly. In their mind the only way they could have said that was if they were innocent, because they didn't know what they were being accused of. But they did know, for the simple reason, they did it!

The only person who could have known it was broken was me and the person who broke it. It wasn't obviously broken until you tried to use it, and the breakage was not one that could happen by accident easily. You could actually see where they had stuck a key through it inside and twisted.

So this was then switched round by the bully, and because they had apparently given a reason why it was broken, and said I was going to accuse them (they hadn't spoken to me in over a year at that point, so hardly going to have that conversation either) they switched it round to be me the aggressor and them the victim. And even though CCTV showed that they were not telling the truth that was the story that stood.
If they hadn't broken it, then they'd could have said something that seemed far more guilty because they wouldn't have known that they had to defend themselves against an accusation.

So I'm certainly not saying that she's innocent. I really don't know. However what I am saying is that I wouldn't take the notes as guilt.

I found some of the staff to be very lacking in empathy, they were not nurturing or empathetic, I could give you examples of things that I can still remember happening. The neonatal unit was quite a distance from the ward, it had a bad atmosphere in there. I sensed friction between the staff, there was hostility. The neonatal until was only physically quite a small area and it was very dated, it's hard to explain but I just couldn't wait to get away from the place.