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Lucy Letby in the news

1000 replies

Viviennemary · 29/08/2024 22:33

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.

OP posts:
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38
SaWhat · 29/08/2024 23:15

Crikey @Ellythe bet you’ve had a few ‘what was she like questions?!’ (I’m not asking).

Must be quite traumatising for all of you as well on different levels.

Neodymium · 29/08/2024 23:16

Listening to the podcast about the trial I did think she was guilty - what convinced me was the insulin results. The fact that she accepted the poison too that someone had put the insulin in. That to me proved that someone was harming babies.

however, since it has come out that the insulin result was not 100% I definitely have doubts now. Especially hearing the reports into the unit prior to all this. I don’t think any babies were murdered. I think it was a poorly run unit with arrogant doctors whose egos did not allow them to seek advice, and who didn’t want to admit there were babies they should not be caring for (like the triplets for example). They did not have staffing to handle triplets. Or the twins with the mother with the serious health problems. Both twins needed help at birth. There wasn’t enough staff there so the ‘worse’ twin was prioritised. The other twin is the one that died within 24 hours.

Ellythe · 29/08/2024 23:17

SaWhat · 29/08/2024 23:15

Crikey @Ellythe bet you’ve had a few ‘what was she like questions?!’ (I’m not asking).

Must be quite traumatising for all of you as well on different levels.

To be honest I don't tell many people! She was really nice and I have to admit it made me think about my judgment of character!!

Mental

herecomesthesondodedoodoo · 29/08/2024 23:18

@mnahmnah you may not be wrong. I work in ultrasound. She may have been doing it as part of a training placement, another area she may have been interested in branching out to. We do have the odd nurse wanting to do a bit of shadowing and training days to see if it's something they would be interested in doing. Not usual that they would be on their own though.

Sonographers could be anyone with a medical degree. Not just radiographers, adult nurses or midwives. That's a bit of misinformation. Plenty of other HCP's become Sonographers as it's is a postgraduate entrance into the profession. We actually get a lot of physios more than anything as they're wanting to learn a bit more about musculoskeletal structure.

SequoiaTree · 29/08/2024 23:18

This is worth watching
https://www.channel5.com/show/lucy-letby-did-she-really-do-it

herecomesthesondodedoodoo · 29/08/2024 23:19

CormorantStrikesBack · 29/08/2024 23:03

Sonography is a totally different job to being a neonatal nurse. A nurse can train as a sonographer but you have to go to uni for ages and train up. You don’t just rotate for experience. She was so young when arrested I really don’t think she’d have been able to do her sonography training in that timescale, not with the extended skills courses for neonates she’d done. You only get so much training at a time.

x post.

Edited

Actually it's a postgraduate qualification that can be done in 9 months.

CheeryUser · 29/08/2024 23:19

I don’t know what I think. I just feel so, so sorry for the parents and if she has been wrongly convicted then that is obviously awful too.

AlcoholicDad82 · 29/08/2024 23:20

I come from a family of Doctors and Nurses and every single one said she is Guilty.

Ellythe · 29/08/2024 23:21

Neodymium · 29/08/2024 23:16

Listening to the podcast about the trial I did think she was guilty - what convinced me was the insulin results. The fact that she accepted the poison too that someone had put the insulin in. That to me proved that someone was harming babies.

however, since it has come out that the insulin result was not 100% I definitely have doubts now. Especially hearing the reports into the unit prior to all this. I don’t think any babies were murdered. I think it was a poorly run unit with arrogant doctors whose egos did not allow them to seek advice, and who didn’t want to admit there were babies they should not be caring for (like the triplets for example). They did not have staffing to handle triplets. Or the twins with the mother with the serious health problems. Both twins needed help at birth. There wasn’t enough staff there so the ‘worse’ twin was prioritised. The other twin is the one that died within 24 hours.

This is my point! I had a lot of placements on nice at Chester, I worked briefly in Chester before taking a job in Scotland.

They were taking babies they really weren't qualified to take, she was a band 6 and she had had extra training so it makes sense she would have had the sicker babies, she had had the extra training at arrowe park.

However there were way more deaths than expected, but on the flip side there was sewage coming out a sink in one of the bays that's not going to help!

mnahmnah · 29/08/2024 23:21

herecomesthesondodedoodoo · 29/08/2024 23:18

@mnahmnah you may not be wrong. I work in ultrasound. She may have been doing it as part of a training placement, another area she may have been interested in branching out to. We do have the odd nurse wanting to do a bit of shadowing and training days to see if it's something they would be interested in doing. Not usual that they would be on their own though.

Sonographers could be anyone with a medical degree. Not just radiographers, adult nurses or midwives. That's a bit of misinformation. Plenty of other HCP's become Sonographers as it's is a postgraduate entrance into the profession. We actually get a lot of physios more than anything as they're wanting to learn a bit more about musculoskeletal structure.

Just when I was feeling reassured that i didn’t actually come contact with her!

She wasn’t alone though. Another lady was in the room. Not sure who she was. I was a bit too emotional to be paying that much attention. I just know the woman who did the scan, whoever she was, was awful!

ColdinNovember · 29/08/2024 23:22

I’ve seen people on another site be given a terrible time for raising doubts regarding the trial. I thought I was going to be convinced of her guilt by the trial but it never happened. The other points raised too around rotas and statistics afterwards continue to raise questions.

I also think some of the doctors evidence too is a bit eyebrow raising. I work in adjacent area and sometimes being asked to recall something that happened at work and it is so, so hard even if was a day or a week ago because of the amount of people we see they sort of merge into one and being able to give accurate evidence on things that happened years and years prior seems surprising to me. Unless it was documented in pt notes at the time which we won’t see due to their nature.

It is incredibly complicated and I think I read somewhere that really the only person who knows really if she is innocent or guilty is LL herself.

Highfivemum · 29/08/2024 23:23

It is heartbreaking for the parents to have to go through all this again but on the other hand if she is innocent then it has to be looked into.
I don’t know if she is or isn’t but I know that as a hospital they would have been criticised for the number of infant deaths and my concern would be she was a scapegoat for them all.
I watched a programme with her friends all standing by her and it did make me think what if !
I just hope that the families get some answers

Allthegoodnamesarechosen · 29/08/2024 23:23

It’s pretty strange to be convicted of murders which no one has yet proved took place. The babies, who were very sick, died, and no one at the time thought they were anything other than natural ( and not unexpected) deaths.

Cases like this are the best argument against the death penalty.

Incakewetrust · 29/08/2024 23:24

I feel I don't know enough about the case to form a full opinion but I've previously said that if she is definitely guilty, then I hope she rots but if she's innocent, I'm heart broken for her.

Unfortunately the only person that will ever know the full truth is her and her only.

Obeseandashamed · 29/08/2024 23:24

Florally · 29/08/2024 23:02

A judge doesn’t sentence a whole life order without reason.

The judge has to give a sentence based upon the verdict of the jury. The jury has more power than a judge in a trial when it comes to determining 'justice'.

Outliers · 29/08/2024 23:27

If it was your child was one of the children that was either killed or harmed, i doubt you'd consider the overwhelming evidence against being questionable.

If she wasn't blonde haired blue eyed woman, you wouldn't find it conceivable that she is innocent.

You have a bias that you're trying to reinforce.

Florally · 29/08/2024 23:27

A whole life order isn’t given lightly.

I'm shocked anyone can look at this case and see anything but absolute guilt and sadness for the families who they couldn’t reach a verdict on.

She couldn’t be anymore guilty than if she painted it on her face.

samarrange · 29/08/2024 23:27

Something that surprised me when I started reading about this case is that there is not a single piece of hard evidence that any of the children was assaulted or murdered.

No autopsy or inquest declared "This child was the victim of homicide, we just need to find out who did it".

In other words, the alternative to "Lucy Letby killed them" is not "Somebody else killed them, but nobody could have, therefore it must be her". The alternative is that they just died. These were, after all, very sick children. That's why they were in hospital.

At one point the prosecution noted that the children who died were, pretty much without exception, the sickest ones on the ward. This was used as evidence of how evil LL was: "She deliberately chose the weakest so that they would be most likely to die from what she did to them". But this is absurd logic. These children were also the most likely to die anyway.

The fact that the prosecution thought this was a great argument suggests to me that the groupthink was well under way. Once you decide that there is a pattern somewhere, you will find confirmation of it everywhere, even if it's just chance among noise.

We were told at the trial that 15 children died and LL was on duty every time. But we weren't told that there were several other children who died when she couldn't possibly have been involved. Is anyone looking for a murderer in those cases? Why not? (Answer: Because of someone's interpretation of statistics. But statisticians notoriously tend to agree on very little.)

She might have done it, but the more I read about the case, the less it looks like "beyond a reasonable doubt", which is the standard that applies — especially when, as mentioned above, there is no independent direct evidence that a crime was even committed.

SomeFinElse · 29/08/2024 23:28

Allthegoodnamesarechosen · 29/08/2024 23:23

It’s pretty strange to be convicted of murders which no one has yet proved took place. The babies, who were very sick, died, and no one at the time thought they were anything other than natural ( and not unexpected) deaths.

Cases like this are the best argument against the death penalty.

This is perfectly put.

Jifmicroliquid · 29/08/2024 23:28

I was expecting to listen to the podcast and be utterly convinced that she’d done it. The reality was quite the opposite.

A lot of those babies were found to have died of natural causes. It had been signed off. It wasn’t a case of “hang on, there’s something suspicious here”. It was only after the doctors raised concerns that the deaths were revisited and suddenly it was decided they were murdered. I found that bit really quite shocking.

I can’t explain why, but I have a gut feeling that she’s innocent. I think it will come out eventually, somehow, but a long time in to her sentence.

chouxchoux · 29/08/2024 23:28

Obeseandashamed · 29/08/2024 23:24

The judge has to give a sentence based upon the verdict of the jury. The jury has more power than a judge in a trial when it comes to determining 'justice'.

100% this - trial by jury is a very scary concept.

IMO Letby’s conviction is totally unsafe and that much seems to be becoming clear regardless of predispositions about her guilt/innocence. I really hope it’s looked at properly, as unpalatable as that might be to Joe Public and (entirely understandably) the poor families of the babies involved.

SaWhat · 29/08/2024 23:29

CormorantStrikesBack · 29/08/2024 23:00

Well the collapses which they did cherry pick weren’t unexplained/unusual until they were. They’d been put down as natural causes deaths, not murder. And I believe that’s what was put down on their death certificates.

So what makes this “expert” (who has never worked as a neonatologist I don’t believe) decide what’s unexplained and what isn’t? Is it confirmation bias and he has a theory and then discounts anything which doesn’t fit?

All good questions! And what will make an appeal (is it) even harder.

SomeFinElse · 29/08/2024 23:29

samarrange · 29/08/2024 23:27

Something that surprised me when I started reading about this case is that there is not a single piece of hard evidence that any of the children was assaulted or murdered.

No autopsy or inquest declared "This child was the victim of homicide, we just need to find out who did it".

In other words, the alternative to "Lucy Letby killed them" is not "Somebody else killed them, but nobody could have, therefore it must be her". The alternative is that they just died. These were, after all, very sick children. That's why they were in hospital.

At one point the prosecution noted that the children who died were, pretty much without exception, the sickest ones on the ward. This was used as evidence of how evil LL was: "She deliberately chose the weakest so that they would be most likely to die from what she did to them". But this is absurd logic. These children were also the most likely to die anyway.

The fact that the prosecution thought this was a great argument suggests to me that the groupthink was well under way. Once you decide that there is a pattern somewhere, you will find confirmation of it everywhere, even if it's just chance among noise.

We were told at the trial that 15 children died and LL was on duty every time. But we weren't told that there were several other children who died when she couldn't possibly have been involved. Is anyone looking for a murderer in those cases? Why not? (Answer: Because of someone's interpretation of statistics. But statisticians notoriously tend to agree on very little.)

She might have done it, but the more I read about the case, the less it looks like "beyond a reasonable doubt", which is the standard that applies — especially when, as mentioned above, there is no independent direct evidence that a crime was even committed.

I thought this exact same thing all the way throughout the trial.

Thevelvelletes · 29/08/2024 23:29

ToBeOrNotToBee · 29/08/2024 22:58

When I was working in midwifery, for a 4-5 months, every single woman I cared for needed something like an emergency cesarean, forceps, I even had a shoulder dystocia and a very poorly baby as a result.
I was the common demoninator and it really impacted me. In fact this was the trigger for a period of time where I was suicidal and ultimately quit my career. I used to write in my journals similar things to what Letby did.
Reading people saying she must be guilty based on her own writing chills me to the bone because they would have found me guilty (of what I don't know) the same way.
I do believe there is way more to this than meets the eye. This is a very shaky conviction.

That's a measured view based on your experience and abhorrent that you went through that on your own.
We live in an age now of armchair detectives,judge ,jury executioner.

Education79 · 29/08/2024 23:30

readysteadynono · 29/08/2024 22:52

I don’t think the conviction was safe, in the sense I don’t think it was beyond reasonable doubt. I have no idea if she was innocent or guilty. But we do require for good reason that people only be convicted if there is no reasonable doubt.

As someone who teaches criminology I do have niggling concerns about this one, but the jury, in the court founder her guilty, and that is our system (and the best available).

Jurys often don't really understand the reasonable doubt instruction, they should, in their deliberations be looking for that reasonable doubt and ruling it out rather than going blindly on what is presented to them.

A major part of the evidence is the writings, I've seen some examples given by experts in this field of samples of these, and if read one way they could be a confession, the other way the torment of someone who knows they are being fitted up.

So on that basis you can say, ah, there is reasonable doubt, but then you have to ask yourself is that doubt being cast really credible?

Knowing what I know, which is what has been on the media sources, I'd probably still go guilty to be honest.

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