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.

You also have to remember that particular baby was the 700g 24-week gestation baby. Babies that premature are supposed to be nursed on a level-3 unit. We do not know how much experience LL and the nurses on that unit have of babies with level-3 needs. What would have been normal nursing practice for a level-2 neonate might not have been appropriate for a level-3 neonate.

And it was really Level 1, only a pretend Level 2.

Indeed. Because when someone eventually looked at the unit properly, they realised that the care they provided at level 2 was not fit for purpose. Hence them being downgraded to level 1.

This happened to me in hospital, my oxygen levels suddenly crashed, and the nurses just stood there watching while it happened, fortunately it didn't last long

Yeah. Standing watching is doing something. It's not like they ignored it and continued their conversation at the nursing station. They were prepared to escalate if necessary.

See I’m not sure about that. Midwifery is more my field but when looking after a woman in labour and the fetal heart drops below 100 I dont immediately pull the emergency buzzer. I see if it recovers, if in 30 secs it doesn’t then I pull the buzzer. I have defined seen paediatric colleagues watch and wait with a desaturated baby. 9 times out of 10 they take a breath and their levels bounce back up.

My main issue with the evil from the doctor about this event is I don’t believe he could have thought it was as significant at the time as what he says now. Because he did nothing. He’s now saying it was obvious that Lucy was harming/not helping the baby when she should have been. But he didn’t do or say anything at the time? He didn’t shout at her and say what are you doing? He didn’t report her there and then to whoever was in charge?

I also remember an incident at the hospital where I worked where when the crash team arrived in the middle of CPR being administered to a patient in their words we were “stood round, not doing anything “. That’s literally what they put in a statement. Where as actually the defib had just told us to pause CPR while it reassessed to see if a shock was needed. 🤷‍♀️

that patient died. Thankfully I’m not up on a murder charge with the crash team giving evidence.

And he left her there after and the baby deteriorated again, and then he left the ward completely and left Letby there again where he was called back within a couple of minutes for a further desat....and then he left her there again and said nothing......doesn't really add up!

Yes to be fair I’m not a paediatrician or midwife so I don’t know what the specific protocol is when a baby is desaturating. Entirely different scenario with adults though.

Have you heard of the Birmingham 6 or the Guildford 4? Miscarriages of justice on a grand scale do happen.

Why do people have to be so bloody snotty on this thread? I’ve been on the receiving end of it myself and I’m sick of it. There was nothing in fedup’s post to suggest they hadn’t heard of the Birmingham 6 or Guildford 4, they just said what a huge miscarriage of justice it would be etc etc. Behave and stop being so dickish.

This ^

If it were my child I would want to know if my child was the victim of a killer or the victim of systemic medical negligence. I would want the truth, not a scapegoat.

Gross, both of you. You're reinforcing your own existing biases.

Don't be disingenuous 🙄

It’s largely her writings being used as evidence that is currently under scrutiny. Many experts claiming they are meaningless and shouldn’t have been used as evidence, particularly as she was encouraged to write these things down as part of counselling she was undergoing.

Particularly as others parts of her writings said things such as ‘why are they doing this to me’

This has all been weighed up by the jury though. I’m not seeing anything on this thread that makes me think ‘that changes things’. The writings for example. LL gave evidence. So was able to tell the jury all about why she wrote them, counselling etc. Experts are doubting them are they? What interpretation should be put on the writings doesn’t immediately strike me as something for expert comment, evidentially speaking. Unless it’s coupled with evidence that she was suffering from some sort of mental illness which affected what she wrote and how it should be interpreted, and then you might need an expert to help. But that wasn’t the case.

There’s an awful lot of implied disparaging of the jury here. In our system, for good or ill, and many of us working in the system say good, the jury is king and queen on all questions of fact. To get past the court of appeal you need to show they were misled, somehow prevented from doing their job properly, which is to weigh up the facts. I’m not seeing anything like that really.

I do find it quite incredible that people can look at those desperate, frantic scribblings, made at the suggestion of counsellors by a person struggling to cope under what must have been well-nigh unbearable stress and torment of mind, singled out under grave suspicion and made an example of by her own colleagues, accused by the doctors she’d worked so closely with in a job she loved (but that was, in itself, a hard and high-stress environment every single day), and then brush it all away with 'unless it’s coupled with evidence that she was suffering from some sort of mental illness which affected what she wrote and how it should be interpreted, and then you might need an expert to help. But that wasn’t the case'.

How do people think THEY might have coped with that intense, unrelenting level of pressure, all day, every day, for months and months, with no end in sight and no idea when or how it might finish? Just woken up every morning and sprung out of bed with a glad smile, looking forward to what the day might hold? Because I sure as heck wouldn’t. I’d have been a wreck curled up in a ball.

If anything, those notes tend to make me see LL as a normal, feeling human being, not the calculating psychopath so many people want to make her out to be.

I'm dubious about those experts, though. People like criminologists are being quoted, rather than psychiatrists.

Did they rely on an expert psychiatrist to suggest this evidence suggested LL’s guilt? I would be astounded if a psychiatrist or indeed a forensic psychologist suggested her counselling notes were consistent with her admitting to the crimes she has been found guilty of.

Can't tell who you're replying to here, but how were either of the posts telling you that you're in the wrong being disingenuous?

You’ve just illustrated what I’m trying to get across. You’ve just been able to put forward a very eloquent argument for why the writings shouldn’t be relied on as evidence of guilt. I’m not brushing it aside. I might even agree with you for all you know. My point is that LL’s KC would have without doubt said everything you can think of, and more. If you can do it then they, quite frankly, can do it better. Better than me too. You think you would have come to a different conclusion? You weren’t on the jury, listening to all the evidence for the best part of six months.

Or is the argument that the writings shouldn’t have even been before the jury? Because they can’t be trusted to assess them properly? But you think you can, so why can’t they? You’d have to work very hard indeed to persuade me they should have been inadmissible.

I’m not trying to persuade you of that. It's the fact the notes were treated by the prosecution as bombshell proof of LL's guilt. You could just as easily argue the opposite, exactly as I have done: they were evidence of the mind of an innocent person in torment.

As the Guardian's report yesterday makes clear, the prosecution highlighted the phrase: “I am evil I did this” …throughout the trial the jury was repeatedly reminded of that statement, and encouraged to interpret the notes literally….The defence argued during the trial that the notes represented Letby’s anguished state of mind when she was accused of killing babies and not “guilt”.

Ultimately, it wasn’t a confession, and shouldn’t have been treated as such. I suspect that the enormous amount of very complex (and, for lay-people) difficult to understand medical evidence was overshadowed by the much more easily-graspable concept of 'look, she wrote it down, she's evil, she said so!'

It seems to me that each element of the triel being rehashed piece by piece (despite the jury having been presented with both sides of the argument at the time) is more a consequence of the long-term reporting restrictions arising from the retrial, coupled with the intrigue created by the New Yorker's banned article (and the fact that geographical reporting restrictions are largely unenforceable nowadays for online publications).

The flurry of content released after reporting restrictions were lifted gives the impression that suddenly there's this huge and growing consensus of doubt across the world about these guilty verdicts, when the mundane reality is that many of these articles, opinion pieces and podcasts have been sat on ice for months and have now been released to make a few bob. Which is to be expected, as that's what the media does.

It's perfectly normal for non-events to be spun into sensationalism by journalists. And the post-lockdown appetite for conspiracy theories and true crime is huge, so it's a guaranteed money-spinner.