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.

Their career is only on the line if they don’t do their jobs properly. That goes for if they give evidence which helps either side. By the way, experts owe their duty to the court, not to the party who calls them. I totally fail to see why they would have anything more to fear from helping to exonerate an accused than from helping to put them away for the rest of their lives. If they did the latter badly, that surely would ruin a career?

It will take time for experts to accumulate a critical mass of evidence to launch a significant appeal.

However there has to space for this process to happen under Lucy's new legal team. I am not offering opinion on guilt or innocence but I do believe we can't stop the debate and process of evidence accumulation because it distresses the families or even those on MN.

I have never seen such a release of counter opinion to a legal case so soon and we can't simply dismiss the opinion as being crass. There is a real feeling out there fromany angles that this case didn't benefit from our legal system as it stands.

@mids2019
I have never seen such a release of counter opinion to a legal case so soon and we can't simply dismiss the opinion as being crass. There is a real feeling out there fromany angles that this case didn't benefit from our legal system as it stands

Agree.

But tbf, I don't think feeling is exactly the right word, because it sounds too emotional. I think I know what you mean. It's rather a sense that the verdict is unsafe.
That's not to say anything one way or the other about Letby's actual guilt - it's a question of whether the legal system is capable of evaluating the scientific and statistical evidence: what, whether or how it's presented to the jury, and whether or how the jury is capable of interpreting it.

@WagnersFourthSymphony

Ok feeling is maybe not the right word and actually it is the emotion about the case that perhaps has led to a suppression of opinion. It takes courage to speak out in some kind of defence of a serial killer so experts in my opinion are being deliberative in their public comment and possibly choosing the correct time

the evidence of what actually happens to professionals who give defence evidence in such high profile cases really does speak for itself. It is brutal and if you look into it, has destroyed good careers.
People want to see someone being held responsible, and in such high emotional cases such as LL, the public wants a guilty verdict. A lot of professionals just won't go near these cases, which is why LL didn't have any medical defence to support her side, no one wanted to do it

Her expertise is criminal law and that means she will have had plenty of experience in analysing all kinds of expert reports and cross-examining all kinds of expert.

Her job is to examine both expert and non-expert evidence and, if necessary, call it into question in defence of her client.
She knows more about it than you do, accept it.

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/letby-brings-in-new-lawyer-as-potential-appeal-prepared/5120772.article

So the barrister now representing Lucy to formulate some sort of appeal is being attacked for even going near this.....but worrying I'm my opinion.

Why would a barrister risk his reputation and do work for free unless he feels there is something that needs addressing?

There seem to be more and more people willing to risk their reputations by at least looking again at this case. There are also more and more anecdotes of people being 'warned off' offering opinion on support of the defence. One thing that surprised me was the lack of nurses giving evidence especially those that worked closely with Lucy over a number of years and I think you will probably find the trust warning Lucy's colleagues to be careful about jeopardizing their careers.

Note in this legal magazine a lack of emotive language when describing LL. I suppose it's embedded in legal culture to be as neutral as possible.

Mark McDonald is shit hot and is very involved in addressing miscarriages of justice.

If every verdict and every judicial process and every legal professional and every jury was always right; if every piece of evidence was always accurately presented, understood and every verdict was watertight.... there would never be miscarriages of justice.

Fact is, there are. I don't know whether LL js guilty of all those murders or not (neither does anyone else here). But I do believe this case needs to be re examined rigorously.

The fact that anyone going near a defence case is jeapardising their career, is extremely worrying

Yet the Daily Mail has termed any questioning of the case as a 'sick' campaign for release. When you see such vitriol thrown at anyone who wishes to look at the prospect of miscarriage of justice no wonder many who might have had important views would actively take cover.

there seems to be a bit of a j just mob mentality about this which isn't helping.

the upcoming public enquiry will.be interesting though there are those that feel it can't be entirely flexible as it has to presuppose all the murder convictions are valid.

@eastegg I'm also a lawyer and in my experience it's naive to think there aren't some cases that experts want nothing to do with. Grenfell is a good example. So many experts turned the instructions down. I'd imagine being asked to act on behalf of a nurse who has allegedly killed many babies isn't the case you want your career to be remembered for.

So there can’t ever truly be justice where a case is a very emotive one such as child murder, and it involves expert evidence? Because experts are too scared. Well that shuts down the arguments doesn’t it. Anything can be met with ‘well of course we haven’t heard about it either at trial or before the Court of Appeal, because experts are too scared’.

It’s getting far too close to conspiracy theory territory. I’m all for a debate and I’m keeping an open mind as I’ve already said, but once I start hearing ‘well you never know what we might have heard if witnesses (robust professional ones at that) weren’t too scared to come forward’ then I feel like giving up.

The expert upon whose evidence Sally Clark was convicted was ultimately crucified. It cuts both ways.

It's a total myth that experts are too scared to give evidence for defendants in these cases. They know perfectly well that, provided they stand their views up with evidence, they will continue to be respected within the expert community. Indeed, the expert who is vindicated and gets an innocent person off gets extra kudos.

I'm not suggesting that is what happened here. I'm just saying that it isn't unheard of for people not to want to accept instructions. Tbf Grenfell is my only experience of that.

That is the million dollar question isn’t it - what went wrong with the defence. There are no clear answers. By rights there should have been any number of experts to choose from, but they didn’t even call the ones they had.

No doubt you can appreciate that understanding scientific evidence from a lay perspective is not the same as from an experienced scientific one. That is absolutely fundamental to evaluation of the soundness of medical evidence and the credibility of expert witnesses.

Professor Michael Hall, one of the expert witnesses for the defence wrote a letter to the BMJ. I attach it as it highlights some issues.

I'm sorry but those deeming her to be innocent, could you hand on heart say that you would be happy to leave your vulnerable baby in her care? In the hands of a nurse that said a baby was fine and told the baby's mother to go away despite the baby screaming with blood pouring out of its mouth? Babies have various cries/screams and the nature of screaming described by its mother would not be caused by a harmless stroke.
In the hands of a nurse that caused a baby's obs to drop and was only prompted to react to it because a doctor caught her?
You're all deluded.

There's a difference between saying you believe her convictions may be unsafe and that you believe she is innocent. Very difficult to say she is innocent based on what I know. Do I think her convictions may be unsafe? Yes, I do.

Fair enough. My reply wasn’t specifically directed at you tbf. Your post was fairly measured. I think some posters are running away with the idea of silencing as an answer to the question of why no scientific evidence has persuaded the court of appeal that anything went wrong when so many on this thread claim to know that it did.

The expert upon whose evidence Sally Clark was convicted was ultimately crucified.

It took some time to get there. She lost her first appeal. Here are some comments by a US pathologist, who provided evidence for the second appeal, which equally apply to the LL case:

Throughout my review, I was horrified by the shoddy fashion in which these cases were evaluated. It was clear that sound medical principles were abandoned in favour of over-simplification, over-interpretation, exclusion of relevant data and, in several instances, the imagining of non-existent findings

I think your first sentence there sums up where we differ. I don’t agree that the million dollar question is what went wrong with the defence, because I don’t assume, as you clearly do, that anything did ‘go wrong’ with the defence necessarily.

I know it took time to get there. But my point was that in light, for example, of cases such as Sally Clark, whose life was utterly destroyed by an expert, experts may be just as unwilling to testify for the prosecution as for the defence. There’s no logical reason why they wouldn’t be.

Another grossly presumptuous comment: ‘equally apply to the LL case’! Nobody on this thread can possibly say that comments by a pathologist, with privileged access to the Sally Clarke case, about that case, ‘equally apply to the LL case’.

I look forward to reading about your evidence to the C of A. I’m not even joking. You must have that level of access and expertise to be posting in the way you are.

They can if they followed the trial. Because the comments apply word for word to Dewi Evans’ evidence.

In fact they echo a previous judge’s comments on Evans:

He either knows what his professional colleagues have concluded and disregards it or he has not taken steps to inform himself of their views.
Either approach amounts to a breach of proper professional conduct.

No attempt has been made to engage with the full range of medical information or the powerful contradictory indicators. Instead the report has the hallmarks of an exercise in ‘working out an explanation’ that exculpates the applicants.

It ends with tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside Dr Evans’ professional competence and have no place in a reputable expert report.

For all those reasons, no court would have accepted a report of this quality even if it had been produced at the time of the trial.”

There’s nothing wrong with the defence in a case where the question of whether murder has even been committed rests on interpretation of scientific evidence - and they produce zero expert witnesses?

Whether it was intentional and the strategy backfired or it was by default - it means the jury has only heard one side of the story. David Allen Green wrote a good piece on this.

Anyway, we’re not going to agree so let’s leave it there.