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.

During the last week of her trial I was in hospital with my preemie (liverpool women's) and loads of the staff remembered her and because it was such major news and I was in hospital with my DD a while, I'd discussed LL with the staff and they were all shocked because she seemed really lovely.
But nobody believed she was innocent. Not one person. But they were genuinely shocked by it because apparently Lucy was very sweet during her training there.

I had friends give birth at the countess of Chester at the time LL was arrested so I was pretty invested in the case, I believe fully she's guilty (the tattle thread was exceptional, not a tattler but credit to the tattle lassies for their information, empathy for victims and just how that thread was handled if you want to dive more into it) and I don't believe there is a miscarriage of justice here.
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. But the repeated attempts are what seals it for me, some of those beautiful little babies fought so hard to live and fought her sabotages and it just breaks the hardest of hearts.

I have DC born around the same time as those babies and I think of the parents often, I hope that they find peace and that life is treating them with as much kindness as it can muster.

Was she not questioned so many times over the years? I remember her being in the press years ago. So did she keep those diary entries all that time (even when she knew they’d probably be looked at) or were they found in the initial search?

Apologies i dont mean to be rude about something that was really difficult for you.
But radiographers carry out scans - not nurses? She was not an adult nurse either, its a different qualification. A neonatal nurse is a type of childrens nurse. She would never have been carrying out miscarriage scans?

Posters need to stop correcting it now. The point has been made repeatedly. It was a very distressing situation. ^^

I think this to me is part of the issue. I’ve followed it all very closely I’m a nurse and it’s all of our worst nightmare to be accused of something dreadful like this. Obviously I’ve not sat in court day in day out but I’ve looked at all the evidence available publicly and listened to all the podcasts and read the articles.

What concerns me most is some people’s ability to quickly write her off as unlikeable, weird, cold and equate that to being a murderer. Along with the attitude ‘those poor poor babies it’s awful so someone needs to go down’. The wrong person being accused is not justice for those poor babies. You can be cold, weird and still be a nurse (I know a LOT of them!) doesn’t make you a murderer. People seem happy to have an ‘outcome’ and don’t want to think about it any more. I personally feel the outcome is much more unpalatable- the chronic under funding and staffing simply made that unit incredible dangerous for babies and that’s why they died. And those poor parents who effectively ‘chose’ (I say choose as most people go to their local hospital) to have their children there sadly were unlucky and the multiple failings of a poorly run and managed ward killed their beautiful babies.

@Thatmissingsock adult nurses can be neonatal nurses too.

And again- this shows how badly mismanaged and staffed the hospital was if a nurse was working clearly well outside of her remit on the basis she could do a scan. Not appropriate

So what?
Did they work on the shifts that she worked on when the tragedies happened?
Were they involved in the trial?
Have they seen evidence?
If it's a no to all of the above, then they cannot make a statement that she is guilty.
This makes me really annoyed; armchair detectives.
Most people with any level of intelligence would accept that they themselves do not know if she is guilty or not.
It's of no relevance whatsoever that your family members who are saying this are nurses and doctors! They are simply clinicians. They do not investigate neonatal deaths.
And I say that as a doctor.

Well thats just not true. I love the blanket unevidenced statements on MN

Except apparently there were 6 other deaths and numerous collapses when she wasn’t on shift.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39k44n8j1mo.amp

What? So you’re saying if there’s a load of doubt it doesn’t matter that she spends her life in prison as long as she’s not executed? It makes me wonder if people on juries might also think this.. be unsure of guilt but think it’s better to lock someone up than potentially let a baby killer walk free 🤷‍♀️.

someone earlier mention about would we in the future find something out about how insulin may occur naturally in high levels and that’s something I’ve wondered about. We don’t routinely test babies/people for this so how can we say for sure that such levels don’t occur naturally. I’ve no idea, just pondering. We know that insulin is produced naturally and the level depends on many factors, even in a well baby. Never mind a small, prem, sick baby who may be having a metabolic crisis.

i remember the Cleveland child abuse cases where an expert paediatrician said the kids had been sexually abused because their anal sphincters when touched reacted in a way that only the sphincters of kids who had been abused did. And then it turned out everyone’s sphincters did that. 121 kids were incorrectly removed from their families due to this! 121!

Did they though? Where's your evidence for this? From what I've read and seen it's entirely possible this was a poorly run hospital and unit which was doing work it didn't have the skills and capacity for and it was related to this/coincidental many very sick premature babies died, rather than due to foul play.

Human nature wants to blame someone and rather than blame an institution which has since turned itself around to some degree. It's easier to pin things on one person and demonise them, especially the single young woman who is demoralised and depressed by her working conditions and the deaths around her.

I think saying the jury doesn't understand is simplistic. The jury decides the facts based on what they are presented with and under direction from the judge. The experts who are now speaking out are saying some of that evidence was faulty and can't be relied on. It was a very long trial and there is pressure on a jury to reach verdicts. The court system is under huge strain and they tell you how bad things are. You can see it as a juror in crumbling buildings, etc. From what I've read recently, it looks as though Lucy Letby was failed by her defence team which didn't call some of its own witnesses or question some of the prosecution evidence strongly enough.

Dr John Gibbs has said in the seven years since Lucy Letby was taken off the unit there has been one neonatal death.

Ellythe I get what you mean about questioning your ability to judge character. I worked as a rookie alongside a guy in his 20's one summer who then went on to commit one of the worst murders in the UK. Media blackout on some details. He seemed charming and really nice.

We were lifeguards together 🤔

People want someone to blame. The death of the babies is horrific, but if they have locked an innocent person up for life who didn’t do it… well that’s no justice for the babies or their families, is it?

I couldn’t care less that she is blonde, white and ‘pretty’. I actually found something intrinsically off-putting about her demeanour and looks (that probably sounds horribly judgemental). But I still don’t believe she is guilty.

All those people who are annoyed that people are questioning this conviction need to have a real think about this. Do you want to live in a society where you can be locked up for life for something that there is very little evidence you did? People seem to think that because she was found guilty, therefore she is, but are forgetting there are many cases out there of people being sent down for crimes it was later found they did not commit. That is not a new phenomena by any means.

I hope I am wrong and she is guilty, because I can’t even think about how horrific it is if she isn’t.

Didn’t the unit stop taking on very sick or overly premature babies though? So no more deaths would be expected.

(Happy to be corrected on this as I’m not sure where I read it)

Yeah this was sort of my experience as well. I followed the podcast, and I’m an ICU nurse (adult setting so slightly different) and there were some evidence that I didn’t really follow. The doctor saying he caught her red handed over a patient with sats of 80s , alarms silenced and just standing there watching, that’s really not unusual at all, regularly patients desaturate after suctioning, turning for example and as an experienced ICU nurse I know when and when I don’t need help, very often you just silence the alarms and watch for a few minutes and give the patient some time to recover. So I didn’t really think that was “caught red handed” at all. The over thing that gave me pause was the introduction of air into the stomach as a means of murder, I didn’t get that at all, I just thought it was cause the patient to vomit or burp, certainly wouldn’t be a very effective way to kill an adult, but I just put this down to my inexperience of neonatal patients and took the prosecution at face value. Also a lot of these babies had been resuscitated, it’s pretty common to find a lot of air in the stomach after CPR as bagging and chest compressions can introduce a lot of air into the stomach.

but like you say it was the insulin evidence that done it for me and I was sure she was guilt but now all these experts coming out and saying that isn’t exactly the smoking gun that the prosecution set it up as has given me pause. I don’t know if she’s guilty or not, probably is but I’m less sure now than I was during the trial.

we have spoke about it in work quite a lot and I would say people are split pretty 50/50 on this case, and I’m including very senior ICU consultants as well who just aren’t sure.

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.

Or she chose the sickest because it wouldn't be a surprise they died?

Quite frankly we'll never know.

However I wasn't convinced if her guilt until the trial started and I followed it.

“Their case was wide ranging, including blood test results which showed that two babies had been given an insulin overdose, X-rays which indicated that air had been injected into seven others, while others still were shown to have been force-fed with milk.”

she also wrote in a journal “I am evil” you don’t write that if there have been unavoidable mistakes in care. You do write it if you are guilty of murdering babies.

this is insane. I hope she rots in prison

I hear you, and I don’t have a view one way or the other about her guilt.

But this is the difficulty with probability. If I’m waiting at a bus stop at 08:30 every weekday morning and, over a year, 4 people collapse and die at that bus stop, people might accuse me of having something to do with it. Because I was at the bus stop every time it happened. But, I’m always at the bus stop, so of course I’ll be there if someone collapses and dies. Also, I wasn’t there for a 5th death, that happened at a weekend. But no one takes that one into account.

My understanding is most babies died on a night shift. Letby worked more night shifts than colleagues. She offered to cover extra shifts because she was conscientious and helpful. Otherwise, colleagues who had families would have to cover them. And she was young and saving up, so eager for the extra money. But night shifts were when the hospital was most understaffed. If they called for a doctor, they’d take ages to arrive.

This is the conundrum. Was she a murderer, who offered to work extra night shifts to take her chance to murder, when there were fewer people about? Or was she a helpful and conscientious nurse who was more likely to be working when very sick babies were more likely to die?

Agree 100% with this, if this was a Black or Asian person or someone with a different heritage no one would be batting an eyelid at the conviction. In fact I’m sure papers like the Daily Fail would be having a field day.

This has really bothered me. I had counselling for PND many years ago and I was encouraged to write my thoughts down, even fill in booklets which the therapist could read. At the time I had appalling intrusive thoughts, I'm not even going to describe here some of the awful stuff that flitted into my mind unbidden. I hated myself.
I refused to do the written part of the therapy, as even in the state I was in I could see the risk in commiting those thoughts and feelings to paper.

I think the note sealed her fate. Without it, it may have been a very different outcome.

Also my earlier comment about insulin, so this was just a theory then? There was no hard evidence that they had been injected with anything? Or did a post mortem show they had elevated levels of insulin? If that's the case, and they were originally judged to have died of natural causes, how did they make the u turn to suggest they had been injected deliberately?

As I said, I think the note was probably the most damming piece of evidence against her. There will always be doubts of her innocence because of it and I can see her staying in prison because even if everything else is debunked, people will always come back to the note.

This is one of the things used repeatedly to shut down any discussion of this being an unsafe conviction. ‘It wasn’t her? Her life was ruined? Oh well. Think of the poor parents of the babies and be quiet.’

’It wasn’t LL who did the scan? Oh well. Shush. It was a distressing situation.’

Spreading lies, even unintentionally, deserves to be challenged, repeatedly.

More than one a week

https://ccrc.gov.uk/news/more-than-one-miscarriage-of-justice-overturned-every-week-this-year/#:~:text=The%20CCRC%27s%20Annual%20Report%202021,overturned%20thanks%20to%20CCRC%20referral.