Lucy Letby in the news 2

[ShamblesRock]

Following on from the previous thread.

The thread had got to discussing Dr Dewi Evans, whether he was impartial, and questions about some of the evidence he presented and if he is now backtracking.

Also discussions around LL behaviour - FB searches, keeping notes, hanging around amongst those mentioned.

It has posters who have faith that the legal system have been thorough and therefore justice has been done and others who feel that there are too many holes in the evidence. Plus the odd discussion around the legal system as a whole.

Following

I'm hoping to catch up with the Channel 5 documentary.

I have a feeling it may leave more questions than answers.

Two other things I found interesting to listen to was Tortoise Media podcast - Expert witnesses and BBC sounds File on 4.

Thanks for new thread.

Just wanted to pick up on a post made in the last few pages of that thread, which said that most of the babies would have still been in the unit even if it was downgraded before because they were over 32 weeks.

Actually most wouldn't have been there because the cut off is 34 weeks for twins and higher again for triplets I believe. So I don't think any of the twins would have been there, and neither would the triplets.

Wrong thread

This new article in the Guardian is worth a read.

It makes it clear the police have not been at all honest about the way they investigated this case- they did NOT, as claimed, start with an open mind and all independently come up with Lucy Letby for each separate case. They approached a statistician from the start and ignored what she told them.

That article made for an incredibly worrying read. There, however, seems to be a shift from "we aren't saying that she is guilty or not guilty" to "there seems to be lots of evidence pointing to the verdict being wrong" On the surface they seem the same, but I really feel there is a shift in opinion.

According to that article the police approached the statistician a year after the investigation started, so could this not have been after the independent investigations concluded and they already had LL's name in the frame? Then the decision was made not to instruct her as statistics were ultimately not part of the prosecution case.

And I also can't see that there's an issue in this not forming part of the disclosure as it wouldn't either support the defence (there's nothing in that exchange which might suggest LL didn't do it) or undermine the prosecution (as statistics were not part of their case). I'm sure they had these sorts of exploratory conversations with a load of witnesses that they didn't end up using.

It’s about the report that the hospital took to the police in the first place:

‘According to documents seen by the Guardian, seven doctors collaborated on compiling a report to police in May 2017. It presented details of 13 babies who had died and eight more who had deteriorated. They said Letby had been present at 11 of the deaths, adding: “The likelihood of this occurring by chance alone is very low.”
In their opening statement to the inquiry, hospital managers said that when they finally went to Cheshire police, on 5 May 2017: “It was explained that there was a notable high statistical relationship between Letby and babies deteriorating on the unit, but no other evidence.”’

Bad statistics put her in the frame. The police then looked for evidence around Lucy.

Bad statistics put her in the frame. The police then looked for evidence around Lucy.

But the onus wasn't on the consultants to be statistically rigorous about their suspicions. They just reported what they had to the police as a starting point and it was then for the police to conduct a criminal investigation with the necessary rigour.

And I'm not seeing anything here to suggest that the police were lying when they said that they then investigated each death and incident separately and that the people working on those investigations didn't know about the suspicions on LL. The call to Jane Hutton was made a year after the investigation began.

I honestly think she is innocent or that at least it should go to retrial.
The expert Dewi Evans is already changing his evidence. The swipe card data was inaccurate
The statistics I think were manipulated

But the police didn’t use the necessary rigour. Their correspondence with Prof Hutton shows that, together with the facts that:

1. They messed up the door swipe data, thus undermining their claims about times when she was alone with babies and therefore had opportunity.
2. Since she wasn’t on duty for one of the supposed insulin poisonings you have to believe an absurdity about her having poisoned a bag in advance even though she wouldn’t have known which bag the nurse on duty would pick. (If you can believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you!)
3. For another of the babies the death was a few minutes after her shift but they counted that as her being there- not unreasonable, as long as you do the same thing (ie counting adjacent shifts as her being there) to everyone on the spreadsheet, but there is no sign they did that.

My suspicion is they saw anonymised data so the police investigating each case didn’t know her name was Lucy Letby, but it’s clear the cases were already selected so they would come to the conclusion it was this particular nurse. That is what Prof Hutton’s problem was, that she tried to raise. If they had had an ounce of rigour they would have taken her advice.

What actual evidence is there that she murdered these poor babies

Did you follow the trial?

Circumstantial and supposition by the lead prosecution expert witness

Following.

But the police didn’t use the necessary rigour. Their correspondence with Prof Hutton shows that

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel can you point me towards the police correspondence with Prof Hutton? I've only seen what's referred to in that article.

The more I read about the misuse of statistics and expert evidence the more I doubt the validity of the process and therefore the verdict.
I would not be at all surprised if LL is eventually acquitted.
Of course it is all very upsetting for the bereaved families but it is ultimately of no help to them that LL remains in prison if she is not guilty.
They deserve the truth as much as LL.

My suspicion is they saw anonymised data so the police investigating each case didn’t know her name was Lucy Letby, but it’s clear the cases were already selected so they would come to the conclusion it was this particular nurse. That is what Prof Hutton’s problem was, that she tried to raise. If they had had an ounce of rigour they would have taken her advice.

Your suspicion maybe, but you literally have no idea about any of this @TheCountessofFitzdotterel . All we can tell from that article is that Prof Hutton said to them that you can't draw any conclusions about the statistical likelihood of one person being on shift for all these incidents without conducting a full review of all possible explanations. Fair enough, and they didn't then base the prosecution case on statistics anyway.

That’s what I am referring to.
If you write to an expert in the technique you have been using, they explain to you you’re doing it wrong, and you gaily ignore them, you’re not being rigorous. (Unless you are also talking to others in the field and they say ‘no actually you’re fine, she’s a maverick’, but that’s not what happened, they decided to ignore the methodological problems which had already had a huge impact on how they approached the case - indeed, there wouldn’t even have been a case otherwise.)

That’s what I am referring to.
If you write to an expert in the technique you have been using, they explain to you you’re doing it wrong, and you gaily ignore them, you’re not being rigorous. (Unless you are also talking to others in the field and they say ‘no actually you’re fine, she’s a maverick’, but that’s not what happened, they decided to ignore the methodological problems which had already had a huge impact on how they approached the case - indeed, there wouldn’t even have been a case otherwise.)

But in what way did they ignore her @TheCountessofFitzdotterel ? The prosecution didn't at any point provide a statistical probability for LL being on shift for all these incidents. Perhaps they didn't take things further with Prof Hutton as they felt they could build a strong enough case without the need for this sort of evidence. The CPS may even have had in mind previous cases where statistics have been mis-stated/misused and deemed it not worth the risk... Just because one officer contacted her with a speculative enquiry it tells us nothing about how the case was being run. There were nearly 70 other people also working on it.

Referring to the original probe, Mr Hughes said: "We looked at it individually, every case needed to be investigated on its own merit. I wanted to allow people to come to a determination of what they were finding on their own." After six months using this tactic, Mr Hughes then introduced weekly team meetings, where investigators shared information. "All of a sudden the picture would start falling into place," he said. "It was chilling really at times, to see it drop into effect.
"A detective would give the update of their investigation, they would say, 'What happened in my case was…according to the medical evidence the collapse took place at this time, at this time the designated nurse went on a break handing over care to Lucy Letby, the parents left and the child collapsed,' then another detective would go, 'Oh my God, that's exactly what happened in my case.' Patterns emerged

That doesn't sound like it was in way robust to me, sounds like they had nothing until they came together and started saying 'oh my God Letby was there when the baby in my case collapsed too'.

@kkloo that is literally a 30 second informal synopsis of a 6 month-plus chunk of the investigation. It's impossible to tell anything about the robustness or otherwise from that.

I think that synopsis is pretty telling, especially considering we know the evidence that was relied on in court.

You said you've seen nothing which suggests the police were lying when they investigated each one individually and that they didn't know anything about the suspicions about LL.
And I've seen nothing which suggest that the police investigation was done well and was robust!

Not to mention - the police investigated the cases that Dewi Evans told them were crimes. So they were looking for a suspect. But there may not have been a crime in the first place. In which case there is no suspect.

baby C highlights this. Dewi Evans confidently said during the trial that Baby C had air injected into his naso gastric tube and presented the big bubble of air on the X-ray as evidence that someone injected air into him. Then when it emerged that LL was not on shift or indeed had any contact with him when the X-ray was taken, his view changed. Rather than sticking with his view and concluding ‘someone else’ must have injected air into him, he changed his opinion and said that she must have killed them by injecting air into his bloodstream. However there was no evidence of this. Why is he allowed to change his mind of the cause of death when it emerged she couldn’t have done it? What is his explanation now for the big bubble of air on the X-ray? When asked he said ‘well she was certainly there when he died’. So what? There is no evidence of any harm done to him. The whole thing is a farce.