Lucy Letby press conference

[Viviennemary]

There is a press conference going on now trying to get Lucy Letby's conviction overturned. From what I read the guilty verdict was sound. All those ill babies dying when she was alone with them. Just a coincidence? Already been refused an appeal.

Not necessarily. It was a poorly run trial and she seemed to have a crap legal team who for reasons known only to themselves didn't call any expert witnesses (who were available) except for a plumber.

The "evidence" presented by the prosecution may have been copious, but when you delve just a little deeper you realise that much of it isn't actually evidence of anything really. Just that these very vulnerable and premature babies sadly died.

The current international panel of experts has now concluded that in each case there were other explanations (namely natural causes). Does that not cause you to question anything? You seem determined to believe the original verdict unquestioningly.

As I said earlier in the thread, to me it hasn't been proven beyond reasonable doubt that a crime was even committed in the first place.

she was convicted by the court of public opinion long before the trial took place

And by the majority of people on this site, as I recall.

No, I don't think that. I'm just expressing my opinion regarding this particular case.

Do you mean like with the grooming gangs? Where racial prejudice (and misogyny) meant that perpetrators were not prosecuted when they should have been?

Yes.

A lot of lawyers don’t understand statistics and they are very highly educated. I don’t think Goss, the judge in this case, does.

I 100% agree with this. In the past, forums like Mumsnet made me feel a little better about it but these days not so much. Honestly, it would be terrifying.

Anyone who has had a baby in nicu will know that sometimes when the alarms go off nurses will watch and wait for a few seconds to see if the baby rights itself it’s not uncommon at all to do that

Exactly this.

Letby is white, there's no indication of racial prejudice here, and afaik there's never actually been a case where a non white NHS clinician has been convicted of multiple murders. Additionally, clearly white British people can experience miscarriages of justice.

It's not only speculation but irrelevant in this instance.

Another thing to consider is that when you're accused of something that is essentially abstract and relies on expert witnesses on both sides, it is incredibly difficult to prove your innocence. Even if you get as far as reasonable doubt, there will always be a question, because people question how and why such a situation has come about and become the subject of legal proceedings. The "no smoke without fire" scenario.

We want to trust that any investigation prior to trial would be incredibly thorough and unbiased, however, human nature being what it is, there will be bias, perhaps subconscious, perhaps not, especially in highly emotive cases.

Court cases are not implicitly about the truth, it's more a game where each side is invested in winning. Those who find themselves as the unlucky contestant / defendant, if they are new to the system, and have no reason to distrust it, find it incredibly difficult to grasp this. Your legal advisors can tell you how certain things are likely to go, as they have been here before to different degrees, and you will think "But they can't do / say / use THAT, surely?" But yes, yes they can if it is presented as pertinent. Pyjamas come to mind. Utterly crazy making and substantially irrelevant to Lucy's case, but an exercise in discombobulating and destabilisation of the defendent.

In cases where actual evidence is largely circumstantial, discrediting the defendant is a huge power play. The prosecution has to convince the jury at all costs of guilt, by fair means or foul in the name of "justice" (to justify a spendy high profile trial). The defence has to get to reasonable doubt, and I do think questions need to be asked about Lucy's defence.

That said, we're talking about exceptionally complicated medical evidence. Not many solicitors / barristers would necessarily know where to look for experts with the right expertise in a highly unusual case, where the mechanisms of death proposed have little precedence.

I don't blame the jury. They did as instructed - which was basically if you think she did one, you can find her guilty on them all, never mind how. That's what I think is a travesty.

And at this point the media had already gone to town with a 'burn the witch' mentality. She was being scapegoated in the media before the trial.

Ah you don’t understand statistics either!

Same, I have colleagues who are NICU nurses and doctors and they’re not convinced she’s guilty at all. They’re all quite worried about her having been found guilty, for themselves as well as LL.

Absolutely. I don’t see how Jury can make a decision when really they need to be able to critically consider the evidence - which as you say was so specialist they wouldn’t be able to.

Of course she wasn't surprised. She'd known the consultants were accusing her of murder for two years. She'd known the police were investigating for over a year.

Like everybody else, she'd have a fight / flight / freeze / fawn reaction.

You can't judge people's guilt or innocence based on which one.

I wonder if it could be a case of negligence with some of the babies as the doctors are saying about poor medical care.

Maybe some of the consultants should be worried. Maybe it makes sense why they tried to scapegoat LL.

But they were prosecuted. (I am not even sure that racial prejudice led to delayed prosecutions as all the data shows disproportionate numbers of arrests and sentencing for ethnic minorites. It’s curious that this is the one time Police allegedly strayed from the standard practice.)

I read she has PTSD after the arrests.

Okay, so now you're being condescending. Statistical evidence was not the sole or decisive factor in her conviction. Instead, it formed part of a broader narrative used by the prosecution to establish a pattern of suspicious incidents during her shifts.

didnt some senior statistician from the royal college of statistics say that the numbers of incidents, etc was meaningless and shouldn’t be used to convict?

Ive always thought a lot of the theories was total codswallop, the shoving air into the babies via NG tube theory, etc. babies gulp loads of air anyway, when feeding, when having resus some could be shoved in there……never known a baby do anything other than have tummy ache or throw up. NG tubes are tiny, really thin…..you’d be there for ages with a syringe trying to put any large amount of air through it. She’d have been noticed.

I think it was a poorly run unit, bad supervision, poor staffing, poor policies, no learning from errors……but better for the hospital to blame it on an individual. Maybe I’m wrong, but I do think this. Didn’t they only do ward rounds twice a week! I read that, if it’s true it’s insane. There should be a consultant ward round twice a day!

Yep, Dr. Phil Hammond is MD and he has done a great job of scrutinising the evidence.

Whether she is guilty or not, who knows, but the scientific case against her is very shonky to say the least, and I think it all needs re-visiting. What would be awful is if in 30 years time she is proven innocent after all, I think she, and we public deserve concrete answers, and if none can be found then she should be released.

None of this was noted by the pathologists at the time.

She probably has CPTSD which is determined when the brain is functionally re-wired due to a prolonged period of stress and having no control over circumstance.

Exactly! I always thought there wasn’t enough evidence to convict but people on here hung her out to dry at the time!

I think the convictions were deeply unsafe. Aside from all the reasons I think that to be true, consider boiling it down to which of these sound most likely…

1. Lots of babies were killed because a (until three consultants started being ‘suspicious’ of her) highly regarded nurse dreamt up a number of different ways to murder them - some of them extremely (if not impossibly) difficult to pull off.

OR

2. A failing, filthy and chronically short-staffed unit was treating very premature and sick babies it hadn’t got the in-house competence to keep alive. A unit which was shortly thereafter severely downgraded, so that it no longer looked after this category of babies - an action which was at least months, if not years, overdue.

I mean come on. Even if there weren’t so many holes in the ‘evidence’ they used to convict her, I’d STILL think it was more likely that the babies died because the unit wasn’t collectively up to the job of keeping them alive.