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.

Ive just looked at google images of her diary ..im not convinced she’s innocent

She did not confess. She said she felt guilty. Common for people caring for babies who die.

As someone whose baby is on SCBU, having been in NICU, I'm appalled at their audacity to do this.

Those poor parents, you have to put your faith in the staff caring for your child and you have to trust them wholeheartedly. This monster took their babies away. She doesn't get to keep re traumatising those parents.

I hope it isn't being condescending to point out that nowhere in UK law does it say that "a pattern of suspicious incidents" is the theshold for conviction. The legal threshold is proven beyond reasonable doubt.

@AlertBrickBear

it was a typo though interesting to see you are caught up in semantics! as there is utter nonsense being spouted on this thread why not apply yourself to correcting some of the misinformation!

One of mine was in NICU too. I wouldn't want my experience to be used as a tool to criticise an expert for protecting their professional reputation in the face of complete misinterpretation of their work, nor for someone trying to exercise their legal rights.

I genuinely believe that this needs reviewed. Too much ‘evidence’ based on opinion and rotas rather than scientific/ medical fact. Where is the chart showing the drs on duty when the babies died, for example. And include all the deaths, including when LL wasn’t even at work. If you’re going to use a rota as evidence, make the data complete. We need to be able to trust that the justice system is fair and accurate. The experts today have cast doubt on that so this conviction should be reexamined.

I’ve been trying 😊

I’m really sorry you went through that, but what if she didn’t do it? Do you feel as though all of the contributing factors within the hospital system will have been taken care of if so?

@AlertBrickBear

I suggest you start with looking through the court transcripts and reading this:

www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/R-v-Letby-Final-Judgment-20240702.pdf

@AlertBrickBear she did it. She's been found guilty. She's using these appeals to traumatise her victims further.

Wrong. She wrote: “I am evil, I did this.”

Source: news.sky.com/story/amp/lucy-letby-trial-i-am-evil-i-did-this-read-the-confession-note-written-by-nurse-accused-of-murdering-seven-babies-12718882

I find it astounding that people who can’t even get the basic facts right on this case feel entitled to air opinions on whether Letby is innocent or guilty.

That was explained by Letby . The babies died on her watch. It’s not the same a ms a confession.

Just because the media present that piece of her writing as a confession, it doesn’t mean it is. Clearly it isn’t.

You have to trust their competence too. Does it not worry you that a detailed review of the care of these babies by world leading neonatologists has uncovered a succession of basic errors that have been effectively whitewashed by blaming Letby? At the very least I would expect you to be grateful to them for laying bare the inadequate care these children received.

Ipsa dixit.

I find the way statistics are used in these things really frightening too, and I admit I don't really understand how they work. A quick google says that the odds of winning the UK lottery jackpot are 1 in 14 million. For each individual person, it's almost impossible but it does happen to somebody almost every week.

So many people see statistics in something like this and say "Surely you can't think it's just a coincidence?" and I immediately wonder, well what if it is? What are the chances that it is a coincidence? More or less than 1 in 14 million?

We say 'beyond reasonable doubt' but what statistic would qualify as that? Is 1 in 14 million beyond reasonable doubt? In that case, if the lottery winners are exceptionally lucky, are we just accepting that some people are exceptionally lucky and go to prison?

I remember reading an article about someone who won the lottery twice. I don't remember the details but aren't the odds of that just astronomical? In another life, that could be a person on trial who's been as unlucky as that right?

I get that most trials aren't cut and dry and it's very rare we have a fingerprint and DNA and a gun and a person caught red-handed by a large number of trustworthy people, but where do we draw the line of what statistically is acceptable? 1 in a million? 1 in a billion? How likely does it have to be that we say that's good enough to put someone in prison?

The jury thing worries me for the same reason except that's far more frightening. Twelve jurors really isn't a lot at all, especially when you consider how much the average person can understand complex medical information and especially when you consider social psychology concepts about conformity and certain people having more 'sway' in groups, regardless of whether they actually have more expertise. If you let ten juries (120 people) watch a trial, surely it's unlikely they would all come to the same conclusion. If 9 of them would find you not guilty and 1 find you guilty, for example, then that's still a pretty terrifying roll of the dice to take!

I get that it's the best we have and I don't have an alternative to propose, but I feel like a lot of people see the jury trial as really robust and actually I think surely it's massively up to chance whether they get it 'right' or not. It might be the best thing we have but I would absolutely not want to be on trial as an innocent person and have to trust they'd get it right.

There are alternatives to jury trials. It's not a necessity by any means. Some countries don't use them at all, others do but in limited circumstances. Identifying other ways is easy, the difficult part is working out which set of pros and cons we prefer!

"This" doesn't mean she's admitting to murder. It could mean she thinks she caused their deaths by negligence or a lack of care due to poor training.

Yes. She explained at the trial that she'd been barred from the unit. She knew the consultants were accusing her of murder - her union wrote and told her so. She was deeply distressed, as you would be. She worried that she had failed those children, and she wrote the thoughts that came into her head, including claiming she was innocent.

This is an interesting read: https://londonletter.substack.com/p/special-edition-the-lucy-letby-new

Yes. The consultants were pushing to be allowed to care for very premature babies again from 2017 on.

They have never been allowed to do so. Their managers refused, whether Letby was on the ward or not.

If you're referring to Dr Evans, that's not true.

So she’s clever enough to murder babies in such a way there is no real evidence of what she’s done but then stupid enough to provide the evidence anyway by writing down ‘I did this. I’m evil’ in a diary which she keeps in her house.

I doubt this group of experts are wiling to put their professional reputations on the line if they thought she was a murderer. I heard the evidence about the rotas and the babies but I didn’t realise that anything that didn’t fit the premise that Letby was a murderer was redacted from the record. It’s shocking.

Unlikely because Myers did okay in the face of lies and inventions from the prosecution.

The CCRC can reopen a case on the basis that an expert witness was incompetent or dishonest. McDonald has indicated that that is what they are doing. So in a way yes, the new experts are the new evidence.