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.

Any medical evidence available to the prosecution for the first trial was available to these experts now. If not, the prosecution had failed in its duty to disclose evidence and the first trial was a mistrial and must be declared void.

Other evidence was available to neither - e.g. bodies because children were cremated, placenta wrongly disposed of, things that consultants claimed to remember years later but never mentioned at the time or in their own investigations into the deaths.

This is one reason why it is risky to overturn the original postmortems where a pathologist actually examined a body and found natural causes.

Many people are murdered and then the body cremated before murder is suspected.,

Things do tend to happen when you are around, when you are one of only two nurses with specialist qualification in caring for the most critically ill child on your unit.

All nurses would go to answer alarms when working together on the unit. Good for Letby if she was first there to help.

The child wasn't stable - he was deteriorating and postmortem showed one lung not functioning.

Gibbs is unlikely ever to have seen a child die with this particular lung and heart malformation before, so it's for experts on the scholarship, not him, to say if it's that surprising. It's also never been demonstrated that that drawn out death would be caused by air in the stomach either - why would it? I mean it's a completely invented murder method. Why assume it would have that effect?

The child's resuscitation went badly - about 15 minutes to get air into the chest with intubation, because the consultant had to come and do it. Difficult airway so other methods didn't work initially. All that is a lot more relevant than Evans's inventions.

It's typical of Evans. What happened on day 3 was evidence of murder when Letby was thought to be there. As soon as she wasn't, the child was stable in spite of it and perfectly well (on one lung, with increasing respiratory effort and markers for infection rising).

The word stable was just convenient rhetoric for him.

It is worth saying too that though I do believe his intentions were good, Gibbs went against regulations which are there for good reason when he phoned the pathologist and suggested he should rethink his findings before sending the report, and when he wrote to the parents casting doubt on the postmortem before it was published.

If I remember rightly, the prosecution suggested that she could have gone to the ward even though she wasn't working. And she admitted she did sometimes go in on her days off. But I still feel like that would have been very specifically noticeable - her going in to work when she wasn't working and being there long enough and involved enough to harm a baby by tampering with equipment etc.?

Genuine question - if this baby was so stable then what was the reasoning for keeping LL away from the baby. In what sense is keeping her away from a stable baby protecting her? It kind of implies the opposite?

Before my experiences at family court I would have been far less likely to question LL's guilt. But I have seen first hand the pressure potential witnesses are put under not to get involved with court hearings.

In my case both health visitor and social worker told me numerous times that my ex was clearly abusive to both me and the children. But when it came to family court hearings the HV opted out from getting involved (claimed her union didn't allow involvement in family court cases) and the social worker hugely watered down her views. School refused to get involved even though they had witnessed many serious issues.

It seems that in LLs case experts and colleagues were stopped from testifying. The role of professional getting involved in court hearings (whether criminal or civil) really needs urgently reviewed.

@MikeRafone

it was the night of 13/14 that child C became unwell

that was when she came on shift

it was actually pointed out in court that at the time of the scan she had not had contact with the child - her barrister mentioned it - but apparently the judge did not in his summing up and it is this what has caused upset

it is still true that she was going into that child’s nursery, despite being told to see to her own nursery and it was her who was standing over the child as his alarm sounded and his designated nurse then went into the room

read what dr gibbs said - he was not accusing her - he has decades of experience- and had never seen such an unusual response in a baby

To those saying let the parents rest and not go through this again, I don't know if you know a parent who's baby died but let me tell you we are maybe among the strongest people you would know as we've had to live through the unthinkable. No way would any of the parents of the babies concerned want a woman locked in prison if she didn't do it. The hospital management need to answer for their failings if she is innocent. And it sounds like the hospital were doing a terrible job. Even stillbirths in the maternity ward increased over this time (as per the NY article I believe it was) and there's no way that's the failing of one person. That's a systemic failure on the hospital.
We don't know for sure if she's innocent or guilty but there is just too much evidence here that was either not used or that was construed to mislead everyone to think certain things. For that reason alone if there's a chance she's innocent then she deserves a chance at a retrial.
If LL was your sister or daughter or friend and she was truly innocent, we would all want her to get her chance. There's no bandwagon everyone is jumping on who thinks she should get that chance.

Excellent post, ANiceBigCupofTea, very fair, good for you, x

And if they accepted that she could have sneaked in and murdered babies in her day off, so could everyone else in the hospital and the whole exercise falls apart.

This.

dr gibbs who was called to resus the baby thought this was a strange case because after he and the family had stopped resus the baby started faintly breathing again - suggesting that whatever had caused the death was in a type of reversal - something he had never seen before

I supported someone whose baby died a couple of weeks after birth. They said in the last couple of days their baby stopped breathing several times and they thought it was the last breath, then spontaneously after several seconds, sometimes quite a long time, began breathing again.
There was certainly at least a couple of times where they had time to realise baby had stopped breathing, sound the alarm and the nurse was just coming in when they drew another very faint breath and started breathing again. This wasn't treated by either the nurses or the other medical professionals as anything unusual.
Baby was dnr, due to their condition, so they didn't try resus.

I didn’t think she’d been “kept away”, I thought she hadn’t been on shift? I might be wrong and be misremembering.

The one thing I would hope we can all agree on is that the CCRC need to review the case as a matter of urgency. Even taking LL completely out of it, it would be beyond cruel to keep this hanging over the families heads for another 5-8 years. I can even begin to imagine how tortuous that would be.

That's a very good and important point.

I quoted the wrong post, sorry. It should have been this one:

From @MikeRafone:

child c was not LL child to be observing

she had been moved from that nursery because she had been present for A&B and management wanted to protect her

despite this when she returned to work instead of caring for her own child she was found in that babies nursery when it collapsed- the baby had been stable despite the scans you mention

My point was that 'protecting' her (presumably re her mental health or possibly concerns about her competence at this early stage of events) by stopping her from treating an apparently stable baby seems counterintuitive? If anything you'd want her around the more stable babies, wouldn't you - less likelihood of an issue?

@newrubylane

they did try to put her in with the more stable babies but she left them unattended and went to nurseries she should not have been in because she preferred to care for the most sick children

My question though was

if LL wasn’t on shift on from when baby was born until 12 June when cray was done

then on cray prosecution state it shows that LL has pushed air into baby C lungs as shown on xray

how has that happened?

as LL wasn’t on shift?

who put air into baby C baby ?

regardless of LL not going as told after 12 June and being in wrong ward

And this is supposed to be “ beyond reasonable doubt”

there isn’t any evidence of this snarking into the ward - which you need a swipe card to enter

so how can this be beyond reasonable doubt?

i could accept that LL went into the ward on her time off, but without some type of evidence of this happening between birth of baby C & 12 June, all I see is hearsay and doubt

LL needed to be proved guilt beyond doubt and on the case of baby c I see reasonable doubt

The air into lungs and skin tone was disputed as taken out of context by the expert who wrote a paper on this, who is one of the 14 writing they don’t see that these deaths were murder

Baby C cause of death from Dr Evan’s was milk and air given intravenously

He has not necessarily relied upon the scan

Now you would know this if you had read the transcripts/latest updates

No it wasn't. He has never claimed any child received milk intravenously. He might come up with that next, though.

Is Dr Evans starting to look a bit Walter Mitty -esque?!