Lucy Letby: a condensed update on recent developments

[Kittybythelighthouse]

So, in the past week or so alone we’ve had:

Leading neonatology expert Dr Shoo Lee (Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto, Honorary Physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, President of the Neonatal Foundation, Founder of Canadian Neonatal Network, Previously Head of Neonatology at University of Toronto and a hospital for sick children) says his 1989 paper, which the prosecution relied on as their only proof of alleged intravenous air embolism (skin discolouration) was misused by the prosecution. He actually went to the appeal hearing and had his paper Judge-splained to him by three CoA judges who probably don’t even have a science A level (the judiciary have a poor record regarding science). He was so astonished and aggrieved that he has has published a new peer reviewed paper filling in all new evidence since 1989 and distinguishing between intravenous and arterial air embolism which the 1989 paper didn’t do. The conclusion: there is zero evidence for skin discolouration in intravenous air embolism, which is the only possibility in this case. This means there is absolutely no evidence to support an allegation of air embolism. It didn’t happen.

https://t.co/TRokh1hneu

Dr Shoo Lee pulled together a blue ribbon panel of the world’s best experts in relevant areas. Never before in legal history has a group of such highly regarded international experts come together to challenge the evidence against a convicted serial killer. They went through all of the evidence independently and pro bono (with the proviso that they would publish reports regardless of findings). Yesterday they held a press conference. Conclusion: there were no murders. There was plenty of poor care, medical malpractice, mistakes, and a poorly run struggling hospital.

“If this was a hospital in Canada, it would be shut down”

Link to their summary report: drive.google.com/file/d/1aV4zwwdBYw8Z_E-Tpe9_-iPR7n8cZdFk/view

A leak from an Operation Hummingbird detective which reveals that deaths were chosen as suspicious or not based on whether Letby was on shift (remember, most of the babies had uncontroversial post mortems at the time). There were ten other cases originally classed as suspicious until it was established Letby couldn’t have done them, then they magically became unsuspicious.

“Four more children would later be added, two children would be dropped, collapses deleted and added as the focus was turned in different directions, and the whole chart thoroughly chopped and changed. The guiding principle being, always, that Letby must be in the frame.” Trials of Lucy Letby on X.

https://t.co/FOO55lWlCi

Chester Police responded with a statement to The Mail on Sunday:

“There is a significant public interest in these matters, however, every story that is published, statement made, or comment posted online that refers to the specific details of a live investigation can impede the course of justice and cause further distress to the families concerned. It is these families and the ongoing investigations that remain our primary focus.”

“Cheshire Constabulary's statement to the Mail on Sunday is remarkable, coming from a police force that put out an HOUR-LONG promotional video about their own investigation.

They claim to be demurring from commenting now because "every story that is published, statement made, or comment posted online that refers to the specific details of a live investigation can impede the course of justice and cause further distress to the families concerned."

Such concerns did not stop them, less than two years ago, from flooding the press with incendiary and prejudicial commentary, going so far as to announce that they'd be reviewing the care of 4,000 babies that Letby may have ever come into contact with.

The lead investigator, Paul Hughes, even sat down with the co-hosts of the Daily Mail podcast for an episode called "Catching the Killer Nurse," where he speculated to no end about the supposedly evil and cunning machinations behind Letby's every move, and concluded that "she clearly does love the attention. I think she's loved the attention of a trial." (From The Trials of Lucy Letby on X).

Is Letby the one who loved the attention? The investigation was as active then as it is today. Why the silence now? 🤔

Thirlwall released the witness statement of Michelle Turner on behalf of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. She speaks about Letby's placement in 2012 & 2015, including how unlikely she would have been in an intensive care room without another nurse present.

thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/upl…

Former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord MacDonald to BBC’s World at One: “It is clear that there is now this quite impressive body of work. Something may have gone wrong here. That clearly has to be taken seriously.”

"New documents released by the Thirlwall Inquiry also show how the Countess of Chester refused to take part in research to improve outcomes for premature babies."

Neena Modi: "The Countess of Chester was the only hospital to decline participation."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/04/the-10-baby-deaths-that-cast-doubt-on-lucy-letbys-guilt/

Meanwhile the CPS still (as far as we know) refuse to hand over former Dr Dewi Evans new report about how one of the babies died - written in October 2024 after BBC’s File on Four challenged him about Letby not having been on shift when an ‘incriminating’ x ray was taken. In fact she hadn’t been on shift since the baby was born. She was convicted of killing this baby.

The CCRC announced yesterday that they have opened their investigation of the case. They assembled a team specifically for this case late last year, in anticipation of an application. This is an extraordinarily speedy and organised response from the CCRC.

https://ccrc.gov.uk/news/lucy-letby-application-received-by-criminal-cases-review-commission/

This has been a remarkable, historic, run of events. It is now looking very likely that the case will go back to the Court of Appeal, or there may be a more expedient solution. Whatever happens, it’s very unlikely to take the CCRC their usual 10 years to deal with it. They are on the ropes recently, with a CEO stepping down and a raft of bad press. I am not Mystic Meg, but my money is on an exoneration within the year.

And he had been working on a television show which was going to dramatise the whole saga. This was before the trial started. This blows my mind too. He claims to be crushed by the events from the hospital and yet he was working on a television show about it!?!

I think Ravi was worried about his television career being impacted negatively by the hospitals failings and was looking for someone to blame.

What?? Astonishing self indulgence

Now his suboptimal care of Baby K has been exposed, he has much bigger things to worry about.

The TV show thing may not have had any basis in reality. It was never confirmed by Jed Mercurio and the reps of the A list actresses supposedly in line to play Letby said there was no such project. Certainly there could never be a drama telling the story as Dr J tells it because the audience would be screaming “Call the police, you fool!” at the TV.

He has hoisted himself by his own petard.

So Lees interpretation of data must be perfect?

Information is open to interpretation by anyone

And it will be interesting to see how other experts interpret that information - it’s interesting how it is claimed as a fact that those babies died from IV embolism yet there’s so many people jumping on the bandwagon in this case saying oh that baby died of this, oh he died of that, nope he didn’t it was something else - however by your view Dr Lee is to be relied upon whereas no one else should be

You know for certain that he captured all IV embolisms in the world do you?

No you don’t - let’s wait it out!

I wonder how long they will take to make a decision whether to re-open the case.

You are misrepresenting Dr J. He said he had a gut feeling and went into a room where she was standing over the baby

There’s no need to demonise him

He never ran off to call the police because he didn’t have any thoughts that she was a murderer he thought her abilities were questionable which he tried to raise on multiple occasions

Yes there are failures everywhere in the whole scenario

The current inadequacy of the UK's system for expert witnesses, and the potential for miscarriages of justice that results, is well known. This is an extract from Joshua Rozenberg's latest column in the Law Gazette:

"Sir David Davis, the MP who has championed Letby’s cause, asked why the government of which he had been a member had decided in 2013 not to change the law on expert evidence. Two years earlier, the Law Commission had recommended that an expert’s opinion should not be admitted unless a court judged it to be sufficiently reliable. The government’s law reform advisers cited a lecture given in 2010 by Sir Brian Leveson, who is currently reviewing the criminal courts for the government. Leveson thought it ‘perfectly clear that expert evidence of doubtful reliability may be admitted too freely with insufficient explanation of the basis for reaching specific conclusions, be challenged too weakly by the opposing advocate and be accepted too readily by the judge or jury at the end of the trial’.

Meanwhile, the Law Commission has been reviewing the law on criminal appeals.

Provisional proposals will be published this month. Based on what happened in the Letby case, Davis thought the current statutory requirement of ‘a reasonable explanation for the failure to adduce the evidence in the Crown court’ made it too difficult for the Court of Appeal to correct errors. ‘It may be judicially convenient,’ the MP said, ‘but it’s not justice.’ I had originally been sceptical about Letby’s denials. Who else could have harmed so many babies? But the new experts say that nobody tried to kill them.

The hospital where they were being cared for was simply not up to the challenge.

Lord Denning famously said that the possibility of the police being responsible for a miscarriage of justice was an ‘appalling vista’. It would be equally appalling to think that Letby was wrongly convicted because of unreliable expert evidence. The CCRC must find out what really happened."

I’m not relying on Dr Lee. I read through the trial medical data that was available online. I read through pages of notes on the medical data by 2 different neonatologists, one retired, one practicing and noted the causes of death by the original pathologists. I’ve also discussed the cases in depth with medic friends.

So - many of the conclusions of the doctors of the panel were expected - some were unexpected as they had access to evidence that was not presented to the court. It was a surprise for example that Dr J had made such basic mistakes in the care of Baby K - but we already knew the CoCH care of Baby K had been “suboptimal” as the Arrowe Park mortality review had concluded this and commented that Baby K had arrived “in such poor condition as to make death inevitable.”

That’s what he said originally. Unfortunately the swipe data mix up contradicted his first story and nurse Joanne Williams contradicted his second.

She said that when Baby K’s alarm went off - Dr J came running over and asked “what happened” and “who was in there” ie he was not in there himself.

I don’t know why you’re so concerned about “demonising” Dr J when he gave not a toot about demonising LL.

In the long run it turned out his own abilities were questionable and that may be why he directly accused LL of harming Baby K in particular.

It’s interesting and commendable that Rozenberg has done a massive U-turn on LL having defended the verdict in the past.

Doctors don’t always know exactly what killed someone. They might give different theories as to why someone died.

My family never knew if my uncle’s technical cause of death was acute pancreatic cancer or sepsis. Different explanations from different doctors.

And if multiple doctors, pathologists and experts have not only given plausible explanations of non-murder routes to death, but found absolutely no evidence of murder, it’s a bit mad to conclude that a person has actually been murdered. Especially if the lone voice saying that there has been murder (and it really is a lone voice, Private Eye have been looking for any experts who would back up his claims and haven’t found a single person) is making comments about how he knew it was murder within 10 minutes, how he’s never lost a case, and that sometimes you just know something bad has happened(!).

Dr Lee’s research, as the world authority on neonatal embolism, is the best available medical evidence that we have. It’s nonsense to jump to the extreme explanation of murder when nothing whatsoever in the medical research available points to murder, but in fact points away from murder. In medicine there are few certainties. We go with the best available evidence. That’s how science works.

There’s a saying: if you’re under a bridge and you hear hooves passing above, you think horse before you think zebra and you think zebra before you think unicorn. We can now see the shadow of the passing animal and it doesn’t have a horn. We can hear its whinnies. It’s probably a horse. Clinging to the completely unevidenced absurdity that it’s somehow a unicorn, despite all the evidence available to us, is madness.

It’s a horse.

The immediate documentary on the night of the conviction, the ‘hero’ complex of certain consultants, even though they said they had expressed suspicions previously, but had not reported, as they should. After the conviction, whilst I still believed she was guilty, one consultant stood out for me, and I remember thinking - his cock sure attitude, self confidence and crowing would come back to haunt him, somehow, sometime….and when I was thinking this, I still believed she was guilty.

The point of academic publication is that you make your findings and sources and methods available to your peers all over the world. They learn from you but they can also check and critique and update and revise, because you are clear about how you built your case.

That's the world Lee and his experts come from.

If Dewi Evans and Sandra Bohin were confident of their: theories that air in stomach and overfeeding kill premature babies, that you can diagnose air embolism based on how loudly a child cries, that you can spot air embolism without evidence "once you know", why on earth aren't they sharing their findings with medical science? Why aren't they worried that premature babies everywhere are in danger of death from accidental overfeeding and air in the stomach? Why don't they think it would prevent more suffering if everyone knew how to identify that cry, or Evan's magic method of finding air embolisms?

What are they afraid will happen if they publish their scholarship? Don't they want to save lives?

They are charlatans and at some level, they know it.

2 ward rounds a week on an intensive care unit ( a NICU no less) surely not ?. That frequency is appropriate ( possibly) for an elective orthopaedic ward.

Oh dear, poor Dr Jayaram. He’s a grown adult, a professional man. He will have to cope with being criticised and called into question. I’m not “demonising” him. If you find that his own words and actions cast him in a demonic light that’s your finding. My position is that he is, at best, an unreliable, biased, witness with an agenda. He is not a trustworthy source and he sure as shit isn’t a whistleblower or a victim.

“He said he had a gut feeling and he went into a room where she was standing over a baby.” As you present it here that’s evidence of absolutely nothing. It’s a non event entirely. I can absolutely believe that this is exactly what actually happened. Nothing. Yet she was convicted for attempting to murder this baby solely on his word. Even judge Goss said to the jury that the baby K case comes down entirely to whether or not they believed his story. He didn’t present it in court as a non event, did he? He said that she had to have extubated the baby deliberately. That there was no other explanation. Yet he didn’t say this to a single soul at the time. He even told the transport team that the baby self extubated, so why was he actively covering for a serial killer? Would you just shrug and go back to your office, allowing her to try to kill that baby again twice that very night? Would you tell no one about this? It simply doesn’t add up. Did he witness an act of attempted murder or not? You can’t have it both ways. The prosecution didn’t present it as a non event either, did they? Johnson said in his summing up that she was “caught virtually red handed” in the act of attempted murder. Again, she was convicted of attempting to murder this baby on his word alone. It’s monstrous.

Dr Jayaram put himself into the impossible position of claiming to have known that this woman was an evil serial killer of babies a year before he bothered to do anything solid about it. His story changed a number of times and didn’t tally with Nurse Williams story, which made a lot more sense and stayed the same throughout. Good for her. But then, why would we listen to a mere nurse when we have the word of “a clever doctor” to use Cheshire Police’s wording. He’s, quite simply, an obvious liar and he backed himself into a corner.

Even the Court of Appeal questioned his credibility. A major UK whistleblowing charity - who the doctors approached as “whistleblowers- criticised his version of events just as I do and refused to work with him. As I say, he hoisted himself by his own petard. If what he contributed to wasn’t so epically monstrous I would think he was a bit pathetic, nothing more, but it is epically monstrous. He’s despicable. You may disagree if you wish, but don’t expect me (and others) not to call it as I see it. I have zero sympathy for him.

@Neurodiversitydoctor I’ve worked on elective orthopaedic wards (only as a bank nurse) and from memory they had daily ward rounds. I still can’t get my head round the twice a week ward rounds.

As a house officer (2000 so light years ago) the consultant cane round twice a week, but of course we saw the patients daily and the reg came round with most ( maybe all) days. I have worked in many NICUs and PICUs ( although that was 10 years ago as well) twice daily ward rounds are absolutely standard.

It’s like the shaken baby deaths theory which did for Sally Clark and others. His evidence turned out to be so poor he was brought before the GMC for professional misconduct. Initially found guilty but got off on appeal.

Then a child abuse scandal in Cleveland where 121 children were removed from their families as 2 paediatricians decided if you touched a child’s anal sphincter and there was a reflex they’d been abused. Turned out it’s normal reflex. Don’t think anything ever happened to those doctors.

It’ll be 17 years since I worked in a nicu and twice daily consultant ward rounds were definitely a thing.

@Kittybythelighthouse completely agree with you about Dr J. If we’re talking about people who like the attention then he’s a prime example. There is no way what he said in court and to the police stands up to scrutiny of any common sense. He would not have left her and done nothing if he genuinely thought he’d walked in on her mid way through killing a baby.

Let's not over-egg this: she only ever worked in one other hospital (Liverpool Women's Hospital) as far as I can find out, so if they are investigating deaths in "other hospitals" in the plural, they are unlikely to find she had anything to do with them all. Or with any deaths at all, at all but one of those other hospitals....

One of my observations is that the posters here who want further investigation into this case say "we want further investigation", and occasionally snap at others who are offensive to them or post obvious rubbish (obvious to me, and since I hadn't heard of this woman before the threads here, I am clearly agnostic). Posters who don't want further investigation tend to do two things: state as fact things which I know are not facts, and make extremely unpleasant remarks both about the woman they are absolutely certain is guilty and about anyone who doubts that the evidence that she is guilty is completely watertight.

Given a choice between the rational and the irrational I am always likely to consider the rational to make a better case.

Also academic publications have to be peer reviewed before they are even published. I used to be a peer reviewer for quite a specialist journal. I had to read the articles and provide anonymous feedback. This could include asking for clarity, querying methodology, making suggestions for consideration etc. Ultimately I also was asked whether I thought the paper should be accepted or rejected. Each paper had several experienced reviewers. To even get to the point of publication numerous independent people have to consider it.