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.

Yes. LL has instructed McD as her new defence barrister. He has been working on taking to the CCRC. Shoo Lee was instructed by McD to convene an international panel of experts to examine the medical evidence. The panel was independent and it was agreed with LL and her lawyers that the findings would be published regardless of whether favourable to LL or not.

To be fair, I followed the trial and I came to the same conclusions as the panel (albeit without their expertise) - no evidence of murder in any of the cases.

The Achilles heel is Evans who, as the other judge correctly identified, is not expert witness material. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he and the consultants were apparently able to convince the other expert witnesses to support their claims.

The question is not so much how the panels came to different conclusions, but how on earth the prosecution experts ever came to the flawed conclusions as they did.

I think much of this case is down to pure confirmation bias and group think. And no smoke without fire. If the authorities point at a person and says they are in all likelihood responsible for murdering a large number of babies, and follows it up with means, method and opportunity, all most people retain is "baby killer". Goes back to the question of "why would anyone want to fit her up"? Which of course is a far more complex question as most would say the accusers had no choice but to raise concerns, yet the validity of those concerns should absolutely be questioned and should have been from the start.

This is very much an example of Catch 22 in real time throughout. The sheer numbers of people involved in the case on all sides make it a labyrithinthian task.

Yes. The prosecution experts very obviously tried to fit the facts to whatever crime they could imagine. This article shows them doing that for baby N.

Baby N had a crying fit one night. Her designated nurse was on a break, and we have no record of who he left in charge of her.

In very small babies, crying loud or long can lead to low oxygen levels. The baby desaturated to only 40% oxygen levels, which is certainly dangerous. The baby had two minutes on oxygen and recovered. A doctor came in to see him while this was happening, but she was called away to an emergency. She noted:

On my arrival 40% oxygen, screaming. Sternal recession. Poor trace on sats probe. Pink. Attempt to settle. Crash bleeped away.”

When her nurse came back, he noted down what the other nurses reported:

One episode whilst I was on my break whereby [Baby N] was crying ++ and not settling. He became dusky in colour, desaturating to 40s. Responded to facial oxygen within 1 to 2 minutes. Crying subsided within approximately 30 minutes and colour returned to normal. Pink.

Nobody thought there was anything suspicious at the time. Nobody could remember the incident later - they had to rely on their notes. Nobody had evidence putting Letby in contact with baby N. (Since the trial, corrected data from swipe cards has shown the incident was over before she came back on the ward, but it is fair to say Evans and Bohin thought she was on the ward).

Between them, these two prosecution witnesses decided that screaming must mean something sinister. They came up with air embolism by injecting air or "some painful stimulus". Of course they blamed Letby.

Here's how Evans responded when asked if there was any proof of that painful stimulus.

Q. Is there evidence of physical evidence of inflicted injury in what we see on this occasion?
A. From my report of 2019, the answer is yes, and I’ll tell you what they are. There was a sudden deterioration at 40%, the screaming and the crying that lasted 30 minutes.

Of course, nobody ever claimed the screaming and crying lasted 30 minutes. That was just how long the child's nurse was away. And the circular reasoning is typical of Evans - the child screamed, must have been a deliberate injury. How do we know that? The child screamed.

No record and no eyewitness account put Letby near this child. She was found guilty of attempting to murder him on this occasion.

That's the standard of "expert witness" we are dealing with. They were guns for hire for the prosecution. Once you see them in action, you stop trusting them on anything.

More detail here, a lot of it about door swipe records, which police now admit were wrong.

medium.com/@triedbystats/baby-n-transcripts-reveal-previously-unreported-swipe-data-error-in-lucy-letby-case-16ff22254561

That article is utterly chilling.

It seems ludicrous that one could be convicted of attempted murder on such flimsy evidence.

The problem may be that the jury became convinced by the overall picture being painted and therefore didn't think it mattered too much about exactly how many of the counts she was convicted on.

It does show the importance of examining every charge carefully.

From the same article, Evans answering Letby's defence lawyer:

Q. There’s not even a recorded change in heart rate, is there?
A. Not recorded there.
Q. Or blood pressure?
A. Not recorded there.
Q. It’s an unusual heart attack to have no change in heart rate, for instance, isn’t it?
A. Not recorded there. I have — I don’t recall ever seeing from my neonatal practice a heart attack in a baby, but that’s because one tends to avoid injecting air into their circulation.

Surely even if you were sure Letby was guilty, you'd want a retrial so that the safety of her conviction didn't depend on an unserious and irresponsible "expert" witness like this?

Let the prosecution, if they can, find someone who believes they can demonstrate deliberate harm and who takes the charges and the deaths and collapses of the children more seriously than this man. Who wants to see anything explained away through snide evasion like this?

If the prosecution can't find better than Evans, we might well ask why ...

Yes. Unfortunately the same expert witness spoke for every case, with one exception, child K. (The judge directed the jury that they could take the other convictions into account when deciding re child K).

So is McDonald wrong to ask to have the whole case returned to the court of appeal in the basis that Evans did not do his duty to the court and provide objective, unbiased and informed expert witness?

It will be very interesting to see how the CCRC respond to this specific request.

Everything here is upside down. The baby displays no symptoms of a heart attack. So this means rather than drawing the obvious conclusion that the baby didn't have a heart attack we must conclude that it was an air embolism that caused the heart attack.

The fact that this expert has never seen a baby have a heart attack isn't evidence that he isn't qualified. It is evidence that heart attacks are rare and therefore must be explained by an air embolism. Even though there is no evidence the baby has had a heart attack.

The uk justice system for medical evidence is utterly broken.

I don’t recall ever seeing from my neonatal practice a heart attack in a baby, but that’s because one tends to avoid injecting air into their circulation.

Now I find it odd that he's saying that firstly he's never seen a heart attack in a baby, and secondly implying it only comes from injecting air. Because I know two babies who had heart attacks. Both were very sickly babies, but neither was it due to injecting air.

If I got to google, it tells me that the most common reason for a heat attack in babies is anomalous left coronary artery from the pulmonary artery, and it occurs in 1 of every 300,000 births. Note this is the most common, not the only.

So someone dealing with 1000s of babies every year must have come across this at least in theory - at least I'd hope so.

Yes - and I'm not suggesting this man wasn't qualified as a medical expert because he had never seen a baby have a heart attack, of course.

I'm saying that he can't handwave away his complete lack of evidence that this child ever had a heart attack on the basis that he has never seen a baby have a heart attack, so anything's possible.

They are hired for their (supposed) medical expertise, which however experienced they are will always need to refer to established science, not just things they personally have seen.

Evans' attempts to justify his fantasies by bluffing make an absolute circus out of what should have been a serious attempt to understand what happened to these poor children.

It is worth saying, after Letby's trial, the police realised they had swipe data the wrong way around for one door. When they thought people were entering the ward, they were actually leaving.

They said that they had reviewed all the charges Letby had been convicted of, and this data didn't make any difference.

You can see in the article above that the only way to make the prosecution case stand up is if the doctor attending baby N was emergency bleeped away to the room next door and took ten minutes to get there.

A problem with long trials is that people don't keep on top of important detail like this so it has been up to the police to declare if it was significant. They seem to have got it wrong.

This is just a tiny part of the new evidence that people all over the internet refuse to believe exists.

Sorry, so their whole case was that a baby was crying and Letby may or may not have been present?

https://archive.is/VOUUS

Am hoping this is a link to a very recent article that basically suggests going public with miscarriages of justice is very infra dig and viewed with disdain and distaste by all in the professions worth their salt. Reminds me of that cynical advice that if one is dying, one should do it quietly.....

I found it on a sub reddit, the trials one, and in an exchange about why no experts called and where were the 14, or similar at trial, someone mentioned that Legal Aid remuneration for experts is capped at £60000. Dud some googling and couldn't find an exact source, though there are pdfs on gov.uk that give guidance on these thongs in both the family and criminal courts.

Further digging suggests a figure of 1.5 million in terms of overall budget for LLs legal aid. Correct me if I'm wrong but I've seen it quoted that Evans fees alone amounted to a huge sum. I want to say potentially a 7 figure sum, but am not sure of the facts, and whether that was just him, or all the experts involved.

Personally I'm of the opinion that you can't put a price on justice, so no skin off my nose, but I often hear the handwringing about costs to the tax payer of this alleged criminal trial, as if LL is in some way responsible for the financing of the three ring circus on top of everything else. I'm on my phone so intensive searches for small print documents are onerous. Does anyone else have a coherent breakdown of costs in this trial and what the likely rules are in an easily readable form, just out of curiosity?

In this case, yes. Except that they claimed that the baby was screaming, not just crying, and that made a difference.

@MistressoftheDarkSide

David James Smith is a former commissioner of the CCRC. He was a journalist not a lawyer so I’m not sure how he came by the role. Either way - you’d expect an article from someone of that background to be relatively neutral.

This is not really the case however. He repeats prosecution claims that have since been discredited (albeit not yet legally) - that the deaths were “unexplained”; that LL was repeatedly present at deaths and near deaths; which indicates he has not been following the case coverage closely. His central point is that McDonald has made unconventional use of publicity that the law profession may not take kindly to. I don’t disagree that lawyers are conservative bunch who like things done by the book - but that overlooks the extraordinary use of media and PR from the prosecution side: the police documentary, the copious briefing of journalists which has resulted in skewed reporting of the case, the extraordinary interviews with expert witnesses Evans and Jayaram etc, the use of the Thirlwall by KCs to air fresh allegations about LL with no legal representation present.

An impartial view of the case would surely lead one to conclude that both sides have used PR to an unprecedented degree for good or ill and this is a development in U.K. justice that we need to consider the consequences of.

Didn't Letby ultimately have the final say over what expert witnesses and lines of argument were used? If, for example, she firmly believed that the raw sewage was causing the issues she could reject other unrelated testimony couldn't she?

Or if she knew something that might get other people she liked (e.g. the mystery possible boyfriend consultant) into trouble.

I don't know how anyone under that level of pressure (whether guilty or innocent) can possibly make sensible decisions.

@Mirabai

I concur absolutely.

I've just read an article about how Baby N died, and all the overwhelming evidence that it was the doctors' bad care and nothing to do with LL.

I'm stunned that this evidence wasn't presented in court. How can that be?

I'm really struggling to understand.

@ThisFluentBiscuit can you post the link?

Baby N didn't die, so I wonder if you are thinking of one of babies A, D, I or O? We have less detail on babies C, E and P.

I think we have had most discussion of babies D and O in terms of failings of care.

In the case of baby D, the prosecution admitted some failings but said they made no difference because the baby didn't die naturally. The panel of experts have found more evidence that the baby was in a very serious state before death.

In the case of baby O, some of the details of what happened during his resuscitation weren't in his files. They were only in the report to the coroner written months later. You would have to spot one detail and go back and cross check with x-rays and ventilation settings to put it all together, and I don't know if Letby's original defence expert even had the report to the coroner. The Thirlwall Enquiry uploaded it a few months ago.

Here is the link. Apologies, it was Baby O, not Baby N.

PETER HITCHENS: Why I'm BEGGING you to read these disturbing new claims in the Lucy Letby case | Daily Mail Online

@Oftenaddled - yes, it was Baby O, not Baby N.

How weird that the happenings weren't in Baby O's files. Is that suspicious? If something isn't in a patient's file - especially a bunch of really important things that ended the patient's life - how do we know they're true? Sorry for the paranoia, but after these latest findings, it feels like nothing about this case is true.

That's a tough question @ThisFluentBiscuit

In this case, the parents mention it in their eyewitness statement and the consultant in charge had it in her notes to the coroner. So it seems to have some support, just not to have been recorded straight away. The doctor who did an external review said she couldn't tell enough from Chester's notes to know if the child had safe treatment or not. There was a lot missing from the notes - for example, a registrar must have seen the child that morning because he started him on antibiotics, but there was no note of why or of him examining the child.

The coroner's hearing was cancelled after the police started investigating, so I suppose the jigsaw never came together.

It could only happen with bad note taking, and Chester was criticised for that back then as well as now.

I'm getting angry at our country due to the strong possibility of LL's innocence. Sometimes it seems that it's just one massive cock-up after another. Look at the Post Office scandal. Look at all the years-long child sex abuse rings in many towns that went unchallenged for so, so long. Look at the police scandal of the undercover officers who had relationships with the women they were surveilling. Look at the miscarriages of justice for various people - 56 according to a Guardian article of 7th May, 2024.

Look at our broken, failing NHS. Look at the farce the Tory government created in its last few years. And now, apparently a ten-month-long trial litigated by KCs can' even get it right. Why are we so crap? Why can't we seemingly get ANYTHING right???!!! I am ashamed. I'd like to be proud of my country but I cannot be. In fact, it's disgusting me lately.

If LL is deemed innocent, I expect a lot of people will be feeling the same.

I've been very patient with our national incompetence, and have loved old Blighty anyway, but this feels like the last straw. If she was wrongly put through all this, I might move abroad if I can, at least for a while.