Lucy Letby - what's happening

[Viviennemary]

In the last few days I've heard conflicting news stories. One an ex coroner saying she is innocent. And another piece of news saying the Cheshire police want to charge her with more crimes believed to have been carried out at two other hospitals she worked at.

@Internaut they absolutely did have access to all of the evidence, and more. They reviewed evidence that wasn’t presented at the trial such as expert witnesses and information on the current situation at the hospital. There were crucial witness statements that were missed by the defence in the trial that would have turned the whole thing on its head.

https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/jonathan-coffey-judith-moritz/unmasking-lucy-letby/9781399625197/

I don’t know if this has been recommended before - I found it interesting and put both sides across.

Again, all those witnesses "knew" she was a murderer. So their memories of her are through the lense of that. And even then it's pretty weak beer, they didn't go the the police about their suspicions at the time so they can't have been that concerned.

...and the test is "beyond reasonable doubt".

Do you work for the Post Office or Fujitsu?

I agree. They weren't at the trial and didn't work with Lucy Letby. The hospital management t tried to hush up the doctors who expresed concern about Lucy Letby and the doctors were made to apologise to her. The police should have been called in earlier and that's why there might be charges against the management.

Yes, she was present for all the suspicious events, but events where she wasn't present were not deemed suspicious. Because she wasn't there.
Can you see how that might be a problem?

The prosecution experts who drew up the medical reports to convict Letby also weren't at the trial (before doing so) and didn't work with Letby.

People with a personal connection like Letby's co-workers could be character witnesses or witnesses of fact, but not expert witnesses.

The way science works is that you aim for results that can be replicated by other objective experts, working blind. It's not a disadvantage or a legal problem that people don't bring personal prejudices or preconceptions to it.

What you are suggesting is anti-scientific and incompatible with legal principle - not just in Letby's case but in any case.

Didn't have access to all the information is just a lie about the expert panel that emerged on internet echo chambers after Shoo Lee's press conference announcing they had found no evidence of harm.

It's fascinating to see how people parrot it without understanding the implications, which would undermine Letby's conviction more certainly than anything else. A real case of people being blinded to sense by hatred. It's like a slogan at this stage.

She wasn’t even present for them all. For one of the babies (baby C) the prosecution realised mid-trial that she hadn’t been on shift during the time that the baby had been harmed (the air that she was alleged to have forced into the baby was captured on x ray at a time when Lucy hadn’t been on shift between the baby being born and that x ray being taken). So the prosecution started to argue that she must have come in on her day off to do this. They had absolutely no evidence for this - no door swipe data, no recollections of her being there. Literally just inventing facts mid-trial.

Absolutely.
And without taking into account the fact that if Lucy Letby could have come in on her day off, anyone else could have done the same so the argument that she was the only person present completely falls apart.

And the conviction wasn’t based on statistics anyway

From the New Yorker article, quoting the prosecution:

“She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.””

munchausens BP is merely a feature of female psychopathy. And is often seen in female criminals and killers. The evidence against Beverley Allitt was the same - the common denominator in all the collapses was her being there. There was a longer history of such behaviour from her. But it’s quite possibly for people like Lucy Letby to hide the darkness in their character for many years.

As I said the evidence against Allit was way better, and I linked to some of the evidence.

It was not the same.

And all the prosecution evidence and statements were countered by LL’s very competent defence counsel. But while it might sound like a statistics based prosecution because of the table, it’s not. Yes she was there for all the deaths that were believed to be murder but she’d have to be to be guilty. It’s fairly basic that you have to show that the defendant had the opportunity to commit the crime. She can’t be guilty of deaths that happened when she wasn’t there. But at no time was a statistical probability argument used.

An example of a statistics based argument is Sally Clark whose case was discussed above. The discredited prosecution witness claimed that the likelihood of two children from the same family both suffering cot death was 1 in 73 million.

No such argument was made in LL’s case. But yes she was a constant malevolent presence - she was there for every death that the consultants found troubling or unexpected. That’s not basing her guilt on statistics though.

Nothing Letby's defence team may have said stops that from being a statistical argument.

It was perhaps stronger in the sense that she used insulin and none of the children had been prescribed insulin. There was therefore no other conclusion than that someone gave the insulin to them. It couldn’t have been natural causes. But BA as the target for suspicion and her conviction was based on always being present when the incidents happened as well as reported odd behaviour.

The people saying LL is innocent are largely saying that the deaths were from natural causes and questioning the prosecution experts who said it was not natural causes. The facts for LL are more nuanced than in the BA case - you just can’t say that insulin poisoning is natural causes. However, the prosecution did produce experts who said it was not natural causes. You might not agree with them but that’s what they said and the jury was convinced by their evidence.

In fact the table becomes a bit irrelevant. If you’re saying it was natural causes, it makes no difference if LL was there for all of them. She obviously didn’t kill them if they died of natural causes and it was just a coincidence that she was there.

You persistently ignore the fact that the definition of troubling or unexpected changed according to whether she was there or not.

How is it a statistical argument? Please explain where a statistical probability is used by the prosecution to a) show why it’s murder and b) why she is guilty. They used medical expert evidence to show why it was murder and other circumstantial evidence (including of course the fact that she was there at the time) to show why it was LL who was the perpetrator and not another staff member.

@HeadbandUnited has already posted this, in the post you are responding to

Where is the evidence for that happening? Obviously once she was the prime suspect any subsequent collapse in her presence would be seen as suspicious. Thats not controversial - this is how hospital killers are always identified - colleagues or patients become suspicious. But the sequence of events as told to the trial was first a suspicion of foul play by the doctors due to the nature of the incidents they were seeing and then eventually identification of LL as the suspect. Not the other way around.

Yeah but that is not an argument based on statistics. It’s just not. It’s not talking about likelihoods based on statistics. It’s saying she was there for every killing.

And if you read the statistics papers you and others have urged us to read you will see that the issue they have is that it is wrong to use the increase in deaths as evidence that the deaths were deliberate. Because an increase in deaths doesn’t mean there is a murderer operating or that it’s more likely to be murder. It could be a coincidence or it could be due to negligence or poor staffing levels.

However once you are sure that the deaths are deliberate (and I know this is disputed by her supporters) then it’s absolutely relevant who is there at the time. Because it obviously can’t be someone who wasn’t there at the time. I guess it could be three or four different people (in LL’s case it would have needed to be about 10 separate killers I think) but you can let the jury draw their own conclusions.

All the nurse killer cases mentioned above involved convictions on the basis that a) the death was not natural causes or an accident and b) the defendant was there for all of them. Until LL this was not considered a controversial way of showing evidence of guilt. It’s not making a flawed statistical argument at all although I can appreciate that some might think it does if they don’t fully understand.

There are lots of different problems with the use of statistics in this case, and with the quality of the data - it's likely that no one source covers all of them. But you need to start by understanding that statements about probability, incidence, coincidence, and correlation can be statistical in nature even without explicit reference to raw data or numbers. It's good that you are reading up on things, but until you understand that point you'll remain at cross-purposes with other posters.

At the moment you're a bit like someone popping up saying yeah but water isn't wet. It just isn't. It's hard to have a conversation on that basis.

It’s saying she was there for every killing.

That statement is "statistics".

It's pattern or correlation derived from data samples and those samples were selected. It's pure statistics.

Ask chatgpt if you don't believe me.

Here's a clear and very interesting presentation from Peter Elston to the Radical Statistics Society on that issue:

I have also posted already, I think, a link to an article on the subject by David Rose, which works from the same information without the explicit data analysis

https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-the-letby-case-isnt-closed/

There is a great deal of evidence that suspicious events were defined as events when Letby was present, and not just at that stage of the investigations.

However once you are sure that the deaths are deliberate (and I know this is disputed by her supporters) then it’s absolutely relevant who is there at the time.

And the problem with this is that the evidence about who was there is being used to decide if the deaths are deliberate! See the baby C case I referred to earlier for the CPS's work here.

You're also missing the broader context.

The police initially commissioned a statistical analysis of the rota, and then told the professor to stop her work.

The CPS presented the raw data (ie, the rota) to the jury, without any statistical analysis of what it meant. This is likely to be a deliberate choice from the CPS - they have had issues before with appeals being won because they used a statistical analysis being found unsafe.

Much better for them to just give the jury the raw data, and allow them to do their own statistical analysis.

A travesty for justice though, as the statistical conclusions drawn by a layperson without professional guidance are going to be complete garbage. A layperson (or a hospital consultant...) would look at the rota and think it was a clear indication of guilt, a professor of statistics would know that it is worthless for showing anything other than that Lucy was on duty when Lucy was on duty.