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.

Yes. In other words, he changed his "medical" evidence to suit the needs of the prosecution and their story.

And for the defence, that made lots of their preparation useless. if you are prepared to prove that a medical event didn't happen one night, that doesn't mean you're prepared to show it didn't happen the morning after. Every change the judge allowed created a gap in the defence case that the prosecution would have been able to exploit if they had put Hall and others on the stand.

They have changed their minds since the trial too. Lucy was convicted by a jury that was told that she had attacked various babies (babies C, P and I) via air injected into the stomach via an NG tube. The Court of Appeal also referred to this method of killing. But Dewi Evans signed a statement to Channel 5 saying that no baby had died of injection of air into the stomach, only by air injected into the veins. How on earth is anyone supposed to defend themselves against this scattergun approach of random accusations?

I’m not saying should have been ruled inadmissible because I wasn’t there! I was just a little confused about certain things, because it’s unusual for new evidence to be presented in a trial or for opinions to change radically, and in these situations the judge has to apply certain legal processes. It can’t be as simple as the prosecution changing things and the defence being caught off guard - surely the defence would challenge it if that happened.

I do think this case is so unusual and it’s hard to get your head around, but ultimately the jury were convinced on the basis of the evidence.

And yet LL was found guilty. How do you suppose that is?

I see a lot of her supporters saying that she was a nice, normal nurse before she was arrested and that just isn’t true. She was a freakish weirdo whose behaviour was frequently flagged as being inappropriate for a nurse and creepy/ unsettling by colleagues and patients, alike.

Evans is a hired gun who has openly changed his story to suit the prosecution narrative. Some excerpts from: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/20/my-kind-of-case-intense-focus-falls-on-lucy-letby-trial-expert-witness

Experts say that causes of babies’ collapses cannot always be explained, even by extensive review, including postmortems.

Asked by the Guardian to explain how he diagnosed air embolism when none of these experts did, from the same medical notes, Evans said he had done so independently.

"Well without being too blase about it, it’s only difficult if you don’t know the answer, OK. Once you know, you know … It’s not very good asking me why I diagnosed air embolus. I think you should be asking other people why didn’t they make the diagnosis.”

He explained that he identified it due to rashes, air observed in some postmortems – although bodies produce air after death – and by excluding other medical causes. But he also acknowledged that air embolism is very difficult to prove: “Trouble is you don’t get evidence: air embolus doesn’t leave any marks, you see.”

...

Evans said his new opinion was based on the baby’s sudden collapse and unsuccessful resuscitation on 13 June 2015, on ruling out other possible causes, and realising that Letby was on shift, and had gone into the baby’s room.
“Something must have happened,” he said. “I know that’s not a very scientific term.”

...

Responding to the Guardian’s questions about Baby C, Evans stood by his opinions, and wrote in an email: “Lucy Letby murdered Baby C. Get that into your head.”

The defence did challenge it!

Sorry, I'm not asking you to explain it, but I'vd given you the report, pasted in the relevant but, and you just keep telling me it can't have happened? I don't know what more I can do? What evidence do you want?

If there were mistakes made in the legal process, Lucy Letby would not have been denied a retrial. It’s as simple as that.

And the problems with Dewi Evans' expert evidence in this case are not a one-off. In 2009 the Law Commission recognised that the system has inadequate safeguards against unreliable expert witnesses and recommended that the government reform the admissibility of expert witness evidence. From the Law Commission:

"The current judicial approach to the admissibility of expert evidence in England and Wales is one of laissez-faire. Too much expert opinion evidence is admitted without adequate scrutiny because no clear test is being applied to determine whether the evidence is sufficiently reliable to be admitted.

In the absence of a clear legal test to ensure the reliability of expert evidence, advocates do not always cross-examine experts effectively to reveal potential flaws in the experts’ methodology, data and reasoning.
Juries may therefore be reaching conclusions on the basis of unreliable evidence. This conclusion is confirmed by a number of miscarriages of justice in recent years."

The government declined to implement any of the LC's recommendations to address this. And lo! just as foreseen by the LC, miscarriages of justice based on flawed expert evidence have continued.

Link to the Law Commission's report is here: lawcom.gov.uk/project/expert-evidence-in-criminal-proceedings/

Nope. Not a single parent or family member complained about her throughout the trial. Her nursing colleagues testified to Thirlwall last year, overwhelmingly with evidence that she was competent and pleasant and they suspected nothing amiss.

That's just hindsight, exaggeration, and the easy prejudice that lets people dismiss anyone they find different or weird as somehow wrong. It's an adolescent mindset.

Im not saying it can’t have happened! I’m saying that when new evidence is introduced, or changed, the defence can challenge. If they do, and the evidence is still upheld as admissible, then I’m accepting that there would have been sound reasons for that. The judge has to follow legal procedures, they don’t just make it up as they go along!!

You mean, nobody has ever been denied a retrial despite mistakes in the judicial process? That's a bold claim.

Courts, juries, judges etc get it wrong. That's why legal bodies like the CCRC and Court of Appeal exist. They aren't rebel factions - they're part of the justice system. If you think we don't need them, or they should be a one shot only deal, that's a radical position that would leave a lot of innocent people in jail.

A lot of the actual transcripts are in the public domain and some excellent articles have been published in the mainstream press. It’s very easy to read for yourself what was said, how it was challenged and what the judge accepted. Hence the level of public disquiet.

See my last post - part of the problem is that the legal procedures that the judge is following are known to be garbage.

In this case the judges themselves seem to have become confused from all the flip-flopping, hence the CoA judges referring to a cause of death that had actually been replaced by a new, shiny theory in the middle of the original trial.

Well, I'll be pleased to hear what the sound reasons might be.

But, to get back to the initial point, this is one explanation for the failure to call defence witnesses. Because, sound reason or not, it would clearly disadvantage the defence.

Letby's detractors to have a tendency to take final refuge in the idea that the courts / the jury / the judge can't have got things wrong. Obviously if that's the case there is nothing to discuss, since nothing anyone says can change the past and the verdict. So it would be good if people would be upfront about that position rather than waste everyone's time.

Obviously judges, juries and courts have got things wrong in the past, and obviously Evans did change his story whether or not you believe a judge was right to allow it.

Have you listened to the podcast that closely followed the trial? I suspect not.

She literally failed her nursing exams because of a lack of empathy shown to patients. She talked gleefully about experiencing patient deaths.

People aren’t allowed to say stuff about a defendant whilst the trial is going on because it can prejudice the outcome. So hardly surprising that some of this came out later.

You are showing your ignorance of why retrials are allowed.

What podcast is that?

I've read about the placement she repeated in the Thirlwall documents. No big deal.

There is no evidence that Letby spoke gleefully about patient deaths - if your podcast said that, it's clearly not reliable.

The main issue is not that Letby's fellow staff went on their record with their opinions of her after the trial. It's that they didn't dismiss her as weird or deviant before (or during it). And at the chance to go on the record, they confirmed this.

People aren’t allowed to say stuff about a defendant whilst the trial is going on because it can prejudice the outcome. So hardly surprising that some of this came out later.

Indeed. Did you not find it striking that as soon as reporting restrictions were lifted, investigative journalists from all major outlets published pieces expressing extreme discomfort about the safety of these convictions?

It's too late to edit, but I want to correct that to, not a single parent or family member complained about her throughout the period discussed during her trial .

And yet the jury were convinced, on the basis of the evidence, that she was guilty. They were satisfied beyond reasonable doubt.

Quite. Sometimes juries reach the wrong verdict - or one that is right on the facts they are given but wrong once fuller facts are known.

We know that not all juries reach the right verdict. Otherwise the CCRC and Court of Appeal would not exist.

I'm no big fan of juries, but in this case their decision was understandable. They were presented with an expert witness who declared that these babies were absolutely murdered and a rota that was intentionally put together to give the impression that there was only one person in the world that could have killed them. What other decision were they supposed to reach?

Doesn't mean that this jury got the right answer. But the systemic problems - the known issues with the admission and reliability of expert witness in criminal trials, and the CPS' approach to presenting evidence to a jury that really requires expert statistical analysis - are at fault here, not the jury system.

I'm no big fan of juries, but in this case their decision was understandable. They were presented with an expert witness who declared that these babies were absolutely murdered and a rota that was intentionally put together to give the impression that there was only one person in the world that could have killed them. What other decision were they supposed to reach?

Well the jury didn’t convict her on all counts so clearly were capable of having minds of their own and weren’t entirely duped by all this terrible leading evidence…

That's true but not significant. The cases they didn't convict her on were generally those where either no opportunity had been shown to exist or the hospital admitted to failings in care that were obvious even at that stage.

The jury obviously took their job seriously and didn't leap to conclusions, but of course that doesn't mean they got everything right.

Ok - perhaps you can explain. A retrial would be allowed if the original was wrong on a point of law, surely?