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.

I would say the judges got the applicability of the science to the case wrong (based on their report) which is hardly unprecedented. But there's lots more evidence that has emerged since. People aren't trying to rerun that request for leave to appeal. A more recent summary of much broader concerns about the case is at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/14/the-convictions-of-lucy-letby-should-they-be-overturned

It's on grounds like this that Letby's defence is seeking a first appeal.

As ‘an ordinary Joanna’, no special knowledge, I find the clusterfuck of NHS mismanagement and back covering more compelling than the zebra of an angel of death unicorn.

I mean, unless there are many more hiding behind poor practice… we haven’t had a lot more Shipmans come to light.

The narrative the media pushed of ‘poor doctors struggling to draw attention to a murderous nurse while management ignored them’ was compelling too, of course.

What do you mean it wasn’t obvious? The prosecution was saying she killed them. She was given funds to instruct her own experts, presumably to say she didn’t kill them, and she did. The experts wrote reports. She didn’t want those reports in the trial for some reason so they weren’t used.
What do you mean legal aid wouldn’t cover an international expert? Of course it would. Dr Lee gave live evidence in the leave to appeal hearing via video link from Canada. That was all funded by legal aid.

Now you're inventing facts about Sally Clark's case too. The grounds for overturning the conviction were new scientific findings, not Meadow's ineptness or statistical claims, though they did make that case famous.

Not sure what you'd consider ground-breaking scientific findings - in such poorly evidenced areas as Letby's accusers relied on, incremental gains in knowledge are what's required. You have serious weight behind the scientific case for Letby's innocence. I'm not sure why anyone would think this shouldn't be considered in court.

Well if the judges in the leave to appeal hearing got the science so wrong (they didn’t) then why would giving her a full appeal hearing help matters? What if those judges “get it wrong” too? Or are you banking on the ones in the next court of appeal hearing being more sympathetic?

New findings in her case (ie that her son had a staph infection and that the prosecution had withheld microbiological evidence at trial). Plus the Roy Meadow issue. Not that there had been new scientific research generally so let’s review all cases.

You do realise that your 2 points are contradictory?
Cos Brian Kohlberger is a man.

Lee worked and is working pro-bono on the case - that means free of charge.

He doesn't make himself available as an expert witness normally. He doesn't enjoy or need that kind of work.

It was only obvious after the trial that his intervention would be needed, since the defence tried to exclude all evidence pertaining to air embolism in infants based on the paucity of research in that field. So you had expert witnesses talking about one form of air embolism in adult divers as "evidence" of what happened to infants with another form of embolism.

That research has been augmented since the trial, with the clear finding that the type of air embolism Letby is accused of inflicting has never yet been known to produce the symptoms described at the trial.

It might not help. She could be innocent yet spend the rest of her life in jail because judges don't understand science or scientific evidence. There are massive issues with our justice system that I didn't appreciate before I read about this case.

Again, explain why Lucy Letby instructed experts who produced reports yet she never called them.
I have no idea of Dr Lee’s arrangements re payment but I am pretty sure it would be covered by her legal aid if it was shown that he was the most appropriate expert. He might well be working for free with her weird new appeal team that is led by a media hungry junior barrister who also thinks Ben Geen is innocent. I think everyone is working pro bono on that one. I would think he got paid in the appeal led by Ben Myers KC.

Andy Malkinson, Sam Hallam, Victor Nealon ... the list is endless. Convictions should be reviewed.

She’s in the jail as she was convicted and probably going to be convicted with more. You don’t accidentally get convicted with killing that many babies FGS

They can't stop whether there are potentially more victims or if shes been wrongly accused. Obviously its awful for the families but they can't just stop investigating to make them less sad (which won't even happen) obviously.

Lee has stated that he was not paid for his work on the request to appeal.

It's telling that you dismiss the new defence team as "weird". Your posts on this thread make it clear that you're not interested in justice - just mudslinging.

Because if LL is guilty then they should have done more to prevent the deaths.

If LL is innocent then they should have spotted the rise in the numbers of fatalities and investigated what was happening thus preventing deaths.

Its not hard to see how they could be negligent in both scenarios.

Neither a victim nor a member of the case team involved in it? None of your business then.

It’s also weird that a scapegoat for a failing ward would have all the senior managers on her side. I thought scapegoating was when the managers tried to blame the problems of the hospital on a staff member. Not where the managers were having cosy chats with the staff member’s dad and threatening to sack the people who had raised issues about her behaviour.

Senior managers thought that the reports from the Royal College of Pediatrics and Children's Health, and the associated new pathologists' reviews and reports, explained the deaths adequately. These reports showed multiple failings at the hospital and in medical care, including evidence of failings likely to have contributed to individual deaths.

The defence was not allowed to present these reports in court, so the jury was unaware of them when finding Letby guilty.

If people refer to Letby as a scapegoat, they mean that the consultants on the ward accused her, without evidence, of being responsible for deaths in which their own negligence had played a part - knowingly or unknowingly.

You can read about those reports here: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/08/a-superbug-doctor-shortages-and-a-neonatal-unit-out-of-its-depth-failures-at-lucy-letby-hospital-revealed

No, it's for the witnesses saying the science is wrong to put forward a convincing case, which means explaining the science. Judges aren't stupid, and many have a background in dealing with extremely technical evidence. It's facile to say they didn't understand simply because they made a finding that it does not demonstrate anything strong enough to render the original convictions unsafe.

The defence was not allowed to present these reports in court, so the jury was unaware of them when finding Letby guilty.

Where do you get that from, @Oftenaddled? The report you quote refers to them being used at least in the second trial, and there is no reference to the defence being prevented from using them.

(yes one or two cases could be attributed to natural causes, which is what she tried, but not this number)

That's the whole point. This number absolutely can be attributed to natural causes. The whole statistical basis of her conviction is wrong.

Some further points: (a) The judge prevented the defence from calling their expert witnesses because he felt it would confuse the jury. (b) Crown prosecution experts are paid to say defendant is guilty (c) Alas parents do get significantly more compensation from NHS if its proved a medic murdered their child compared to if the death was due to natural causes or accident - so you have to bear that in mind (d) The prosecution experts have now been peer reviewed and found wanting (e) some door swipe data was back to front.(f) Prosecution ignored other similar deaths on the ward because Letby was not there (g) In scribbled notes where letby suffering from depression, said she did do it, she also said she did not do it (this was ignored by prosecution). If you had just been arrested for multiple murders you too would begin to think you might have done something (perhaps accidently moved a tube or given the wrong meds) - you would doubt yourself and get depression. These were thinking through notes from depression - I did it , I didn't do it. Often advised by mental heath councillors..(h) In summary there really isn't a real case to answer - it makes no rational sense that she was found guilty. All I can think is the jury must have been brainwashed by 10 months of Dr Evans - 10 months is a long time....And with Lucy Letby looking like a depressed guilty zombie in the witness stand (made so by an expert prosecution barrister) she had more or less ZERO chance of a fair trail..

It wasn’t a mess? You think it was a safe well run unit? I didn’t think that was a controversial point. What about the sewage? The staffing levels? There are numerous stories about the issues.

In July 2016, when the unit changed admission arrangements and stopped providing intensive care, the trust asked the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) to conduct a review.

The report found significant gaps in medical and nursing rotas and insufficient staffing for the provision of longer term high dependency and some intensive care.

I don’t get the connections you’re drawing. If Letby was convicted why would people be arrested for the badly run ward? They have their answer. Plus it’s not like one person was acting maliciously for the ward to be run badly - it was badly run because of funding issues and staffing numbers.

I think it’s more likely that the doctors believed Letby was guilty which is why they called the police. Not everything is a conspiracy. But it doesn’t mean their assessment is correct.

No. And the conviction was never based on statistics anyway. It was just a snapshot among a lot of other evidence, eg tampering with notes, being seen around the baby immediately pre-collapse etc. There have been cases where someone has been convicted solely on the fact that they were on shift at the time but this wasn’t the case here.
And these collapses were unexpected - the baby was about to be discharged, was very stable. She didn’t pick the most vulnerable ones. There were also repeated collapses of some, all stopping if they were moved off the ward. It is not conceivable that you’d get that number of deaths and collapses that are totally unexpected and where the doctors can’t explain it. It’s not Holby City - most patients behave as you’d expect. With some premature babies it is indeed touch and go but not in this odd and unexpected way - the deterioration wouldn’t be as sudden after a period of doing very well.

Respectfully, I think you've misread something there. Where are you seeing that reference to the reports being used at the trial in my link? The whole article is revealing them as "new" information just last year. Is the CoC acronym causing confusion maybe? That's just the hospital - Countess of Chester. Will certainly apologize if I have that wrong but I do think you have misread things.

The most detailed discussion I've seen of this issue is on Reddit, with extracts from trial transcripts. I'd say it does assume a bit of prior knowledge: https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/comments/1kzklwi/background_for_me_but_not_for_thee_why_the_rcpch/

If you want something more mainstream though less detailed, as well as that Guardian article this was discussed in Phil Hammond's earlier Private Eye reports. A bit scrappy but worth reading. If you need more I am happy to dig into them later.

www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/lucy-letby