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 think they were arrested for turning a blind eye to the murderer allowed to commit crime on the ward. Because the managers backed her to the hilt didn’t they? They refused to countenance that she was a problem. It was only when absolutely forced that they finally called the police and suspended her. That doesn’t sound like an instance of scapegoating at all.

This

What an utter load of rubbish. The judge did not prevent her from calling evidence at all. It was clearly said in the appeal court judgment that she chose not to and that the conclusion could only be that it didn’t help her case. It shows the dangers of people turning armchair detectives without reading the evidence in the original trial or understanding the legal system.
If the judge had prevented her calling expert evidence then that would have been the number one ground for appeal and she’d have been successful. She was free to call it and she had it to hand but didn’t.

Because loads of babies died at the hospital. Even when Letby wasn't at work

The one where the baby was about to be discharged? Letby was found not guilty.

Some of the children she's accused of killing or harming were certainly, obviously, among the most vulnerable on the ward.

For others, the team of eminent and highly qualified international medical experts, working for nothing, have found missed opportunities to avert deterioration and death.

No and they have been arrested for failing to stop LL due to how they handled Dr Breary and Dr Jayram raising complaints. Because they believed LL 100% and made the doctors apologise to her. There weren’t loads of other babies who died.

I'd love to live with such blind faith in the justice system.

The collapses were unexplained according to the doctors caring for them. Yes they were ill but they weren’t expected to die and many were over 32 weeks as well and fully expected to survive.

There was an Addenbrokes neonatologist interviewed on the radio who was utterly shocked by the fact the doctors did 2 ward rounds a week. In his ward it was 3 A DAY.
‘Not expected to collapse’ has very little meaning when the babies are being neglected to the extent that worsening problems can be missed.

Based on what?

Dr Breary and Dr Jayram raising complaints.

They didn't go to the Police themselves, they can't complain that someone else didn't.

And the conviction was never based on statistics anyway.

But the flawed statistics was the foundation of everything that followed.

The only reason that the doctors thought that Lucy was killing babies was because they saw that she had been on duty. At that stage there was literally no other basis for the accusation. We now know that the duty rota is evidence of absolutely nothing, but the doctors were like dogs with a bone, completely convinced by their rota evidence, and events cascaded from there.

They took their accusation directly to the police. And then the incredible flaws in our system for expert witnesses took over. At the time that the police got involved, there had been multiple investigations into the deaths of the babies. Post mortums, expert reviews from external neonatologists. None of them had found anything suspicious in the deaths. No evidence of murder.

Then Dewi Evans contacted the police and offered his services as expert witness. He is not a practicing neonatologist. He has been severely reprimanded by judges for choosing a conclusion and selecting the evidence to fit this. Within 10 minutes of reviewing the medical notes he had confidently identified definite murder, murder that had been missed by all the other professionals doing in-depth reviews that came before him. There are no other neonatologists since the trial that have come forward to say that they agree with his findings (the Private Eye guy has been actively looking for one for months). And he was paid around £500k for doing this.

None of this would have happened if not for the reliance on dodgy statistics in the first place. Together with the flaws in the use of expert witnesses it created a perfect storm for a miscarriage of justice.

The judge prevented her from calling expert witnesses case by case, allowing the prosecution expert witnesses a long monopoly at the beginning of the trial. In cross examination, the chief expert witness for the prosecution changed his story about what had happened, frequently. The initial defence reports had been written to counter the prosecution reports, and the prosecution expert witness saw them before taking the stand (and in some cases changing their story).

The question Letby's defence had to ask was, had they discredited the prosecution expert witnesses enough in cross examination that they could avoid calling their own experts, whose reports were written to respond to the accusations, not to explain the deaths.

(It wasn't their job to explain the deaths, because you never have to prove innocence, only guilt. And they were prevented from using the external reports Chester commissioned which found poor conditions and failings in care as contributory factors).

We don't know why Letby didn't call her experts in the end, but we know the defence wanted to use them early in the trial and that the chief among them, Michael Hall, has raised concerns about the safety of the conviction since. So the explanation isn't that the reports said Letby was guilty.

Most likely it was a tactical decision, unlikely to have been Letby's suggestion but legal advice - and legal experts haven't found it surprising or incriminating.

Here is a useful article on why Letby may not have called these witnesses, for anyone who is interested

davidallengreen.com/2024/07/the-lucy-letby-case-some-thoughts-and-observations-what-should-happen-when-a-defence-does-not-put-in-their-own-expert-evidence-for-good-reason-or-bad/

It’s this. It’s how can a pretty young white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes commit such heinous crimes. Any other ethnic group people would have no issue believing it. People have forgotten Beverley Allit.

And the conviction was never based on statistics anyway.

It was. Cheshire police have said they were going to take no action but the spreadsheet "changed everything".

And I am fed up that with every bit of debunked evidence people say "Ahhh well the case wasn't based on that." There's a long list of stuff people say the case wasn't based on, WTF was it based on?

Letby was handed a prison sentence with no right to appeal and that in itself is deeply troubling.
What makes this even more concerning is the lack of direct tangible evidence linking her to the deaths. The entire case rests on circumstantial grounds, not concrete forensic proof.
The foundation of any just legal system is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, not guilt assumed in the absence of hard evidence.

Every prisoner, no matter how serious the crime, should have the right to an appeal. It is not just about fairness for the defendant, it is a safeguard for the integrity of the conviction itself. Appeals exist to catch mistakes, to correct miscarriages of justice. To deny someone that right is to undermine the very principles that hold our legal system together.
In a case as complex and contentious as this, barring an appeal is not just bizarre, it is ridiculous.

I have noticed Cheshire Police are making desperate bids to find other deaths/accusations , why? It is not their job to do this now. So they have something to hide.

That's what Jane Hawdon pointed out when discussing her report on the deaths and collapses - the question is, should the deaths and collapses have been expected.

Unfortunately, for every child who died, the international expert panel has found missed signs of danger - failures to test, failures to act on test results, failures to give medication, failures to spot deterioration due to inappropriate treatment.

Yes, it seems likely some of those children could have been expected to survive - with better care.

No, it was never based on statistics. The spreadsheet was pretty damning and yet might have piqued the interest of the police initially but she was never convicted on the basis that she was the one there for all the unexplained deaths. It was part a lot of other evidence against her which is why the trial took nine months. I’m sorry if you don’t like the outcome but it doesn’t make it a miscarriage of justice.

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 absolutely is conceivable. That's why they didn't call the police when the babies died.

Why on earth would a panel of international experts of various nationalities and ethnicities care that Letby is a reasonably presentable white blonde woman? Do you really think they'd put their reputations on the line for that?

By your logic, no white woman could have just cause for appeal. We don't help to resolve racism by extending injustice arbitrarily to all comers.

Or alert the coroner to any concerns, despite being the people who drew up reports for the coroner.

Until they noticed a distinct pattern. You might have one or two unexpected deaths or collapses, not 25 and not in the patterns that happened. I mean what was their motivation for alleging one of the nurses was a killer? If these things happen, it was likely natural causes and not deliberate? None of the consultants were being blamed for the deaths and needed a scapegoat. They noticed the pattern. They tried to speak up and were shut down. LL was protected to a huge amount with senior managers going to bat for her. Why not just get on with things and have an easier life? It’s not like they stood to gain anything at all.

And it makes no sense to say people believe a white woman can't murder people. Its self evidently not true. White women commit horrific crimes all the time.

Speaking for myself, I could well believe she's guilty. I just think the evidence was vanishingly thin and has now been debunked.

The consultants were being blamed for contributing to the deaths. That's the evidence from the external reviews that was excluded as irrelevant from the court, and could not be presented by the defence.

Until they noticed a distinct pattern. You might have one or two unexpected deaths or collapses, not 25 and not in the patterns that happened.

Sigh. The whole point is that you absolutely can. The NHS released a booklet explaining all this. Multiple statisticians have explained it in layman's terms.

Unlikely things happen all the time, plus they caught themselves up in the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

And Serial Killers are also unlikely so if you're going to say something unlikely like a statistical cluster is impossible then serial killers must also be impossible!