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.

To explain why their suspicions were raised. Harold Shipman was suspected because he was submitting a higher than normal number of death certificates. Statistically I’m sure it could be explained by other means why loads of his patients were suddenly dying and by itself it doesn’t mean he’s guilty of killing them. Obviously he was guilty though.

To say the case was never based on statistics is patently nonsense. Anyone on the jury, seeing the shift records where Letby was the only staff member present for 100% of suspicious incidents would have marked her down as guilty at that point. Slam dunk.
Because no statistics expert was put up to refute it, it was never explained to the jury that it was a cherry picked rubbish.
It certainly convinced me that she was guilty when I heard about at the time of her trial.

I think you’re assuming the jury is thick. And if it was so damning why didn’t LL call a statistics expert to refute it then? I don’t think there was ever any suggestion from either side that it was murder but could have been done by someone else on the ward. So it doesn’t really matter what the chart says - we know she was there for all the incidents because that was accepted fact. It does explain why she was always the number one suspect though and why they didn’t really look into anyone else.

I don’t think it’s about the jury being thick. They’re going with what’s presented to them. I think her defence doesn’t seem the best. They conceded that the deaths were suspicious, which would surely go a long way to conceal her fate.

If I was in the jury and both sides agreed on suspicious deaths and I saw a table showing she was the only one present for all these suspicious deaths I could find that quite convincing. I think you have to be quite bold to go against both the prosecution and defence.

I don’t think it’s about the jury being thick. They’re going with what’s presented to them. I think her defence doesn’t seem the best. They conceded that the deaths were suspicious, which would surely go a long way to conceal her fate.

This.

That spreadsheet looked like a slam dunk to me until actual statisticians explained why it wasn't. Was I thick, or did I just fall into a statistical bear trap any layman would have fallen into?

I'd say the latter. Statistics are a nightmare, only experts spot the confounders, but they're obvious once they're pointed out by someone who knows.

You are presenting this the wrong way round. There was no evidence of murder prior to LL being suspected. There was a spike in deaths which wasn’t unusual when viewed in a wider context but which nevertheless the consultants decided must be due to nefarious activities and they got it into their heads that LL was the common denominator. The fudged roster chart and ‘medical evidence’ was all about supporting the theory. She was only there for all the incidents she was there for. The expert witness literally changed his evidence on the stand when he realised she wasn’t there for one of the alleged incidents. He’s recanted on a cause of death since she was convicted. Emails show how the consultants manipulated the facts to make a more compelling case to pique the interest of the police. There is so much in the public domain now that no reasonable person could deny it needs looking at.

I'm finding it interesting how whenever someone comes out publicly in support of her, within a day or so there will be a news article implicating her further.

Which does make me wonder. It's not really happening the other way round, so why is it so important to someone/some people that if people question it then that's quashed in the public eye?

I mean if I'd have thought the right result was reached on something as important as that, she hadn't been given leave to appeal, then anything said about her innocence would be water off a duck's back. It doesn't matter.
Or you'd be interested in having the right outcome - that to me is the important thing.

I started by thinking she was guilty. Lots of things don't add up when you look at it closely. I don't necessarily think she is innocent, but the avoidance of looking at the questions makes me uncomfortable.

I want our justice service to be correct.

It is an old quote to be fair sbout the Birmingham six, Lord Denning felt it would of been better to have hung them rather than have all the appeals.

I do think Judges have got more circumspect sbout voicing such opinions but I think there’s an idea that prevails that they don’t like appeals even when the evidence seems to suggest that the conviction is really unsafe.

I'm not assuming the jury was thick, I fell for it and I don't believe I'm thick (others may disagree).
It was a stunning piece of evidence which made Letby look bang to rights.
Except it was bogus AF.

Fuck me, that's even worse.

She did confess - remember the stuff she wrote in her diaries?

No, none of that constitutes a confession.

all of the stuff she wrote were the words of an unhinged individual. She also used colour-coded initials of the babies in her diary which were used to build a case against her as she appeared to be keeping a record of the attacks and she was also obsessively stalking the parents of the dead babies on FB.

well it does because it’s part of the reason she was found guilty.

People are so dim, these days. They think someone can’t be guilty of a crime unless there is video footage of them actually doing it 🙄

She had the very best barristers that money could buy. Precisely because the conviction needed to be safe.

But it didn’t really go to anything the prosecution was saying. They were saying these deaths are suspicious and LL was there for all of them which is why she was suspected. LL seems to be saying that all the deaths were of natural causes so not murder although with the insulin she said someone else might have put it there. She’s not saying it was murder but it wasn’t her. So the table doesn’t have huge probative value because nobody has ever said that it hinges on the statistical likelihood of her being present. Obviously people can use common sense. If money goes missing from the till several times and only one person is there every single time then statistically it might not prove much but yeah, if I was investigating I’d start with that person.

Can totally see why you got confused but it was an ex-coroner's officer not an ex-coroner. A coroner is a sort of judge. A coroner's officer is someone who does admin for a coroner. An ex-coroner's officer is someone who used to do admin for a coroner. If I wanted medical advice I wouldn't ask the GP receptionist. Similar, the ex-coroner's officer's opinion is worth approximately nothing.

Dim people, who have no capacity of critical thinking, accept that the flimsy circumstantial evidence against her = she was guilty.

The circumstantial evidence in its entirety was not flimsy.

It was, astonishingly so.

Have you got any irrefutable evidence to support your opinion?

If money goes missing from the till several times and only one person is there every single time then statistically it might not prove much but yeah, if I was investigating I’d start with that person.

Jist watch one video on the statistics of this. Just one. You're repeating the same completely wrong stuff, over and over again. Invest 30 minites of time and stop embarrassing yourself. (Or the NHS paper on the statistics which they published specifically for this case. Sadly they sent a copy to defence and prosecution and neither side read it. To be fair, it's not something an arts graduate could wing.)

It doesn't prove it beyond reasonable doubt for a court though. You need further evidence.

In this case it would also be a bit like saying "Money went missing on only the odd days of the month, but we'll only consider the 1st, 9th, 11th, 15th, 17th and 29th because that's when the person you want to convict was in... and then when told that they weren't in on the 15th, changing it to the 16th when they were in. We'll also ignore that their manager was also in on those days and had access to the till".
That's why there are queries about the statistics. The jury was shown part statistics in order to make her look more guilty. Part statistics in such a case should be illegal.

No you are embarrassing yourself by thinking that the statistics argument that has been made in the press means that the fact that one person is always present for all events is utterly irrelevant. It’s not. It’s circumstantial evidence.

Yeah, and there were way more problems that that. They didn't factor in that as a full timer in a department with a large number of temps she would inevitably be around far more than anyone else. That as a full timer she was routinely given the children inn the worst state. Pretty sure there were some jobs that only she did. They only considered nurses, who knows what shifts janitors and porters and receptionists were doing.

The list of confounders is long, and you'd need to be a pro to spot them.

I also wondered about the unusual high number or dislodged tubes. How many of the temps bothered to write down a dislodged tube? I think it's entirely possible she was just more contentious with her note taking.

I've been in hospital recently and the two full.timers were doing 80% of the work and the temps were noticeably doing very, very little and often needed help. They didn't know where stuff was. When an emergency happens it certainly isn't the temps that turn up first. You can bet that the two permies encountered far more bad outcomes than the average nurse becaise the average nurse was spending half their shift looking for the stationary cupboard.rather than being hands on with patients. I suspect that Letby was like the two permies I saw.