Lucy Letby - programme on ITV now

[Viviennemary]

I think this must be a new programme and not a repeat. Experts are being wheeled out to try and say Letby is innocent. I'm not convinced at all. None of them were even at the trial or worked with Letby. It's all theories and opinions..

Here some of what the International Expert Panel says about Baby C:

Over the next 3 days Baby 3 showed multiple clinical signs of intermittent bowel obstruction (no bowel opening from birth; dark bilious aspirates; bilious vomit; intermittent stomach and small bowel distension; recurrent crying). No bowel movements and dark bile aspirates and
vomiting are clear indication for urgent surgical opinion. This did not occur. Instead despite feeds being contraindicated, he was given a 0.5ml nasogastric feed. He collapsed with a major apnoea 15 minutes later.

Two nurses commenced resuscitation, one of whom was extremely inexperienced and had never done cardiac compressions before. The medical registrar who was called had 3 unsuccessful attempts at intubation before the consultant arrived. Baby 3 therefore would appear to have had ineffective ventilation for at least 20 minutes which would have resulted in marked respiratory and metabolic acidosis and made subsequent resuscitative efforts less
likely to be successful. ...

Post-mortem showed an aberrant descending colon with persistence of the mesentery (a membrane that normally disappears in fetal life thereby fixing the colon to the back of the peritoneal cavity). With a persisting mesentery the descending colon is mobile and displaced to the right, with the potential for transmesenteric (internal) herniation of small bowel to the
left of the descending colon causing obstruction that could be intermittent. Post-mortem also showed widespread hypoxic- ischaemic damage to the heart, lung immaturity, and other changes consistent with severe IUGR
...
Baby 3 did not respond adequately to prolonged resuscitation because of inadequate resuscitation for 20 minutes following an acute episode of apnoea. Recovering respiratory distress syndrome and severe growth restriction with myocardial ischaemia, would have
added further to the likelihood of a poor response to resuscitation. The apnoeic attack was likely precipitated by severe pain due to a further episode of acute small bowel obstruction precipitated by feeding. The suggestion that the multiple signs of intestinal obstruction could be caused by injection of air through the nasogastric tube is untenable.

CONCLUSION

1. Baby 3 died because of a decision to discontinue respiratory support and resuscitative effort in the face of a poor response following inadequate resuscitation for at least 20 minutes after an acute episode of apnoea.
2. The clear prior signs of intermittent bowel obstruction that warranted urgent surgical opinion and investigation had gone unrecognized.

https://lucyletbyinnocence.com/shoo-lee/International%20Expert%20Panel%20New%20Summary%20Report%20of%20additional%2010%20cases.pdf

The consultant defended his lack of follow up for bile aspirates in court, saying he wasn't worried yet, but in the hospitals own review of care, they note that x-rays should have been carried out.

Here, for comparison, is all we have been able to learn of Dewi Evans's new report on Child C, since the police won't share it:

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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/20/my-kind-of-case-intense-focus-falls-on-lucy-letby-trial-expert-witness

How can anyone not have concerns about this case?

Off the top of my head, nobody claims she was alone with children, A, B, F, H, I, J, L, M or P for any incidents at all.

That seems...quite relevant?! Is that really the case that she was thought to have attacked them while others were present (or rather, not to have had the chance to do so alone)? Because if so I'm even more baffled by the entire thing.

The idea is that she could have injected air into most of them, really quickly. But the International Expert Panel points out that this would cause an immediate collapse, alarms would go off, and she would never have a chance to reinfuse the IVF line she was meant to have used to cover her tracks.

The prosecution kept coming back to the idea that if she didn't do one thing, she did another thing, and the jury didn't need to know which. The judge in his instructions told the jury they didn't need to know exactly what happened or when to find her guilty.

It all came back to the suggestion that babies don't just collapse and die, and she was there. But as Jane Hawdon pointed out to hospital management in 2016, true unexpected collapse is very rare, but failing to expect a collapse you could have anticipated is much more common.

It's interesting that people have this image of Letby sneaking into dark rooms on her own to commit a secret crime, when that's not even what the prosecution argued in most cases. Stories that make no sense don't catch on and circulate, and the story the prosecution actually asked us to accept makes no sense.

Yes. That's why they have to come up with these really weird murder methods.
She has to some how do something that leaves no mark on the child's body with no obvious weapon or implement that the people all around her didn't notice her doing at the time. And now she has to somehow prove she didn't do this thing (shouldn't be that way but it is where we seem to be in practice).

It is so similar to a 16th century witch trial. Dewi doesn't actually say she used black magic to kill the babies, but injecting air into babies stomachs is about as likely.

And when Jane Hawdon made this comment, she'd seen the notes on each child's care, so it wasn't a pure hypothetical either. She was much less openly critical, but she found that better care could have produced a different outcome in at least all but two of the cases she examined for Chester (I don't know either way about the last two).

And the stupidest thing is that killing a baby by putting air into its stomach via an ng tube wouldn’t be quick. Firstly we don’t know how much air it would take to do this (if possible at all) but seeing as babies gulp lots of air in themselves when feeding and don’t die I’m going to imagine it’s not a small amounts of air. NG tubes are tiny, long and very thin, to tube feed a baby milk takes a long time.

To get anywhere near enough air in to make a baby poorly, she would have to be attaching a syringe, plunging it, taking the syringe off, pulling it back, reattaching it, plunging again and repeating that dozens of times.

but nobody saw this happening? 🤷‍♀️. It does not medically or physically make sense.

I am reminded of the auditing process that I go through regularly.

When it is carried out randomly there are no issues found. There may be in fact small errors but they are perceived as within normal limits of acceptability and passed.

When it is carried out retrospectively after 'something' has occurred, faults will always be found - because people are hunting hard for them. They need to find fault because in doing so they blame can shift to an individual rather than other factors.

I think there is a strong element here of having to find 'something' when the original investigations by coroner found only natural causes.

Interesting view of senior coroner reviewing for police in 2017
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/14/former-senior-coroners-officer-says-lucy-letby-has-suffered-miscarriage-of-justice

It's so, so bizarre that there just isn't a mechanism for half these attacks to actually take place, let alone with others present. I know she had a highly respected barrister but how it even got to court is baffling and then these nonsensical attack methods were just accepted. I suppose a lot of that is down to Evans, an inveterate crank if ever there was one, being paraded as a great expert.

I can sort of see why they may not have called their own experts, thinking that cross-examination was enough to demolish the basis of the accusations. But obviously prosecution painted a picture of her being the constant 'malevolent presence', had Jayaram claiming to have caught her red-handed (since shown to be a complete hallucination on his part), leaned heavily on the insulin issue and the jury were told they didn't need to be sure about the methods she used.

I can understand for a lay jury, simply the fact that she was being accused of so many attacks and that this was a cluster of deaths presented as both exceptional and inexplicable (despite it being neither, sadly), and the sheer emotive nature of wanting justice for those parents could have swayed things quite considerably. The fundamental problem was Dewi Evans' bullshit-based reports and the consultants who were rarely on the ward and seemed oblivious to the obvious mistakes in care and missed signs that things were not going well for these babies.

It's so tragic. And as per the interview I posted, incredibly damaging to relationships between parents and nurses, and the nursing profession as a whole. Nurses afraid to put their arm round a distressed parent or send a card in case it's seen as sinister.

The more I learn about the case the more I am starting to believe that Lucy's barrister didn't put in a proper defense because he believed the prosecutions case was so outlandish, and so unsupported by science and just utterly ridiculous that he assumed the other side would do his job for him.

Unfortunately the jury did not understand enough of the science to see how improbable it was.

Yes. Every time there is a criticism of his finding in the press, you see Evans having a meltdown about how they're WRONG, he's right, and he has no time for them and their credentials anyway.

It makes him look like an unstable fraud, outside the court. But it's exactly the job the prosecution needed him to do. His actual duty to the court was to discuss the full range of possibilities, not to fight for the prosecution. But as this excellent blog post puts it:

When examining Dr. Evans, Ms. Letby’s defence ... could, and evidently did, put to Dr. Evans that his diagnosis was highly speculative, that it was supported by little hard evidence, that he was not very experienced in air emboli, had long since retired, was suffering confirmation bias and so on.

Dr. Evans could, and did, deny those defence assertions, but risked seeming defensive, flustered, or in denial in the face of a well-constructed cross-examination.

Where a witness is “over his skis”, cross-examination has the advantage of being incisive and devastating, but, unless the witness accepts defence propositions, it is not, of itself, evidence. When, months later, the judge sums up for the jury, he will not include a review of the cross-examination, however devastating it was, unless the witness accepted it.

They didn't need (and certainly didn't get) a scientific genius. They needed someone with the bare minimum in credentials and the complete inability to ever contemplate or admit that he could be wrong. I'm sure many of us have worked with men like him.

That's a really interesting perspective on how audits can work.

I found the statements by Stephanie Davies, the former senior coroner's office, very persuasive. Even after she left her job with the Cheshire Police, it seems from her statements to the Thirlwall Inquiry that she still believed the court must have got it right. A lot of people must have felt the same - it seemed unlikely, but how else to explain it all?

And then the defence press conferences showed her that the coroner's office hadn't been given full information, and filled in the missing pieces of the jigsaw much better than that prosecution case.

She did an interview with Channel 4 that is worth watching too:

@oftenaddled Thanks for sharing that post. Very interesting re the dilemma of whether to call the defence experts. Essentially a credible/responsible expert would have to concede there was at least a remote possibility of something like air embolism, despite the paucity of the evidence and the fact that other scenarios are far more credible. So you would have a situation where one expert is sure it was X and the opposing side is conceding that X is a theoretical possibility. Again the issue is with Evans being neither credible nor responsible, nor willing to countenance that he could be mistaken, so he simply didn't concede anything and his testimony was treated as established evidence. Is that about right?

That's right yes.

It is easy to miss the fact that the expert witnesses' duty is to the court, not the defence or prosecution. They are also meant to rely on "settled science", not speculative theory. So it wasn't Evans' job to assume murder and speculate about how it could have been done. His job was to share the range of possibilities with the jury, explain which were most likely, and answer cross-examination honestly without taking sides.

He has done terrible, terrible damage here.

If you thought she was innocent at first, why did you think that? Also, what exactly changed your mind? I’m genuinely interested to hear your reasoning there if you don’t mind sharing. That’s very interesting to me.

Again, “the bigger picture” is just “she’s a witch because she’s got red hair” type thinking. If there were no murders none of it matters.

When people say “no one complained at the time” we are talking about the babies in the indictment, not other babies who were not deemed to have been harmed by Letby. It would be impossible to find a nurse working in a high emotion setting who no one had ever had an issue with. This specific anecdote is also coloured by the context and retrospect etc,

I’m not surprised that a third party parent would think “my baby was at that NICU too - maybe he was harmed?” and might even feel livid about something in retrospect, but Letby was never charged with harming that baby, so we can’t assume that she did harm him.

Again this requires an assumption of guilt. You’re not dealing with facts. All you’re offering us is a vague miasma of “she’s a bit of a wrong un isn’t she?” which is understandable from parents who naturally worry, overthink, and potentially reframe memories unconsciously given their proximity to the case. Anyone else reading into it is again just using which trial thinking. It’s Salem 1692 all over again: once Goody Proctor was accused of witchcraft suddenly everyone’s milk had been spoiled by Goody Proctor and everyone had a story about how she harmed them.

The Artell anecdote is sincerely felt I’m sure, but it’s not meaningful in this discussion. If it was it would have been part of the case. Given the extreme tenuousness of some of the cases Letby was convicted for there’s simply no way any other possible cases slipped through the cracks.

You let yourself down a bit by dismissing us as “cheerleaders”. Everyone here has been pretty clear that they are interested the rigour and fairness of the justice system and/or the NHS, that’s extremely rational and reasonable. Nobody is a “cheerleader”. In fact, I’m a bit spooked by people who seem not to care about what this case exposes about the expert witness system (which has been in dire need of reform for decades) policing, and the justice system in general. Given the calibre of the expert panel don’t you think it’s worth being sure? Have a proper look under the bonnet? If you don’t and are willing to handwave all that away I find that bizarre. I really don’t understand it. It’s simply not logical.

As regards Child C I think you must be thinking of some other case. That one was the first to be dismantled. Even Evans rowed back on that one. What, specifically, do you find most damning about it?

It's not an idea I pulled from thin air. I copied it from that article-sorry if it wasn't clear. It literally says the baby was in good condition! Plus he was being looked after by a less qualified nurse which I don't think would be happening if he wasn't stable. AND that nurse briefly left the room, which she wouldn't be doing if she had any fears he was about to collapse and die. She'd probably have asked LL or someone to watch him whilst she left if that was the case. But no LL took it upon herself to sneak in there as soon as the other nurse left. With no reason to. The fact is the minute LL went in there the baby collapsed, it's highly suspicious whichever way you look at it.

Actually all the nurses who gave evidence agreed that Child C wouldn't gave been left alone on the ward. There were two intensive care babies in there, each having one to one nursing.

Another nurse, Mel Taylor, was in the ward when the child collapsed. There's some confusion about which of the other three nurses on duty was or wasn't in there with her, since nobody could remember for sure, years later

You see how you are having to add extra touches to the story to make it make sense.

So - the child was in a condition that required 24 hour one-to-one nursing.

He would not have been left alone in the room.

There's no evidence Lucy Letby was alone with him at any point (but if she was, babysitting would be a good reason)

There is evidence that Lucy Letby wasn't alone in the room with him when he collapsed.

You are using articles that came out after the trial but before the Thirlwall Inquiry as well as the expert reports published by the defence. This means you are missing information such as:

The consultant in charge of the mother's complex pregnancy was not surprised the child died.

The consultant in charge of the child on the neo-natal ward write to his mother saying such things could happen without ultimate explanation.

The hospital noted in an internal review that there was a missed opportunity to follow up signs of intestinal obstruction and x-ray the child.

The prosecution described the child as being in a good condition, but we know now that the hospital was not seeing serious problems and the child was not in good condition at all.

I thought she was innocent at first because there was so little to go on. IIRC all the police said was there were suspicious baby deaths and they stopped whilst she was on holiday and started again when she came back. Also the three arrests seemed ludicrous and like they couldn't have had much on her. Then the trial finally started...

When people say “no one complained at the time” we are talking about the babies in the indictment, not other babies who were not deemed to have been harmed by Letby. It would be impossible to find a nurse working in a high emotion setting who no one had ever had an issue with. This specific anecdote is also coloured by the context and retrospect etc,

So you want other cases looked at where LL (apparently) wasn't there, but a mother not in the trial who says LL was hugely inappropriate and then her baby mysteriously had an insulin spike you dismiss? OK then! Surely even more reason to listen to her when she had no reason to think LL was harming her baby at the time yet STILL made a complaint. And she was livid back then not in retrospect-did you watch her interview?

It wasn't always a high emotion setting (as evidenced by her texting and boredom doing feeds) she caused it to be high emotion and drama by attacking babies because she got off on the aftermath. This particular time wasn't a high emotion setting so that's irrelevant. She took it upon herself to interrupt a couple she had very little to do with and tell them not to get their hopes up-I mean why would she want parents to think that hmm? The parents were obviously pleased how well their son was doing and LL felt the need to take that away, why? I think it's clear you are willing to die on this hill and will never see her for what she is. Cheerleader is certainly the right word!

And it's you guys who are not dealing with facts "oh there were no murders because the insulin test was wrong, the overfeeding never happened, the liver injury was wrong, the air embolism evidence was wrong, the tube dislodgements on 40% of her shifts at liverpool prove nothing, she did overdose a baby with 10x morphine but that was the other nurses' fault 🙄what am I supposed to do if you don't want to believe the scientific evidence? I'm not sure you understand what the big picture means in this context, it means she IS a witch because all her behaviour and evidence points exactly to her being one!

I’m really surprised at this response. You’re being unnecessarily defensive and hostile. It’s totally okay for us to be polite to each other, no?

First, I don’t think it’s relevant to drag in other cases that were definitely closely looked at by a very aggressive prosecution but not pinned on Letby, because they could not be. That has nothing to do with cases of collapses that Letby had nothing to do with and was never accused of.

“Surely even more reason to listen to her when she had no reason to think LL was harming her baby at the time yet STILL made a complaint. And she was livid back then not in retrospect-did you watch her interview?”

I did watch that video. There’s very little to do with this case that I haven’t seen. I think she’s very emotional and I don’t blame her. Anyone would wonder the same. There is no proof that Letby was the nurse she complained about. If she was, it would be on her file and would therefore have come out at Thirlwall, but it didn’t. It’s possible that she mistook Letby for another nurse given the context of being told a murdering nurse was at work when her baby was in hospital. Like with the cold cot event. We can’t put weight on it if the prosecution and Thirlwall didn’t.

A NICU is, very often a high emotion environment. Strange to argue that it isn’t,

”I think it's clear you are willing to die on this hill and will never see her for what she is. Cheerleader is certainly the right word!”

What hill? The hill of arguing for our justice system to be fair and rigorous? Well yeah I suppose I will. Rather that than end up in the dock myself some day on the word of a dodgy doctor! The question is why aren’t you concerned about that? Something that could affect the lives of your children and theirs? Justice is a fundamental tentpole of our society and it has to work properly for all of our sakes. But apparently you don’t give a fig? You’re more interested in clinging onto your socially acceptable tabloid sensation hate figure? That’s deeply weird. Sorry, but it is.

You insist on characterising reasonable people showing an interest in the rigour of the legal system we all rely on for freedom and justice as “cheerleaders”. Why? Is it because you cannot argue against the facts, but you really don’t want to stop burning a witch, so you must misrepresent us as deranged fans having a parasocial relationship with a baby killer because…what? We like baby killers??
Okay. Yep. 👌🏻

”what am I supposed to do if you don't want to believe the scientific evidence? I'm not sure you understand what the big picture means in this context, it means she IS a witch because all her behaviour and evidence points exactly to her being one!”

Are you quite well? You are the one denying the scientific evidence. You are the one plugging your ears and going lalalalala.

I see you’ve finally admitted to being a gleeful witch burner, deaf to all reason. Reflect. You’ll be embarrassed by this in years to come.

Re the morphine error Letby made early in her career:

In England alone, there are 237 million medication errors in NHS care every year:

https://www.bmj.com/company/%20newsroom/237-million-medication-errors-made-every-year-in-england/

At the time when she made the error, 1 in 5 calculations of morphine doses in error were inaccurate, on average:

https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/projects/administration-of-intravenous-morphine-to-neonates

If, with these facts before you, you believe that two known significant medical errors on her career make Letby more likely to murder, it is you who are not thinking scientifically.

Rattling off descredited facts and irrelevant anecdotes, and sailing on without reflection as one after another is shown to be wrong - that's not thinking scientifically. What you are listing there is not "scientific evidence".

@Oftenaddled yes and add to that the fact that Letby was a trainee nurse working under a senior nurse. Morphine is administered with two nurses monitoring it. The overdose (a very common error as you say) was obviously primarily the senior nurse’s responsibility.

I agree @Kittybythelighthouse , and I am prepared to bet the senior nurse didn't go on to murder anyone either.

But he wasn’t in good condition - that’s obvious from the medical information. You have cherrypicked your information from a newspaper article.

There’s quite a difference between being in a good condition, and being in a poor condition but not being expected to go off imminently. And if the care was as poor (non-standard) as suggested by the panel of experts, this explains the placing of a poorly baby with a less experienced nurse.

Can you provide evidence that LL “sneaked” in to his room, rather than her providing routine cover while the less experienced nurse was on a break?

But you are wrong. The baby you are referring to was not in a good condition because they had no anal opening.

@Kittybythelighthouse I did watch that video. There’s very little to do with this case that I haven’t seen. I think she’s very emotional and I don’t blame her. Anyone would wonder the same. There is no proof that Letby was the nurse she complained about. If she was, it would be on her file and would therefore have come out at Thirlwall, but it didn’t. It’s possible that she mistook Letby for another nurse given the context of being told a murdering nurse was at work when her baby was in hospital. Like with the cold cot event. We can’t put weight on it if the prosecution and Thirlwall didn’t.

See this is why I call you cheerleaders. You excuse everything. Instead of admitting that comment was bang out of order, you're now playing the "we don't even know that was Lucy" card. The mother in question worked in the hospital, she knew who Lucy was! You know you can't defend that comment or come up with a reason it was said so oh the mother must be wrong, oh her opinion is coloured years later, oh it probably wasn't Lucy...ad nauseum🙄

A NICU is, very often a high emotion environment. Strange to argue that it isn’t

I didn't argue that it often isn't, I said the incident in question wasn't so it's completely irrelevant. Nothing was happening with that baby at the time, two parents were talking about his progress and LL took it upon herself to tell them not to get their hopes up. For some reason she was triggered by their conversation, no one was even talking to her or asking for her opinion. Was it because she HATES to see others happy or hopeful? Because there is zero other reason for that comment. But yeah sure, must be some other mystery nurse wot said it 🙄

What hill? The hill of arguing for our justice system to be fair and rigorous? Well yeah I suppose I will. Rather that than end up in the dock myself some day on the word of a dodgy doctor! The question is why aren’t you concerned about that? Something that could affect the lives of your children and theirs? Justice is a fundamental tentpole of our society and it has to work properly for all of our sakes. But apparently you don’t give a fig? You’re more interested in clinging onto your socially acceptable tabloid sensation hate figure? That’s deeply weird. Sorry, but it is.

That's not at all what's happening. If I cared about tabloids I'd probably be saying she's innocent since so many of them have jumped on that bandwagon for clicks. I'm going by the actual you know 10 month trial that happened which you seem to have forgotten about? No one who isn't murdering patients has to worry about any of this. I can only surmise that you want her out of prison and onto the nearest baby unit, considering you're so sure of her innocence. Terrifying!

I see you’ve finally admitted to being a gleeful witch burner, deaf to all reason. Reflect. You’ll be embarrassed by this in years to come.

Yeah no I don't think I'll ever have anything to be embarrassed about. I'm mildly embarrassed I ever defended her but then that was way before the trial and she was innocent until proven guilty. I'd certainly be embarrassed/mortified/ashamed to defend her now. Just think for one moment you're wrong and all this time you were defending a multiple killer of babies (you are)...that's far worse than me being wrong whichever way you look at it.

But I think it'll be incredibly hard for your lot to admit you were wrong so it'll be just more denial. Won't have to wait long either as I expect Mon's doc will shed more light on it, then we've got the police investigation findings. I'm sure you're all getting ready to discredit Moritz and yell "conspiracy" about the police when they uncover more about what she did at Liverpool since the Chester consultants can't be blamed for that.

What will happen in years to come is psychologists will study how society lost it's collective mind and refused to believe a bland blonde woman committed heinous crimes despite all the overwhelming evidence.