Lucy Letby: have you changed your mind?

[Kittybythelighthouse]

I’ve been sensing a shift in opinions on the Lucy Letby case and I’m interested in hearing from people who have changed their mind either way.

Did you used to think she was guilty and now you don’t, or you aren’t sure? What changed your mind?

Also vice versa: did you used to think she was not guilty but then changed your mind to guilty? What convinced you?

The reason I’m using the term ‘not guilty’ rather than ‘innocent’ is because courts don’t prove innocence. Not guilty is a legal conclusion about whether or not the state met its burden of proof.

I do think a part of the problem is experts. They are supposed to be impartial and testifying to facts and a lot of weight is given to their testimony. They are paid by the crown and often seem to think of themselves part of the prosecution team taking a conviction as a win.

Paying for experts is expensive. I assume the 14 experts who are now in favour of Lucy would cost tens of thousands of pounds per day if they weren’t acting pro bono. Who can afford that? It has been argued that it needs to change but there isn’t the legal aid budget.

It isn't just "the NHS". There are multiple people with skin in the game, who wish to protect and enhance their reputations.

Frankly, it's bonkers that the resulting conclusion they're running with is that she's not only a serial killer but the worst one ever identified in British history.

I completed get that. But most murders as well as circumstantial evidence will also have forensic evidence at some level. And none of these deaths do.

I think there have to be some serious doubts given the evidence given by medical experts. It’s awful all round. If she’s innocent then her life has been irreparably ruined. She’d never work as a nurse again even if proved to be innocent. One of the challenges I think is the evidence is so complex to interpret. If I was ever involved in a case like this, I’d be quite worried about verdict by jury. I think there are some occasions when the public just aren’t equipped to weigh up very complex evidence and some to the right conclusion.

so basically how big corps can win against little companies etc $$

”There are a few reasons why a defence team wouldn’t call their own witness and none of them reflect well on LL or the strength of her defence”

There are many reasons for this actually. I haven’t seen anyone say her defence was just lazy, Here’s an article that looks at this in detail.

jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Lucy_Letby:_the_missing_defence_evidence

This sort of blind trust of authority has been responsible for some of the very worst things in human history

The answer is natural causes and poor medical care.

The hospital started taking on more acutely ill children without having specialist neonatologists. All of the consultants were paediatricians who did neonatology on the side and spent most of their time with older children.

The hospital cut nursing staff, and regularly missed staffing standards, so babies who should have had one-to-one care weren't getting it.

The consultants did two ward rounds a week instead of two a day. So, much more than other units, this one was staffed by registrars and by trainees, many of whom were just rotating through for three months.

Errors which seem to have contributed to deaths Letby has been charged with include:

Not starting a blood transfusion on time / at all.

Setting ventilation settings too high so that children's lungs were over-inflated and their hearts put under pressure.

Long delays offering antibiotics, or offering the wrong antibiotics.

Failures at intubation.

We see lots of understaffed, dirty, penny pinching NHS units experience scandals, with higher death rates, even among babies. When experts have found these errors in the records, and the doctors treating these children weren't experts, why is it hard to believe that they simply, sadly, got things wrong?

But yet the public, who haven’t heard any of the evidence, seem to think they are better equipped than the jury to determine her guilt or innocence?

Nonsense

The court case took months. The ITV documentary lasted an hour including adverts. It’s interesting and raises questions and if there is to be a retrial so be it. However, the documentary wasn’t impartial, it had an agenda (as does this whole thread) and yet here people are willing to overturn a conviction based on a 5 year long investigation (still ongoing with potentially more victims identified) based on a tv programme.

You can bet that if she was acquitted, there would have been a documentary with some equally impressive specialist and experts questioning the acquittal also.

Except no one is citing "fandoms" as evidence that the verdict is suspect.

Try reading the previous posts. They generally refer to a panel of international experts (some of whom allege that their own studies which were cited as evidence for her her 'guilt' were misinterpreted or used incorrectly) and are arguably more suitably qualified than those used in the trial, who state that the conviction is unsafe.

You state that you've "listened to the evidence" - so have they, and concluded that it doesn't prove her guilt or that murders took place at all.

I think you misunderstood what was said. The expert panel reports were not made at the time of the trial, for a start, and they’re a huge part of the CCRC submission.

Because the "circumstantial evidence" barely passes a sniff test let alone a stress test.

It's like saying Ice Cream Van 1 has been robbed because its run out of ice cream to sell. The seller of Ice Cream Van 2 must be guilty because he's across the road and still had ice cream to sell.

Very different from someone witnessing a person under the cover of night, in a balaclava, carry a TV as they leave a property they have no cause to be near.

I'm sorry, I keep posting, but I just don't think people get how tricky the environment can be. For example, I would often have two babies allocated to me. Absolutely fine according to ratio guidance. But one would be in a cubicle on the left of a large bay, and the other would be in a cubicle on the right of the large bay. So actually quite a distance.

Tube feeds take time - you aren't allowed to push a feed, it has to be given by gravity. So you sit beside the cot, remove the plunger from a syringe, and attach it to the NG tube, then pour the milk into the syringe and hold it in the air until the milk runs through. Meanwhile, your other baby may have triggered their alarm, or soiled their nappy, or vomited, etc. But you are stuck because you are holding a syringe in the air and you can't see what's happening in your other cubicle.

Even nappy changes take longer because you have to weigh the nappy before it is placed, then weigh the nappy you have removed to calculate output.

Babies can and do dislodge their own ET tubes. They are strong and the tube is unpleasant.

I'm not saying it's impossible for LL to be guilty. I'm just saying it's not a slam dunk when you look at the context of the work environment as someone who has been there.

Indeed. Where is @FolkWays evidence that Lucy Letby is a psychopath?

Whether guilty or not, the case has highlighted the exceptionally poor state of the NHS including neonatal units - experts criticisms of the unit are shocking.

The public have heard much of the evidence. Its been widely reported. Widely discussed. Widely assessed.

Or are you of the opinion that the general public has no right to question authority?

Not all families have that option. Some units don’t allow siblings there all day (or in times of infection or COVID, at all). Many families find one parent has to work in order to continue affording all the normal costs of living and the additional financial burden of a hospitalised child.

You've just illustrated, again, why a jury trial is totally unsuitable for such highly specialised cases. You believe they were poisoned with insulin because the prosecution said so and you (of course) lack the considerable and highly specialised knowledge necessary to analyse, contextualise, or critique that theory.

In the latest documentary, an expert from the US argues that in fact there is no proof that they were poisoned with insulin.

I'd suggest you watch it.

Yes, two applications to appeal were refused. Applications to appeal are reviewed by a panel of judges who likely don’t have a science A level between them. Judges are experts in law and nothing else. They are not gods of all knowledge. The judiciary’s remedial understanding of science is a known issue. An application to appeal hearing is not what anyone means by saying a review of the evidence is needed.

Again, refusal to appeal is a near ubiquitous feature of miscarriages of justice, not a sign that the convictions are safe.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/aug/08/judge-tells-colleagues-to-be-on-their-guard-over-expert-witness-evidence

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/15/expert-witnesses-are-weakest-link-in-english-justice-system-says-wrongly-convicted-surgeon#:~:text=After%20an%20appeal%20in%202016,%5D%20and%20not%20the%20experts”.

It’s not about what I’m saying. I was describing the actual meaning of the term ‘Not guilty’ in a legal context. It means the burden of proof has not been met by the prosecution. It means there is reasonable doubt.

Oh well there you go then, some of the public heard much of the evidence. Thats fine then. We should all be able to have a vote based on much of what we heard. Maybe they could develop a Love Island style app.

Moving a bag of paperwork that needs to be treated as confidential waste to the new house is not at all odd. People take pointless crap to new homes all the time. Other people take each move as an opportunity for a ruthless clear out. The only remotely interesting and salient thing about the paperwork is that only a fraction of it relates to the indictment babies. It’s therefore irrelevant to the case.

No one wants it overturned based on a TV programme. They belive it's unsafe based on the testimony of a panel of international experts which was cited in the documentary. Their report is available.

What you're saying is that expert opinion is split over the verdict (I'd actually argue that no, the most suitably and highly qualified experts are generally on the side of the trial and verdict being absurd) but take that as the starting point:

There's no unequivocal evidence, and the expert testimony on which the verdict was based is ambivalent. That's why people want this to be reassessed.