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.

Thanks for this. That’s what I thought, though I may not have expressed it properly (I’m not a nurse). NICU nursing (particularly high acuity) involves special skills/knowledge that a child branch nurse is able to pursue, but that they won’t have unless they do that. Is that correct?

Why didn't she defend herself then? Evil bitch.

What do you mean? She was in the stand for ~ 2 weeks.

Not the poster you are replying to so sorry for jumping in but, yes and no.

The children’s ward in my local hospital contains a level 2 HDU. It cares for children on CPAP. A paeds nurse working there will be exposed to deteriorating and unwell children and babies (especially during RSV season, so many unwell babies). The nurses working on this ward either have or go on to get (a couple of years post registration) additional HDU training.

Blood gases are taken of deteriorating babies and children on a general ward, to monitor if they are deteriorating/improving, if they need transfer to a different unit for a higher level of care etc.

In my hospital, if a baby was born term healthy, discharged home and then admitted to hospital poorly days later, they go to the Children’s Unit, not NICU unless they are very unwell. As such, the paeds nurses there are very experienced at caring for neonates. They may be admitted for jaundice, potential sepsis, feeding difficulties and weight loss, pyloric stenosis, potential apnoea, RSV or flu. Granted, they won’t be prem or very low birth weight, but then not all babies on NICU are either (term babies with normal birthweights also need neonatal care, although of course aren’t quite as fragile usually).

Like I said, yes and no!

I’m baffled at this idea that paeds nurses don’t care for babies under a year 😂 generally at least half the general paeds ward I spent most of my years as paeds nurse on fell into that category!

They mean that NN nurses look after the unwell newborn baby.

After such a baby goes home, if for any reason they're readmitted, they go to paediatric wards.

oh my gosh I don’t think she’s attractive but she obviously doesn’t look like a typical creepy child murderer we imagine. We like to imagine we’d “be able to tell” the ones amongst us. As for that article… sources close to the case ok well whoooo? said they were produced after counselling sessions as part of a therapeutic process in which she was advised to write down her troubling thoughts and feelings okayyyy so she wrote down the thoughts and feeling she had…and those thoughts and feelings included “I killed them”? And you think that shows she’s innocent? Right then.

That's disturbing. And you laugh about it.

What like inaccurate on duty list? Or baby deaths only picked because she was on duty? You mean withholding that type of information? There is Somthing called lying by omission.

That is correct, they have enhanced training and skills relating to both neonatology and critical care nursing. Just as adult nurses working in ICU will either have or be going through additional training in critical care nursing.

Qualified nurses can be appointed to a NICU as soon as they are RNs, and
as your employer would then pay for your training to become Qualified in Specialty (QiS) that is how most nurses would become neonatal nurses, but in order to be maintain their status as a level 2/level 3 or whatever level unit they need to not fall below a certain percentage of nurses QiS.

I hope that makes sense. I understand NHS hospital infrastructure is very confusing at times.

She also wrote about her innocence.

Isn’t this a little ironic though? You’re saying she’s ‘guilty as sin’ on a parenting social media forum. Most people wondering otherwise are deferring to the medical expert’s reports and statisticians concerns?

Letby's ward offered short-term ICU, HDU and special care cots. They had 3 or 4 ICU cots at different times. Children in ICU were required to have one-to-one nursing with a nurse qualified in the specialism.

The children Letby was accused of killing all died in ICU - two had been at a lower level of care but were moved back after a non-terminal collapse.

Letby was one of only two band 5 (cheaper) nurses qualified in the neonatal ICU caring specialism. All level sixes were qualified.

So, from the point of view of discussion, it's the qualification in caring for infants in neonatal intensive care units (not HDU etc) that's relevant I think.

And from the point of view of what happened to Lucy Letby, it's fairly obvious why she was so often on shift when the ICU has patients at risk of dying.

That’s correct 👍

Yes I think I follow! Thanks for the info. I have huge respect for nurses by the way. What an important and tough job that is.

From my understanding there were 2 external reviews no evidence was found with LL practice. They even went to the police who felt there was nothing to back up claims cannot arrest someone on a gut feeling, that’s when doctors decided to go to the police without management. I happy to be wrong if that is not correct.

Yes, you're right. Management contacted the police. They had a series of meetings, and the police were struggling to see what part they could play without evidence of a crime. At that stage, the consultants emailed them with a summary of their suspicions. This is the email Dr Jayaram was talking about when he talked about picking out cases where they could place Letby by the cotside to pique the police's interest, and where he admitted she had called him to help baby K, which he later denied.

That email seems to have been the turning point and persuaded the police to investigate.

The breaking point for the doctors - who engaged in email relay with management for a year while they “knew” a baby killer was stalking the wards - was when Letby won her workplace bullying grievance against them and they were asked to apologise to her.

That’s when they went to the police.

That was the first thing that made me smell a rat. Who engages in email ping pong with management for a year while a baby serial killer wanders at large? The parents whose babies were harmed during this period must be livid. I would be!

p.s: I don’t want to hear any weak excuses about them being afraid of losing their jobs. This wasn’t a dispute about provisions in the staff room, this was about a baby killer! In any case they had routes to take this further, they didn’t even go to the coroner, which was actually a responsibility if harm was suspected. There was also the Pan Cheshire Child Death Panel, which is anonymised and has a police presence. There is also the police, who even a child would know to call if they suspected someone was killing babies.

The doctors behaved abysmally whether or not you think she’s guilty. In fact they’re arguably much worse if you think she’s guilty!

I have watched the documentary. I have also read your op again. It’s actually eye opening and shocking.

I misunderstood your post. I won’t say innocent. I won’t even say not
guilty. I would await her appeal.

That’s fair enough. This poll is only to gauge feeling. It’s okay to sit it out.

If they were afraid for their jobs (highly doubt it) there wouod have been whistleblowing policies.

It stinks

I find the arguments made by the panel of experts very compelling. If they are putting forward that in all the cases the babies died because of inadequate care, rather than deliberate action on anyone's part then I can't see how a retrial can take place.

It must be truly difficult to defend yourself against accusations of murder in these circumstances, especially when in such a long trial all the prosecution evidence was presented and then the defence after that, rather than being able to counteract things as they came up.

AFAIK the only "admitted" cases of harm were the attempted murders with insulin where the defence and prosecution both stated that someone had to have introduced insulin deliberately to cause harm. This seems to have been debunked since, but at the time all the defence could say was that "someone else" had harmed the babies. Also the timing of the insulin readings relies on another nurse picking the one insulin spiked iv bag and giving it to the baby that was already being "poisoned", which seems like a stretch.

I also don't find the prosecution's case particularly compelling because it seems that the facts are being bent to fit the crime. The fact that they had the door swipe data wrong in the original case but still felt that they were able to use it means that it wasn't really evidence of anything.

The handover notes presented as a "trophy" don't stand up to scrutiny when most of them don't relate to the babies in the trial.

The handwritten "I am guilty" notes just seem like a character smear when taken with all the other notes she made.

The facebook searches (31 out of thousands she made over the period) to my mind just show that she used social media a lot.

Things that have come to light since the Thirlwell enquiry like Dr Jayaram's testimony that she didn't call for assistance for a baby when his own email contradicts this.

At various times they were "the sickest babies" or they were unexpected collapses because they were recovering and "ready to go home".

Despite being online a lot and apparently not hiding things like notes or facebook searches, there was no evidence that she ever searched for the various methods said to be used in the case - injection of air into bloodstream, insulin, liver damage, overfeeding, smothering etc. and they are all over the place. I'm not an expert on serial killers but that seems like a lot of diverse methods.

She's also very unusual for a serial killer in that there doesn't seem to be a build up - no earlier injuries, no harming pets, no traumatic upbringing.

In a hospital which was clearly struggling with staffing and hygiene it seems far more likely that poor care and lack of timely treatment was responsible for the babies' deaths than any malicious intent.

Yes, there were already protected avenues for whistleblowing, which is part of what made Thirlwall so absurd.

Given they refused to use any of those avenues for a year, even as they claimed to have a “drawer of doom” that they would not share with management, what exactly are they asking for? Should Thirlwall find that, in order to avoid such a baby killing event in future, Consultants should be allowed to have any nurse removed on their mere say so without providing any evidence whatsoever?

That’s not reasonable and clearly open to abuse. I’ve spoken to enough nurses to know it would be bad to give consultants that much power over nurses.

Ok I’ve watched the doc and have a few thoughts:

• The opinion of the experts re: insulin attaching to antibodies appears compelling in isolation, however, for evidence like this to be properly scrutinised an opposing expert would need to be instructed to consider those findings. Obviously the best place for this to pan out would be inside a courtroom. That said, I don’t think this is new evidence, rather a new view on existing evidence. The point wasn’t explored in her previous trial but could have been.
• Re: Dr Lee’s view that a venous embolism would not have caused the skin marks (as this is only documented in arterial embolism) - has he offered a view then about whether the cause of death could have been an arterial embolism rather than venous? This would obviously discredit the prosecution’s expert evidence, but doesn’t appear to rule out embolism being the cause of death. I haven’t read their papers - has he ruled out embolism entirely?
• The documentary had a clear agenda. Things like this playing out in the public realm are not ideal. I think it’s quite clear that LL’s counsel is attempting to whip up public support to apply pressure (which is why the panel held a press conference and didn’t just submit their evidence). I think this is prejudicial to any future re-trial should one be granted. Condensing a 10 month trial into a 1 hour documentary where specific points are cherry picked and displayed without rebuttal is dangerous IMO. It’s easy to watch that doc and consider that there is reasonable doubt, but the jurors spent 10 months listening to evidence, all the facts, the speculation & the nuances and they came to a conclusion that she was guilty on some counts and not on others.

In response to point 2, there would have been no mechanism for Letby to cause an arterial air embolism because she is accused of using the IV line, so there's no reason for Lee to consider it.