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.

The one about "don't get your hopes up?" yes 100% it was a mother who also worked at the hospital so she knew who LL was. She said she made a complaint and went mad at Lucy. The next day her baby mysteriously had an insulin spike...

I think this is an unsafe conviction. It’s the result of poor management in the NHS - read any of the maternity scandal reports - short staffing, senior staff leave and so on
Sick prem babies die and they are more likely to die with unsafe care.
the unit was unsafe. Dr Evan’s a terrible prosecution witness who wasn’t qualified and unconscious bias developed in the police investigation. It’s another way to cover up the poor care - pin it on a murdering nurse instead
if one conviction is unsafe they are all unsafe. There may be a retrial so this will go on for years.

The problem is that you talk about vibes but you never talk about the evidence. You openly say you made your mind up based on vibes before you even saw any evidence.

Any one of us could likely be framed as a bit odd if the police had free access to our entire lives, private messages, and internet histories etc.

The people who actually knew her do not present the version of her that you’ve decided to believe in, but plenty of lurid tabloid headlines agree. You are not demonstrating yourself to be the nuanced and empathetic student of human behaviour that you claim to be. Quite the opposite actually.

I'm fairly well versed in human behaviour. I have a psychology degree but honestly found it pretty boring because it was generally common sense to me, it's really not all that interesting. Brain damage was the most interesting part to me but because I couldn't train to do what I would have liked to do in my country I didn't pursue it and did something else.

Her behaviour really was not all widely outside the norm.

If she killed babies then obviously that is widely outside the norm, but if she didn't kill babies then the rest of the behaviour really wasn't no matter how much you try to insist that it was.

You're taking common phenomenon's such as cold medical staff (who hasn't experience some of those?) and trying to make out that it's abnormal in psychology terms. Why do you think there are so many complaints about 'bedside manner'? Because it's not in any way uncommon.

You're talking about the 'behaviour' of her defenders, ignoring the obvious and assigning your own meaning to it.

It couldn't possibly be the most obvious answer, that we're just not convinced by the evidence because it does not seem up to the standard required to put someone away for a whole life term in 2023, you have to make up your own meaning that she reminds us of our daughters.

It's clearly you who is not well versed at all in human behaviour seeing as you misjudge normal, common behaviour as being abnormal, don't notice common phenomenon's and instead of reaching the obvious conclusions you have to 'reach' and try to find something else.

You talk about bias, but yet in every single one of these threads you have shown that you are ridiculously biased. No matter what point is made, no matter how strong the rebuttal, you display a complete unwillingness to even consider it in any way....because....'post it's' and 'she was weird and inappropriate'.

No way was her behaviour “text book serial killer”. That would have included things like getting kicked out of school, hurting animals, a juvenile criminal record, risk taking behaviour etc.

Watching Panorama now - I don't mean this as a cheap shot, but I think Dewi Evans is not quite in his right mind. Saying it doesn't matter how the babies were killed! And he comes across as an angry bully.

Yes, all of the case coverage emphasised how UNLIKE a textbook serial killer she was. None of her friends or family came forward with any stories, and there was nothing in her background. That was part of the initial intrigue surrounding the story. By contrast, 'textbook killer' Beverley Allitt had a long history of dysfunction and poisoning people/inducing illness.

“It couldn't possibly be the most obvious answer, that we're just not convinced by the evidence because it does not seem up to the standard required to put someone away for a whole life term in 2023, you have to make up your own meaning that she reminds us of our daughters.”

This! It’s not uncommon either.

If we want to indulge in psychological discussion for a moment, one of the most fascinating psychological discoveries for me in this case is that there are people that have become so emotionally invested in the “evil nurse” story that to them, it feels resolved and morally satisfying. Challenging that with evidence threatens their psychological closure. Cognitive dissonance kicks in: so rather than reevaluating, they frame critics as irrational, gullible, or motivated by some quirk (she reminds them of their daughters etc). That’s easier than re-examining their belief and actually engaging with the facts.

They accuse others of being blinded by emotion precisely because they are comfortable making sweeping judgments from demeanour. This is what is known as ‘projection’ amongst those who study human behaviour.

In the meantime, I’ll continue trying to keep the discussion focused on facts and evidence over endless breathless ruminations over personality traits that are only sinister if we’ve already decided that she is sinister. It’s lurid and pointless and gets us nowhere.

He didn’t say that at all though.

The defence expert witnesses seem to be flinging around some desperate theories though.

Baby was stabbed in liver with a needle by the doctor. No.

Baby was injured during birth. No.

They clearly haven’t even read the pathologist reports.

What is a moj.

Miscarriage of Justice.

Thanks.

They had access to everything.

It does seem that way.

I was convinced Letby was guilty - though I admit I hadn’t followed the events closely.

And upon looking closer, following the first )or was it second? Cang remember) Panorama that started to ask questions, I started to become doubtful that the conviction was safe.

Not because I thought Lucy was pretty, or young, of sweet, or I saw my iwn daughter in her or any of the rest of the nonsense somd staunch adherents to the current verdict - but because I care about the truth and I care about justice being done.

Ivd bedn left seriously doubting the way we do justice in this country.

It wouldn't have been in the pathologist report seeing as the incident was never mentioned to the pathologist.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/14/former-senior-coroners-officer-says-lucy-letby-has-suffered-miscarriage-of-justice

I followed the evidence during the trial-I don't need to go read over again what she did to those poor babies. It's too distressing. That's WHY I don't, it was bad enough following it at the time. That's why I focus on the psychology of her behaviour and the fact she was always the one that just happened to be there. It was often the minute she went in a room and another nurse or the parents had just left.

It's not plausible this happened naturally so many times. Neither is babies collapsing on milestone days out of the blue. And it is more than a bit odd to do things like demand to be given a dying baby to get over the death of a previous one for example. And fishing medical notes out of bins to keep. I linked you an article in the other thread a few days ago about why an expert on murderers said a lot of it WAS textbook serial killer behaviour. It's far more subtle because she worked at the "crime scene" and could relive her crimes and the aftermath she caused from afar through social media-but they are definitely there.

My opinion on the medical evidence is let the scientific experts fight it out and try and agree (or not!) it's not like I'm ever going to be able to decipher it and know which side is right is it? NONE of us here are experts in it or have seen the medical records. No one knows which side is right, although only one side has been tested in court. I don't see the point in going over and reading the horrors of what that thing did to babies. When you come at it from a guilty perspective it's too upsetting knowing what she must've done.

You just need a sacrificial lamb to fantasise about saving I think.

totally this! And it is a lot easier to have one person to blame, especially if you can frame them as weird in some way, rather than a system.

@Firefly1987

My opinion on the medical evidence is let the scientific experts fight it out and try and agree (or not!) it's not like I'm ever going to be able to decipher it and know which side is right is it? NONE of us here are experts in it or have seen the medical records. No one knows which side is right, although only one side has been tested in court.

Exactly, which is why we have all of these threads. There's a process that's started now which may in fact lead to the scientific experts fighting it out, which is what most of us want. But yet when we try to discuss any of that you start going on about people supporting baby killers and being cheerleaders.

Well I do when some act like it's a foregone conclusion that she's innocent and it's all a miscarriage of justice for sure, yes.

I think you don’t understand what an unsafe conviction means.

it certainly doesn’t mean that someone is innocent.

a verdict of not guilty also doesn’t mean that someone is innocent.

None of the people on this thread are part of anything.

I never said we/they were.
I said we're discussing what's going on.

Really?

we’re not part of a society where matters of criminal processes are public interest matters?

Do we not vote in the people who draft laws that shapes the fabric of our society?

Does our (OUR) CPS not often make decisions on whether to prosecute or not on the basis of whether or not it is in the public interest?

I’ve given expert medical evidence in criminal trials.
medical evidence is virtually always ‘grey’ nothing is black and white.
The defence aim was always to get you to agree there was a possibility that there was another explanation for the prosecution’s version of events. If that is the case it is not beyond reasonable doubt.
There is always a lot of non medical evidence and a jury has to form an overall view. The new defence experts would advance the case that the previous evidence is beyond reasonable doubt. From Panorama the insulin evidence looks most compelling but even a 2% chance of an alternative explanation could suffice.
I was disturbed by the idea that the jury could extrapolate from one case to convict on the other cases and haven’t come across that before
much of the non medical evidence is circumstantial or flawed such as the swipe card data or the contradictory evidence in Baby K
I think the tipping point is whether the CPS consider a perjury charge is made out against Dr RJ. If so everything else will topple over.

I always thought there was a bit of a witch hunt