Lucy Letby: Have you changed your mind?

[Kittybythelighthouse]

The other thread has had a lot of really interesting discussion but we are running out of pages so here’s a new one for those who are interested in continuing the conversation.

Whether you’re sure she’s guilty, sure she isn’t, or are somewhere in between, I’m interested in hearing how your opinion has evolved (or hasn’t!) since you first heard about the case,

Please try to be respectful - this is a heated topic. Its a matter of huge public interest with a lot of strong opinions, but we are all adults and can disagree with each other in a respectful manner.

Old thread is here (the poll still has a few days left):
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5388914-lucy-letby-have-you-changed-your-mind?page=38&reply=146359313

All perspectives are welcome 🙏🏻

That said, this doesn’t stack up fir two reasons:

1 - The nurse who LL had that infamous “odd” text exchange with was very clear in her Thirlwall statement that she liked Lucy Letby, worked well with her, and didn’t find it “odd” in the way it’s been presented by the prosecution and the media. Her statement explains what she meant. She also says that she never reported any suspicions of Letby because she never had any.

Jennifer Jones-Key:

“I had no concerns regarding Lucy's responses in the WhatsApp messages about wanting to go back to Nursery 1, after she was put in Nursery 3 and found her behaviour to be normal for the situation. When I said "odd" in the WhatsApp message, I was talking about how I would feel odd myself because I do not work in intensive care. I did not mean to say that Lucy was odd for wanting to go back."

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/thirlwall-evidence/INQ0017998.pdf

2 - it’s doesn’t matter if there were no murders. Nothing at all matters, or can ever be proof of anything sinister, if there were no murders. The med/science evidence is all that matters now.

You can read about the accidental upload here https://unherd.com/2025/03/how-safe-is-the-letby-verdict/, and a bit of a confusing reddit thread discussing it here, since they redacted anything not in the public domain after the upload was removed:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/s/blfOxVbfiN

This is the big one in the insulin conversation. Why are we even suspecting Lucy Letby for these cases, given the only reason she was suspected of having caused these events in the first place is because she had “killed” all the other babies?

So, if all the other cases evaporate (which has already happened), and we are sure (and it’s far far away from sure) that the insulin cases are legit attempts to poison with insulin, why are we looking at a nurse who wasn’t there and making up complex fantasies, riddled with plot holes, about how she could have been responsible for these cases - given the fact that she literally was not there?

Thanks for that. I recall this happening a few times with Thirlwall. Hasty retractions when they had forgotten to redact names before they uploaded documents.

Wonder if they thought that at the time or after the doctors & police accused her of murder. You spreading bile. Somthing that is done to ease a parents heartache you have just made every nurse or midwife have to think about is it the right thing to do?
I have reported her for misinformation. Do you not understand the implications on working staff now?
do you really think you put yourself up for that job of making memory boxes, not some conveyer belt it is done if it is for your patient no one else’s, there you go misinformation.

I have never seen anyone write down length of stay in their diary. Why would they? nurses aren’t responsible for coding.

@Kittybythelighthouse
Why were a lot of the dates redacted in the inquiry? such as the dates the babies were born and when collapses happened etc?

Have you listened to John Sweeney’s podcast on LL? I thought it was excellent.

Good analysis by the BBC in depth team:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj0y9673rjno

Flaws in both the prosecution and defence.

Re the insulin, they have done what most (all?) on this thread cannot and have asked many experts. All have the same issue with the insulin/c peptide ratio as the studies show.

The actual neonatologists they consulted did not airily wave this issue aside. But, as they said, the defence have not shown their expert evidence yet.

The actual neonatologist I spoke to went into great detail on the great buggery bollocks of the insulin science because that was the thing I flagged with him during the trial. You don’t to have to be neonate specialist to see the flaws in the insulin claims.

We have no idea how many neonatologists C&M have spoken to as they won’t go on record, it may be none.

They make a habit of misunderstanding an expert, feeding their garbled misinterpretation to another expert then using that expert’s baffled feedback to try to discredit expert 1.

@Mirabai ,

‘We have no idea how many neonatologists C&M have spoken to as they won’t go on record, it may be none.’

I was referring to BBC InDepth. They clearly asked a number of experts.

How have they clearly asked a number of experts? They’ve said “according to the experts we’ve spoken to” with no transparency at all regarding who those experts were or their qualifications. This is actually a breach of BBC editorial standards.

Agree @PinkTonic Coffey said at the end when talking about the new investigation regarding Liverpool, that he'd talked to a statistician, without naming them, and that it was damning. It's a specious remark to make.

I wouldn't place much faith in Moritz and Coffey. Lots of schoolboy tricks like showing only half the evidence and drawing conclusions.

It's reasonably plausible that they have spoken to some qualifed people, but Shannon and Chase were clear in the ITV documentary that their research is novel, so why would these people know about it yet?

Science moves on. If anyone had suspected the children were poisoned at the time, they'd have sent for forensic testing. It's presumably not been necessary to do this kind of in-depth work before because nobody would previously have relied on the immunoassay tests to build a poisoning case in this cohort with, apparently, distinctive insulin antibody profiles. So tens of thousands of pounds worth of work now, fortunately offered free, to answer a question that never needed to be asked.

There's a lot like that in the Letby case.

Perhaps not everyone's aware that the jury was told that these tests results meant that there was no chance the children weren't poisoned. Not that experts disagreed, not that there was a small chance of another explanation. That's why even an unusual but possible finding is significant here.

And another unusual but possible: the lab that did the testing produced a similar result from a normal sample in error during a quality control test just a month after one of these children's results came back!

unherd.com/newsroom/were-the-blood-tests-in-lucy-letbys-conviction-flawed/

"the lab that tested Baby L’s blood underwent a routine assessment a few weeks later, which found it exaggerated the level of insulin in a quality control sample by almost 800%."

He didn't even say he'd spoken to a statistician - just "someone who understands this data". My guess would be he just asked whoever originally compiled it and made the statistical error since replicated at Thirlwall and the BBC.

I think it was an attempt to stop people from working out exact ages, which would make the children a little more identifiable.

Like a lot of Thirlwall redacted information, it was shared at the trial anyway. But I suppose it was easier for them to have their own policy and not to have to keep cross-checking with court records.

It’s a nasty smoke and mirrors tactic isn’t it. Not telling the complete truth but a version of it and relying on the listener to make the assumption

The babies that survived would be 8,9 or 10 now.

Oh great. We’re saved! The man has returned to talk down to us, demand to see our credentials/permission to speak cards, and to tell us what to think again. Fantastic 🤡

“Good analysis by the BBC in depth team:”

Hold on just a sec - Jonathan Coffey isn’t a neonatologist. I thought your rule, as self appointed lord and master of the free universe, was that no one was allowed to speak unless they are a neonatologist?

Or is that just something you apply to the silly little women on mumsnet? Like you’re mumsnet’s collie dog and we’re mumsnet sheep who simply must be corralled or there’ll be no jumpers for anyone next winter.

Jonathan Coffey is a man though, so I suppose his opinions are always sage, of value, and worth more than ours even though you don’t know what our expertise and experience is? 🙄

There are opinions on both sides. Some opinions are stronger than others. Trouble is, that no neonatologist is of the opinion that only murder could be the cause. Dewi Evans is, but then he’s not a neonatologist.

It is pretty clear, based on the opinions given, that there are far more plausible causes of death than murder. So, given that murder has not been established in the first place, and given that a serial killing nurse is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon, one set of opinions should under law (and I think will) weigh more than the other.

The defence do not have to prove innocence. The defence do not have to prove absolutely what exactly killed each baby. They just have to show that there are multiple more plausible alternatives than murder, which they have.

The prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Given that there are multiple more plausible causes of death than murder, they haven’t done that and it is looking very much like they won’t be able to do it at any appeal either, given the raft of alternative possibilities.

“the defence have not shown their expert evidence yet.”

Of course they haven’t! It’s with the CCRC. It would not be responsible to publicise it before it has gone through the proper process. How come you don’t know that? I thought you knew everything?! Oh dear.

“Re the insulin, they have done what most (all?) on this thread cannot and have asked many experts.”

You really are an insufferable 🍆

On what basis do you dismiss us all so “airily”?

Do you know what? Don’t bother answering me. I already know why. It’s because you’re a sexist 🍆

From now on I’m not replying to you or engaging with you. I’m shunning you. You are an Amish teenager who got caught with an iPhone. You are 💀 to me. Begone.

P.s you’re also a thundering bore.

Bye 👋

Yes. I suppose with exact ages and dates of birth and death they could be identifiable from memorials, gravestones, birth and death records. But in practice I think that would more likely have happened through the trial.

Can anyone walk me through how a piece of evidence as egregiously untrue as the rota/incident visual was admissible as evidence?

This in particular - why was this “someone” anonymised? Experts are not sources.There is rarely a good reason to anonymise an expert. You can always get another expert to be identified if this one won’t.

Even at that, why was the source of their ‘knowing about this data’ anonymised? Why not say I spoke to a statistician/hospital manager/my next door neighbour? We already know it wasn’t a statistician, because the maths are a fail at GCSE. But why not tell us what their expertise is? It’s slippery and irresponsible.

Something people like Moritz and Coffey don't seem to understand about the CCRC reports is that you give the CCRC what's appropriate for the stage they are at and add to it.

Here's an example. There's a lot in that BBC article about what happened to baby O. Moritz and Coffey, incidentally, exaggerate the difference in views by failing to mention that the defence (and original pathologist) experts all had variants on the same narrative: the child had a liver hematoma which ruptured, possibly exacerbated by the needle aspiration which the defence experts were told about, but the original pathologist wasn't. So back in 2016, it was already established he had a liver hematoma in the only review ever done by someone examining his body.

Okay. So where did the liver hematoma come from? They can be spontaneous, but they are often caused by birth injury, so if you see one in a child a few days old, you might start by saying, very likely caused by birth injury. (This is what the international panel said, not, as Panorama claims, that there definitely was a birth injury. Their explanation doesn't rely on a birth injury at all).

But worth checking further, the possible birth injury? Of course. And this is where the international panel has pointed out that either material hasn't been shared with the defence or nobody has looked at the obstetric records, so information on the mother's health, the pregnancy and the delivery haven't been considered in any depth.

The international experts asked the police for these records and haven't received them.

So, where does the CCRC come in? They don't just read the information you give them. They have the power to request evidence like this from the police, prosecution, hospital etc. The current reports are the most likely causes of death, based on the information given to defence and (unless there's been a massive disclosure failure) prosecution experts. But if the obstetric records clear anything up - like the exact source of baby O's hematoma - they'll obviously be refined to reflect that.

In these circumstances, I think it's fairly clear why one wouldn't publish a first round of reports to the CCRC.

Shoo Lee's press conferences, in my opinion, struck the right balance.

Here is the interview from a few months ago where Neena Modi discussed the lack of access to obstetric records - that segment is 16 minutes in

https://omny.fm/shows/motive-and-method/the-lucy-letby-review

To be clear, this isn't about the "defence not seeing all the evidence". It's about nobody, so far as we can tell, having looked at this vital aspect of the case up til now.

You could ask that question about quite a few things in this trial! A large part of the answer is that the courts (and often doctors too for that matter) are extremely bad at handling statistics. There are multiple miscarriages of justice that come down to the courts’ inability to properly present statistics. There is as an hubristic arrogance that statisticians aren’t needed because certain things are common sense (there is also a trope that statistics bore juries). Judges and lawyers are often very intelligent, but intelligence does not = understanding when it comes to statistics.

Statisticians are afflicted by the knowledge that statistics are usually not common sense, but that practically everybody who isn’t trained to at least some degree in stats will assume that stats are common sense.

You likely wouldn’t trust heart surgery to ‘common sense’ - you know the surgeon has to have expertise - but people do this constantly with statistics and it creates a LOT of problems.

That aside, since the reporting ban lifted and the chart has been torn asunder by statisticians, some will tell you that it wasn’t evidence per se and that it was never of any real importance in securing the convictions.

But the reality is that it was used as evidence and it was projected as a visual practically every day during the trial. Of course it was important.

The harm it caused in cementing a lie in the jury’s minds can’t be underestimated. They were awash in complicated discussions about all kinds of minutiae across 10 months. We don’t know what swayed each jury member. But a handy visual, that seems like common sense, projected almost daily, surely had an impact.

Anyone interested in the podcast I mentioned upthread about stats and the wrongful convictions of ‘munchausen by proxy’ killer mothers (spoiler: none of them actually killed their children) it’s called ‘The Lab Detective’ here is a link - podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-lab-detective-tortoise-investigates/id1590561275