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

Definitely wasn't comprehensive enough.

I went onto the very biased r/lucyletby sub to see what they'd made of it and of course the main mod is like '36% instead of 40%'..throw the whole thing out'

It's amusing how the only two fora on the Internet where a majority still claim to believe Letby's guilt are essentially closed shops.

Tattle - you need one of the toxic hivemind to invite you to join

Lucy Letby on Reddit - they literally ban people who argue she may be innocent. As policy

Go to r/lucyletbytrials for sensible discussion

Anyone digging their heels in and insisting 4 extubations matter is just proving they can't think scientifically.

Oh I know, I got banned on that subreddit a long time ago over something very minor that offended the main mod.

I remember during the retrial, some of the mods fan club said they thought the prosecution had lifted some comments from her for the closing speech, and she lapped up the praise 😂

There is reasonable doubt. She shouldn’t be in jail.

I haven’t yet watched the Panorama, and of course it’s now been edited. What exactly was claimed in the original?

It’s only just filtered through to me that this was all based on 4 extubations over 11 shifts. Aside from the comparing apples with oranges data set, all this being based on 4 events (which may have even been the same baby?) is madness. Madness to anyone with an enquiring mind, anyway. I’m not great at stats but this is trivially obvious.

This puts me in mind of the “If you use this shampoo your hair will be up to 80% softer” marketing bollocks.

Who came up with the shonky stats in the first place? BBC, or are they just parroting someone else?

(Sorry, I’ve been concentrating on insulin and explaining why the removal of a NG tube and an oxygen mask isn’t assault and have only just been looking into this. I’m way behind.)

They also don’t seem to have consistently the possibility that maybe there was a doctor who was shit at placing the tubes and not getting them in quite the correct place in the first instance? Were they dislodged or were they just discovered to be in an incorrect position?

It was this, but then the video cuts off, but it cut back to the studio where they said something about how they've been speaking to someone who understands all this stuff and who confirmed it and how it's seriously damning against her.

www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/comments/1mnadmh/bbc_panorama_getting_the_maths_wrong/?share_id=Jo0D6xC5YMP2v7_-zI2am&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1&sort=new

This is a possibility, but the number of babies involved is also important. From what neonatal nurses say - and the poster who crochets octopuses to keep tiny hands from curling round tubes - some babies are prone to this more than others, whether that be from pulling/moving or some anatomical feature that means the tube used isn’t quite the right fit.

I’ve just watched the new segment on Panorama. It’s dreadful - they are still essentially claiming that 4 extubations in 11 half-days is abnormally high, when we don’t know that. If it is known, share the data so we can all look. And in any case the numbers are far too small to infer anything.

Thanks! They haven’t really changed their claim then.

The data comes from the Thirlwall originally. Where astonishingly it was thrown in by a KC near the start. Several people including I think Hutton wrote to the Thirlwall to ask for clarification but it never came. LL was effectively implied to potentially be involved in further crimes without legal representation.

I don’t recall the Panorama quote but the original Thirlwall quote (according to the BBC) was:

”The audit found that there were recorded incidents of the tubes being dislodged on 40% of the shifts Letby worked at Liverpool Womens' Hospital.”

Panorama have now clarified that to “ventilated shifts” and admitted only 4 incidents, but a. Despite claiming they “did not conflate” unit shifts with ventilated shifts I think they probably did. And b. They’re still not expressing the figure per ventilated hours/days because that could be compared to general stats and in that context may not be any kind of outlier.

If I understand it correctly, there's been an investigative team looking in detail at LL's time as a student for months. Still no more charges. Either she was incredibly skilled at covering her tracks even as a student or there's just nothing close enough to evidence to charge her. Presumably they have looked through all those records with a fine tooth comb. Any unexpected incident would/should have been investigated at the time, statements taken etc. Still nothing chargeable so far, despite actively looking for any evidence of wrongdoing.

Is it one wriggly baby who extubated 4 times? Is it 4 babies? They still have not made anything clear! Either way, they are committing the fallacy of small numbers. This is when someone assumes that a tiny sample of data will reflect the overall average or “true” rate, even though small samples are usually noisy and unreliable.

In simple terms it’s like flipping a coin 5 times, getting 4 heads, and then loftily declaring “this coin must land heads 80% of the time!” You need to do many more flips before patterns become meaningful.

This is far too small a sample size to be of any statistical value. Far too small a sample to say ‘Empirically she’s either a terrible nurse or a killer for sure and that’s damning’ - it’s not!

At first glance, 36% vs 1% might look enormous. But look at what happens with such a small sample size if you add just one more extubation or one less:

• If Letby had 3 instead of 4 - 3/11 ≈ 27%
• If she had 5 instead of 4 - 5/11 ≈ 45%
• If she had 2 instead of 4 - 2/11 ≈ 18%

In other words, one case swinging either way changes the percentage massively. The percentages are very misleading because they jump all over the place with just a single event.

This is the kind of 💩 that was used against women in the witch trials. “Can it be a mere coincidence that today 4 pails of milk soured, when usually it’s no more than 1?! BURN GOODWIFE LETBY!!”

That’s what these dumdums just did. Who would ever want to be a nurse under these conditions? You better hope the Dr doing the intubations in your shift does them well or you’re getting dunked. Wriggly baby today? Best pull a sickie quick.

That line “someone who understands this data” is very slippery too. It is obvious that “someone” isn’t a statistician, so why not say what their “expertise” is? What part of “this data” do they understand? Because it isn’t the statistical value of it and they are in no position to declare that this is damning because we are not in the business of burning witches in 2025.

That line “someone who understands this data” is very slippery too.

I think you were right, they’re referring to the Count from Sesame Street.
^^
”4, ah ah ah”

😂😂😂

Yes, but you see doctors are wonderful and perfect. Only nurses have the capacity to dislodge tubes or murder babies, apparently.

That’s why we only look at the nurse shift rota and allow the doctors (who should also have been suspects btw) to help the police compile evidence against whichever evil nurse we’ve chosen to burn.

It’s interesting to see how that sub has evolved over time. How, gradually, bit by bit, things that were absolute proofs of guilt (shift rotas, overfeeding as a murder method, door swipe data, skin discolouration/air embolism, Dewi Evans) have each quietly become “not something that was relied on in court” once it was dismantled. What do they even have left?! I haven’t checked in a while. IIRC they banned me for saying that Dr Marnerides never actually saw/examined the actual babies but just worked from Evans’s reports on the original pathologist’s notes (who did examine the babies and didn’t diagnose murders).

“I remember during the retrial, some of the mods fan club said they thought the prosecution had lifted some comments from her for the closing speech” 🫣 🫠

The flip side of it only being 4 times and so a very small number, is that even if that was unusually high, you could conceivably put that down to bad luck even if someone was deliberately causing it.

I work in an acute setting (non-paediatric) and I have colleagues who are known "shit magnets". They always seem to have horrible shifts where everything goes wrong, patients arresting all over the place etc.

“It's amusing how the only two fora on the Internet where a majority still claim to believe Letby's guilt are essentially closed shops.

Tattle - you need one of the toxic hivemind to invite you to join
Lucy Letby on Reddit - they literally ban people who argue she may be innocent. As policy”

And meanwhile in this very thread (which is open to anybody) we have people saying it’s “an echo chamber” simply because nobody agreed with a point they made that has no substance/evidence.

I haven’t bothered posting on that sub as it seems fairly pointless. I can post on Tattle and did once have a brave attempt at starting a conversation about the doubts cast on the evidence. Also absolutely pointless unless you enjoy being personally abused by the barely literate. I think we’ve seen a few prime examples of the quality of their discussion in recent weeks.

Because everybody knows that the BSB Handbook states it’s a requirement for Barristers to consult Reddit threads for court submissions. 🫣

The waste of resources doing this is painful.
Not to mention all the people who are convinced that the fact that the police have devoted so many resources to looking means there must be something there 🙄

The more I think about this and hear - the more I think it doesn't add up

normally in a murder case the murdered people are shown to have died from unknown circumstances - that didn't happen in this case. The police came in to search for the murdered victims as the hospital didn't know which victims were murdered and which were not - that in itself is odd and highly irregular

Then once they have found the murdered victims, they then try to decipher how they were murdered, as they are not sure, again this isn't surely the normal way to solve a crime of murder

then when they have found which victims were murdered they try to find which victims were murdered when LL was on shift - they even have one victim who was born and treated and LL wasn't on shift the entire time but they say she may have slipped into ht award to commit this murder. They didn't investigate any other suspects, but seem to have made this suspect fit the case.

But at times its as if its like fitting a round circle through an oval hole

Yes there is no irrefutable evidence of murder or intentional harm at all. If LL is eventually exonerated they're not going to go out and look for the 'real murderer', they'll just accept that no murders happened.

@MikeRafone

It seems to be a bit more like this