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

Is our airy friend again “airily” presenting numbers while “airily dismissing” the fact that factors like correlation were not included or presented (doubtful they were even considered?!) while also “airily dismissing” the fact that this is still the fallacy of small numbers. Eleven observations is far too small a sample to start drawing population-level conclusions.

Airy friend is still making the same mistake Roy Meadow made in the Sally Clark case: treating correlated events as independent to generate improbably small odds and then pretending that they matter.

As for the BBC, they’ve been repeatedly criticised by statisticians for misrepresenting the data. Saying “categorically denied” doesn’t make their maths sound. We already know they do their maths on the wall with crayon.

Airy friend knows this. He’s just hoping other people here don’t know it because he thinks women are stupid.

Imagine being the BBC's head of statistics.

It must be the most thankless job in the entire corporation - like herding drunk tarantulas. Wonder if he's on holidays right now?

Correct me if I'm wrong but they only looked at a time period of a year for the trial. There could be far more compelling evidence (since you didn't find the trial evidence compelling) outside of that time period. We know she was having a bad run even before baby A. We know two babies died whilst she was on shift at Liverpool. This is all what ifs of course, but we do know the police have SOMETHING they've sent off to the CPS. I certainly wouldn't be confident it'll all turn out to be nothing!

Some people refuse to believe those mentioned are guilty. I'm just wondering what sort of evidence would have you convinced with LL?

Airy friend knows this. He’s just hoping other people here don’t know it because he thinks women are stupid.

I'm not sure he does. He's so confident in his own ability he fails to see how badly he's misusing statistics. People who don't understand statistics are often far more confident about (mis) using them than people who do understand and can see the problems with the data.
If he did understand statistics he'd be doing a better job of hiding his errors.

To the poster that sent me in the direction of the John Sweeney Podcasts - thank you

Never listened to one before, thinking they were new fangled platforms for so called influencers

Im now completely off the fence

As a lay person of average intelligence ( ADHD) I found the pod casts really understandable in a way I cant decipher a wall of words and whilst I have attempted to follow the Thirwell Trial, doing my own cross referencing - I get lost

This is very much a MOJ at the very least

And what was her Defence actually doing?

On the contrary, they've been investigating Letby's career at Liverpool and Chester since 2018 at least.

Yes I know-I meant the trial only spanned a one year period. There could be something far more damning outside of that they just didn't bring it to trial. It's not because they think she didn't start before baby A. Police had certain rules they had to follow and couldn't go outside that time period during the trial. That's why I believe far more will come out. Although I do think she lost complete control towards the end with the triplets.

No, police did not have rules stopping them from bringing charges from an earlier period.

They do have rules that they must bring charges without undue delay.

So, the reality of their position is not at all what you are claiming. You are calling something a rule when it would in fact be against the rules

You are slipping in an awful lot of misinformation on this thread now

You could find an expert who would say anything if you scoured the globe long enough. None of their theories have even been tested in court. It'd actually be amazing to see how quickly they'd fall apart under cross examination. But in reality they're not people that even need to be entertained.

Making a comment like this when I know for a fact that you're already well aware of the calibre of people involved and the process they followed and that they're working pro bono and the fact they did so on the understanding that their findings would be made public regardless of whether they were in Letby's favour of not?

You are just so unserious. Zero interest in engaging with facts in a sensible way.
Best of luck to you but I will be scrolling past your posts in future.

I'm not trying to slip in misinformation. Maybe you're not as familiar with the trial as you thought. Or you're misunderstanding me. I will look into it because I'm sure I didn't pluck it from nowhere...they can't take too many charges to one trial otherwise it would've lasted far longer than 10 months and been even more complex info for the jury to take in. That's probably why.

Nor was LL ever “in charge” at the LWH ICU. She was a trainee under supervision at all times. Only qualified ICU nurses would be in charge of babies on a one to one basis.

You’d like to think. But as a student midwife I was allocated babies to be in charge of on my 2nd ever shift on a NICU ward as my mentor had rung in sick. I walked onto the ward to find my name and my name only on the board against 2 babies.

Thankfully they were the 2 most well babies , so not intubated or anything like that. Admittedly this was 15 years ago but nobody seemed to think it was a bad idea. I’d like to think it wouldn’t happen now but possibly might have when LL was training? She was at Liverpool in 2011 and 2015.

They could have arranged to try different cases separately, yes. So maybe that has confused you.

But they would still have had to bring all the charges promptly. Then they could consider trying them in batches.

Standards of care changed in 2010 and 2011 though, didn't they?

Obviously that was wrong anyway. And I presume if you had accidentally dislodged tubes handling those babies, we would blame the obvious lack of training and supervision!

Liverpool has confirmed at Thirlwall that Letby would have been supervised, and I wouldn't like to be in their shoes if there's anything fraudulent in their account.

The 3/10,000 number I calculated is correct based on it being a binomial distribution (which it is, as either a baby extubates or doesn’t). It isn’t in any sense conclusive, but it raises questions.

To use an extreme argument, imagine if a COVID vaccine centre inoculated 11 people and 4 dropped dead. Would you want that investigated or just say it is the fallacy of small numbers?

4 is a very high number relative to the 0.25 expected (so 0 being the single most likely outcome).

If it were that they wanted limit the number of charges then why no more since?

If it wasn’t so pernicious it would be laughable.

The irony is that when the 40% figure was first aired at the Thirlwall I literally posted something like - ‘that could mean anything even 4 instances out of 10’. Genuinely not thinking it would be that bad or that close.

If she was being supervised, wouldn't the tube dislodgements be counted against the other nurse/s as well? But the problem is we don't know what their numbers were, just a national average. Is that correct?

They are considering more charges?

We don't know where the 1% came from - national average, ward average, mean, median, for what year. BBC is violating its own editorial guidelines giving us such context-free numbers.

But even if we knew, 4 events out of eleven is too few to be meaningful.

Well quite.

But this is a murder case in which LL was accused of murdering babies she didn’t have care of just because was on shift. Although in one instance she wasn’t even on shift when the key X-ray showing a swollen stomach was taken and had not been since the baby was born. (Baby C).

You are confusing calculating a binomial distribution, a five-second operation online, with statistical analysis.

If you know anything at all about statistics you know the sample size is too small for any meaningful conclusions.

If you don't know that much about statistics, why on earth are you here pretending you're competent to comment on them?

Because they have all come up with explanations that have nothing to do with what actually happened or have ignored vital pieces of evidence. One of them claimed a baby could've been harmed at birth despite there being nothing at all to suggest it. My guess is they couldn't find anything but deliberate harm to explain what happened to that baby so just threw out there that it could be from an injury at birth and the gullible might believe it because she's an "expert". Do you actually think they were ever going to come out and say they think she did it? That was clearly NEVER going to happen.

Well the murdered people in this case happen to be premature babies, which is always emotive.

To state, I was shocked that Letby was found guilty after the first trial, based on the evidence presented by the prosecution, especially the shifts statistics, insulin and the notes. There's no way if I was on a jury would I have accepted that as definitive proof of murder so a reasonable doubt would have been uppermost in my mind.

Which is why I agree that it simply doesn't add up and it never has.

Three things about the birth injury:

International expert panel said birth injury was very likely the cause of the hematoma that ruptured. But they also arise spontaneously, so the panel hasn't in any way staked its claim on this.

The panelist discussing this was pointing out that it should have been investigated. She's right. The child had a diagnosis of ruptured hematoma as early as 2016, from the pathologist who examined his body. But either the prosecution experts never looked at the obstetric records, or the CPS are illegally withholding them from the defence. There's a good introduction to that issue at https://ripe-tomato.org/2025/06/04/lucy-letby-obstetric-intro-summary/

Nobody with scientific training should state that there wasn't a problem with the birth without seeing those records. The defence are asking to see them. Until they do, it will always be possible for people to sneer about them being uncertain, but acknowledging uncertainty is what responsible scientists do.

The sensationalist comparison with deaths from COVID vaccines is of course unviable, because it's unthinkable that we would accept a fatality rate of 1% in a vaccine.

So sure, in this example, there'd be alarm when you got a cluster of deaths through random distribution, but that would be outpaced by the alarm at people dropping like flies daily from the vaccine anyway.

The fact of reaching for this comparison suggests a lack of understanding of the concept of relative risk, as well as the initial error with the small numbers fallacy.