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

Money, arrogance and ego.

.

I’m not particularly clued up on this case, though I understand the debate it’s generated.

Are there any podcasts or similar you would recommend? Prefer that to articles if possible as I never get time to read these days.

“People criticise people who doubt the conviction saying that we're not thinking about the families, but even with the trial there are families who never got any answers”

I agree. There are families without answers and there may be many other avoidable baby deaths going forward if the actual core problem is never addressed. We do not have an epidemic of killer nurses. We do have an epidemic of serious failings in NHS hospitals, particularly focused on NICUs and midwifery/mothers.

I also question whether or not all the families involved are as sure as the ones that Panorama quoted. As in the Lockerbie case, the families are not a monolith with one single shared emotion, though the media usually treats them like that.

That said, there is far too much at stake for all of us to simply look the other way for the sake of the families feelings. It would be unthinkable for many (me included) to leave a potentially innocent woman locked up for life just to spare the families. However, this is not just about the families, or LL. If this is a Miscarriage of Justice it’s a huge one. A historically cataclysmic one that has exposed deep rot in the justice system, NHS, policing, and even the media - particularly in terms of media relationships with the justice system and policing. It’s massively important to all British citizens that this clusterf**k (pardon my French) is examined properly and dealt with appropriately.

@Kibble19 Yes! John Sweeney's ‘was there ever a crime’ is great. John was involved in the Sally Clark MoJ and has a nose for these things. I 100% recommend this.

There is a Daily Mail podcast which can be useful for the day to day of the trial but caution is very much advised as it’s extremely biased - it recently came out that Cheshire Police was paying one of the co-hosts at the time of the trial.

Journalistic integrity is in the toilet with that one and they generally simply echo the prosecution allegations day by day as fact. If you go into it with a huge spoonful of scepticism it’s alright ish for a basic timeline of the trial, though I think you can get that elsewhere without all the bias.

A massive amount of arrogance and hundreds of thousands of pounds!

He boasted openly after the trial that he had “only ever lost one case” and that that one still irritates him. He’s an expert witness, not a barrister. He doesn’t “win” or lose cases. He’s supposed to just present the evidence truthfully regardless of what side it supports.

This was simply an admission that he does not work independently for the court. He works for the side that’s paying him. Otherwise how would he have “never lost a case”?

Oh and he also said that EW work keeps his “daughter in horses and his son in cars”. He’s vile.

I went and looked him up after our exchange yesterday - I knew his name was familiar to me.

He’s destroyed lives over the years piggybacking onto Meadows flawed MSPB theories.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/25/childrensministry.highereducation

Him, Meadow and

But if you go down the probability route, there are a lot of things, even if circumstantial, which, when put together are quite damning.

The insulin is probably the most powerful, even if, maybe, there is a small probability that, in pre terms, you could get that extraordinary ratio of insulin to c peptide naturally.

Then there is the ‘ventilated shifts’. I tried to find more out about the rebuttal after some suggested the maths was bad. But was it so bad her tube coming out percentage was equal to everyone else’s?

And then there is the original reason she was charged based on correlations. As many statisticians have pointed out, the methodology was flawed, but it still has some weight.

And her own notes ‘I did it’. Of course, again alone, it is insufficient as many innocent people who feel guilty may write that. But most wouldn’t.

If you multiply the above together, there seems a low probability of her being innocent. Is it 0? Absolutely not. Is it beyond reasonable doubt? That is for a jury to decide.

Maybe she does deserve a retrial based on poorly presented evidence and that is what is being looked at now.

But I don’t think we will ever know (unless she confesses) 100% whether she is guilty or innocent.

Thank you @Kittybythelighthouse for a great thread!

Firstly I’d like to say I fully empathise with the bereaved parents 💔

Id like to share an interesting point of view/professional opinion by Chemical Engineer Helen Shannon and Biomedical Engineer Prof Geoff Chase. They co-authored a critical insulin paper for LL’s defence:-

The prosecution told the jury that 2 babies ‘being deliberately poisoned with insulin and had the test result that proved it’. H Shannon for the defence states, ‘There is a completely obvious solution that does not involve poisoning. The insulin cases applied basic clinical guidance for healthy adults to tiny pre-term compromised neonates. Something that is unique to neonates is that they have quite a high level of antibodies in their blood. It comes from their mums. So because the antibody binds to the insulin, the insulin doesn’t remove from the body and the level of insulin bound to the antibody goes up and up in the blood stream. It doesn’t have any effect on the child at all; it just floats around. And as a result it gives a very high reading on that particular test that was used at the Liverpool Laboratory. We can’t see any justification whatsoever for the prosecution’s statement that it can ONLY be poisoning.’

I transcribed the above from a clip on X so unable to post link. It can be found via X on Guy Rowlands account @ guyrowlanduk

You’ve fallen into the trap of believing that thing 1 that doesn’t prove murder + thing 2 that doesn’t prove murder + thing 3 that doesn’t prove murder can add up to murder. They can’t.

The insulin results are not powerful, they have been robustly challenged.

The maths for the ‘ventilated shifts’ has been explained on these threads at least half a dozen times.

Which ‘many statisticians’ have said the methodology still carries weight? The only statisticians I am aware of have called the ‘correlation’ evidence an abomination.

Her notes also said I haven’t done anything, I’m being victimised, why are they doing this to me…

So there you are. Add the deranged fantasies of the ‘expert witness’ Evans and multiply it all together and you have a crock.

(99/100)^10 ~ 0.9

ie if you have 10 events which are 99% likely then the chance of them all happening is only 90%

@MargaretThursday ,

‘(99/100)^10 ~ 0.9
ie if you have 10 events which are 99% likely then the chance of them all happening is only 90%‘

Relevance?

The point I am making is if the four things I mentioned had a 10% probability (say) of being caused naturally, rather than the extremely minuscule probability that the prosecution implied, the chance of them all having been cause naturally would be 0.1^4 or 1/10,000.

Of course, we can all speculate as to the precise probabilities, but the nature of building a circumstantial case is to layer likelihoods which when put together build a compelling case.

The thing about the insulin cases is that:

A: the test used is not reliable enough to even fire someone let alone convict as a murderer.

B: it has a 98% success rate. This means 2 tests in every hundred can be expected to fail. How many babies at COCH had immunoassays throughout the several years Letby worked there before the investigation? How many records did Brearey trawl through before he found these two cases which at the time raised no suspicion and were not sent forward for further testing? Moritz and Coffey never explored this because they don’t understand stats.

C: Letby wasn’t even there when both of these babies (who didn’t die btw) had these events. That’s why the prosecution had to engineer complex TPN bag poisoning plots, so they could be poisoned in her absence, but no evidence whatsoever was ever provided for this. No explanation was ever given for why there was no missing insulin. No explanation was given for how she would even have been able to poison the bags given the design.

So, let’s say the tests were accurate (doubtful) and there was exogenous insulin (extremely doubtful) why are we fingering Letby’s collar for it given she wasn’t even there?

The only reason why she was ever in the frame for these deaths is because of the other deaths, but the other deaths have all been shown not to be murder. The supposed murder methods were:

Air Embolism: disproven by the actual expert who wrote the paper the prosecution relied on as their only diagnostic evidence for air embolism.

Didn’t happen ✅

Overfilling the stomach with air or milk: this has been roundly shown to be nonsense by every neonatologist, neo natal nurse, and paediatrician that’s commented on the case publicly. The ‘incriminating’ x-ray in the Baby C case showing an over inflated stomach was taken before Letby had ever met the baby. It’s an invention never heard of throughout the history of medicine.

Didn’t happen: ✅

Tube Dislodgement: alleged in one case - the Baby K case - which relied solely on the evidence given by paediatrician Dr Ravi Jayaram who has since been shown to have perjured himself several times in regards to this case. Even the Court of Appeal said there are valid questions around his evidence.

Didn’t happen: ✅

Physical assault: Letby was convicted of murdering Baby O by punching him in the stomach. She was supposed to have done this while in a tiny room full of other people who were actively working on the baby. It has since been disproven by world leading experts that there are several other far more plausible explanations for the liver injury.

Didn’t happen: ✅

For many, the insulin cases are the only ones still troubling them. If you agree that the above murders most likely didn’t happen, why are we pinning the insulin cases on Letby (if they were exogenous, which is far from clear) given she wasn’t even there?

I really think there should be some kind of uproar about this (quite obvious) injustice.

What on earth has getting drunk and having slightly wild life experiences got to do with murdering babies? Most people who let loose as a young person go on to be completely regular members of society? She was an only child so nobody got that close to her other than her parents. We simply don't know what is in her past, just like for years no one knew what she was doing to the babies. I don't expect an old friend to come out and go "oh I totally wasn't surprised to hear she was murdering babies, she always seemed like the type" because no one is ever going to suspect something like that. Besides, a lot of us think an incident happened at the hospital that maybe wasn't her fault and she enjoyed the buzz around it and that's what set it all off. It became addictive for her.

What sort of "motive" would ever justify or explain what she did? There is none, so unless you are going to say you just don't believe healthcare serial killers of babies exist you have to accept any motive is not going to make sense to us by default. It does to her though, that's the crux of it.

I don't think she's a psychopath I think she's a narcissist. And at their core they believe they are not good enough, and that would fit in perfectly with the note she wrote. I also believe she partly did it out of anger and revenge (narcissistic rage) when she realised she could harm the babies if someone "crossed" her. Plus hatred of seeing others happy. Narcs hate that others are happy because they're so empty. She's been shown to be highly manipulative, anyone who knows a narc well knows how other people get sucked in by them. She's manipulating you all still and I can't believe people on mumsnet who are supposed to be so switched on can't see her for what she is! But then this place is very default "women can do no wrong" so shouldn't be surprised.

I just watched the Panorama programme on Youtube, I would have taken those tube dislodgement statistics as a given, only for Kittybythelighthouse explaining the flaws in how they presented it. Thank you.

The comments on youtube seem to be overwhelmingly in the camp of it being either a full on miscarriage of justice and she never murdered a baby or at the least it is an unsafe conviction.

I did find it harrowing when the expert explained the resuscitation efforts on baby O, (I think it was baby O) the one who suffered the liver lacerations.

The poor parents of all these babies.😥

Thanks for this contribution! “We can’t see any justification whatsoever for the prosecution’s statement that it can ONLY be poisoning”

Thats the crux of it. Serial killing nurses are rare. We cannot convict someone of such a thing without being sure. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. There are far more plausible explanations for every one of the deaths than a serial killing nurse.

Theres a saying that if you hear hooves expect a horse before you expect a zebra. Expect a zebra before you expect a unicorn.

Serial killing nurses are unicorns. Faulty tests, congenital anomalies, etc etc are horses. If every link in the chain of evidence is weak then you do not have a strong chain, you just have a pile of broken links. A pile of non evidence doesn’t somehow = a strong evidence base.

During the trial I had doubts and was shocked they got to verdicts so quickly. Subsequently I’m absolutely convinced she’s innocent. And so is every nhs colleague I’ve spoken to.
She was scapegoated by a dysfunctional system unable to recognise its own inadequacy.

Thanks! The nonsense stats were a shockingly poor way to end that show.

I generally very much agree with your points. To even begin to understand anything about probabilities in this case we ought to know how many times this test was performed over the time period looked at, how many times it gave this type of unusual reading and how that compares with tests of this type carried out on similar infants in other hospitals.

Or even better we could stop admitting this type of terrible evidence from immunoassay tests in court and say that when a test comes back with this sort of result a retest needs to be done with a more reliable method that meets forensic standards.

That said I don't think these babies died so you might want to edit your post if that is still possible.

My post does say that the insulin babies didn’t die, so I’m a bit confused? Too late to edit now anyway.

”Or even better we could stop admitting this type of terrible evidence from immunoassay tests in court and say that when a test comes back with this sort of result a retest needs to be done with a more reliable method that meets forensic standards”

Indeed! Thing is that the lab that performs these tests already says that in their guidance, in bold, and a bright red font.

Sorry, you’re right. I both say that they didn’t die and then I said “deaths” when I meant cases. 🤦‍♀️ I know they didn’t die. My mistake.

God complex did you see the utter contempt on his face at the beginning of the programme him saying more qualified professors from around the world don’t know as much as they think they do.

@Firefly1987 can you please share why you feel LL is a narcissist? Why do you think she murdered the babies in a narcissistic rage? What evidence is there that generates your belief in this? You also say she’s been shown to be highly manipulative. What’s the evidence for this? I’m genuinely wondering! I’ve missed all of this evidence although I’ve read a lot about the case.

Re: your first line (I didn't read the rest after that absurdity ) .... Did I say getting pissed meant you were a psychopath? No , I think you'll find I didn't 🙄

What I did say was most if not practically all of us have a 'past' where someone could say "ohhh I remember seeing Lisa on a night out. She was on the floor covered in vomit "

What I was saying is with Lucy, there appears to be literally nothing even remotely silly and salicious. That's my whole point of that comparison, that most of us have things we cringe at , little shameful stuff that we hope nobody remembers. She had zilch, zero, nadder. Because trust me, anything, absolutely anything would have been plucked to try to taint her character. They found she loved her mum and dad and slept with teddies !? That's all they found.

Because if they had found even the slightest tit bit over the teddies and loving her parents , they'd have used it over that !!

So example: "ex school mate Tasha told the Sun that Lucy was once passed out in a chair in the local pub with vomit down her front. It was obvious that she must have harboured a secret problem with alcohol, perhaps to cover up the mental health problems she was experiencing which caused her to go on to be a cold blooded killer" that would have sufficed for a paper to make a story believe me !!

I can't believe I've had to explain that to you.

Thankfully I think everyone else understood my point 🙄