Lucy Letby: have you changed your mind - thread 3

[Typicalwave]

New thread for those following or wishing to comment - originally started by @kittybythelighthouse.

Oh right suddenly the doctors lost all their ability for resuscitation after years of no problems and it just so happened to coincide with unexplained collapses 🙄

Can you give an answer for why babies collapsed the minute their parents left their side? Johnson read the names of eight other babies and said they were “all cases where the children deteriorated shortly after their parents left”.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/25/lucy-letby-denies-trying-murder-baby-minutes-scrolling-facebook

Nurse Lucy Letby murdered five babies and attempted to kill another two shortly after their parents left their sides, a court has been told.
The prosecutor Nick Johnson KC suggested that Letby spotted “an opportunity” to harm the newborns when their parents were not around.

The trial at Manchester crown court was also told on Thursday that the 33-year-old liked Facebook posts nine minutes before allegedly attempting to kill a five-day-old girl.
Letby is said to have twice attacked the baby, Child H, not long after her father left her side on the Countess of Chester hospital’s neonatal unit.
Johnson read the names of eight other babies and said they were “all cases where the children deteriorated shortly after their parents left”.

Letby denies attempting to murder Child H twice. She is accused of removing the infant’s chest drain at about midnight on 26 September 2015 “just after her father had left” the neonatal unit.

A doctor previously told the trial he saw Letby at Child H’s incubator when the emergency unfolded, even though she was not the baby’s designated nurse. “He said he was concerned about that because he wasn’t completely clear why [Child H] had collapsed,” Johnson said.

Letby replied that she could not say “from memory exactly what I was doing when”.
“Why is it always you that ends up in nursery one when something happens?” the prosecutor asked. The defendant, giving evidence between two prison guards, replied: “I don’t agree that it is always me.”

“Can you give an answer for why babies collapsed the minute their parents left their side? Johnson read the names of eight other babies and said they were “all cases where the children deteriorated shortly after their parents left”.

I think your recurring problem is that you continuously treat prosecution allegations as if they are fact. If you were in the dock right now, wrongly accused of murder, Nick Johnson would throw all sorts of malevolent behaviour at you as if it were fact because that’s his job in an adversarial system. It isn’t fact. It’s an allegation. A heavily contested one at that.

Why are you posting about a baby that Letby’s was not found guilty of harming? I’m just curious, since you believe that they court process was fair and the evidence was compelling and yhd findings were correct, why you’d post an article about a child not included in the guilty verdicts?

How on earth are we defining shortly here?

All but two of the babies died hours after their parents saw them - mostly because they died at night. Does Johnson think the parents only visited for twenty minutes a day?

What nonsense from him.

Are you saying the prosecution are lying about how many babies collapsed shortly after their parents left? Did the defence counter this if it was untrue?

Is there any evidence for the claim about 8 babies collapsing the minute their parents left other than a line of prosecution questioning? I would like to read it if so.

It's just part of the article? Strange you'd focus on that and ignore the other EIGHT babies that collapsed right after their parents left!

It could simply be that they want families in Chester to have access to that level of care without having to travel to eg Liverpool.

Clinical interest/specialty development could be another reason.

I’m sure that any associated increase in funding from upgrading would not touch the sides in terms of the sorts of capital layouts that are required to fix NHS estates though.

Think you need to listen to what the expert panel said about resuscitation techniques, Dr Lee was a very angry, that they were incompetent & said if it was his hospital they would have been shut down, that didn’t happen overnight probably being going on for a while, when they were taking level 3 babies that was out of their skill capability. Were they assessed before taking these babies to see if they were up to the job? Course not.
can you give me proof all babies collapsed after parents left or is that just what the daily mail printed?
you are assuming everything the prosecution says is fact not that it their opinion & may not be actually factual.

@DoubledTrouble

That’s very useful, thanks. Makes it even more compelling, surely the defence would have known the accuracy of the tests at the time?

Although Lucy certainly didn’t during the police interview as when presented with the results she wouldn’t have agreed that someone was poisoning on the ward rather than question the accuracy of the results.

The big problem with the prosecution claims about Letby doing anything shortly after anyone left anything is that it's circular.

Their method was to look for a time when they could argue that Lucy Letby had a chance to be alone with the children, based on things like parents recollections and very approximate times in medical note. This wasn't even at the level of swipe card data which didn't work at the level of all rooms.

Then they said Letby must have done something then, therefore that's when she did something, therefore she waited until then for her chance etc

To cap it all, they completely failed to make any case for how long any of their imagined murder methods might have taken.

It's all nonsense, and as a prosecution claim it's neither evidence nor a fact accepted in court or in the judge's summing up for the jury.

If I were in the dock but being represented by one of the best criminal defence barristers in the country, I think I could realistically expect them to step in if the prosecution’s line of questioning was as egregiously inaccurate and unfair as you are suggesting.

I don't think it's true there were no deaths when LL wasn't there. It was said on Panorama she was there for the other deaths as well. Also in the book Unmasking Lucy Letby they had a document from the hospital that said one nurse was on shift for all the deaths (and this was presumed to be one of the management who wanted her back on the unit!) it also said in the book that Dewi Evans didn't want to know what times the suspected person was on shift of anything about them. Incredible he managed to find every single suspicious collapse and only got one wrong (baby C who she later went on to murder anyway) without knowing LL was on shift for them all.

Consultants certainly had their problems with resuscitation before 2015, but by 2015-16 they were dealing with more, smaller, sicker children. Size is highly relevant to resuscitation because at that age it will involve emergency intubation.

Resuscitation could not have saved children A or E, who had a stroke and a massive internal haemorrhage respectively. We don't know it it would have saved baby I because it was agreed that the child would not go back on ventilation. We know that there was a (standard) delay in consultant input for child C's resuscitation, because it was night, and that there was an unauthorized delay of over 30 minutes for child O's resuscitation. So that leaves child D and child P, and we know that case reviews found gaps in the accounts of resuscitation for both child O and child P. It's certainly not a stretch to think that suboptimal resuscitation played a part in this small number of deaths.

What sort of thing do you mean by step in? We have an adversarial system, so the job of the prosecution is to sling a lot of mud. It would be a problem if he were saying something he knew to be false, but assuming that isn't the case (and I really, really doubt it) he's doing what he's supposed to do in putting the accusations. The whole point of making them is so their accuracy can be established.

I accept there are wider concerns about whether that model is fair, but it's the one all the barristers involved were working within.

I would have hoped so too, but one has only to read excerpts from the trial reports and transcripts to learn that this was not the case.

Here's an example, on Johnson baiting Letby about being arrested in her pyjamas

https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/comments/1ibsi0f/dressing_down_lucy_letby_nick_johnson_and_the_lee/

Dewi Evans, the man who decided her guilt in ten minutes and who had a letter from another judge warning that he made the evidence fit hi0s bias.

I really think that you should stop signing this man's praises.

So first of all you say no one saw her do anything so she's innocent, then you're presented with at least nine babies where she took the opportunity to attack them whilst alone and now you're saying that still makes her innocent because it was set up just to make her look like she did it when no one was looking? Don't you think the parents would remember if their babies collapsed whilst they were there or not?

How long do you think it takes to inject air into a baby?

He decided there was harm right away-he didn't know there was a person in the frame.

It's not a question of how long it takes to inject air into a baby.

It's a question of how long it takes for alarms to go off after you do it.

You're misunderstanding me in the first part of your post. Let me try again. Nobody has proved Letby was alone with children at the times when she is accused of killing them. They've just suggested she may have been alone with them at some point. You know. Doing her job as a nurse. Maybe alone, maybe not.

Exactly. Surely it has to be agreed facts by both sides what times the babies collapsed and who was there etc. I don't think prosecutors are allowed to outright lie and make up false allegations? It looks bad for her because she did it not because the prosecutor was throwing a bunch of mud at her! And if the latter was the case then Myers would've surely stepped in.

He certainly knew there was a person in the frame. He knew he was sitting in a police station ...

Times of actual collapses could be agreed based on the medical notes, certainly.

Who was in the room when could only be demonstrated to a limited extent. So a record might tell you nurse A was feeding child T at some point between two times. But no, if you followed the trial you will have seen that who was in the room when was often a matter of query or dispute.

You're not understanding cross-examination here. Myers certainly can cast doubt of Johnson's questions by asking his own questions in cross examination, but he can't prevent Johnson from stating the prosecution's assertions.

@Oftenaddled not necessarily, just that harm was suspected by someone. Besides, they got the wrong suspect in the Stepping hill case to begin with. It's not always clear cut. Although it's correct to say there has NEVER been anyone but Lucy in the frame for this, strange that...

You mean baby C where Dewi Evans initially asserted that the baby had died due to air being injected via mason gastric tube due to air being found on an X-ray of baby Cs abdomen?

‘The paediatric pathologist instructed by the prosecution, Dr Andreas Marnerides, told the court that all the prosecution’s experts had come to the same finding, based on that X-ray. However, during the trial it emerged that Letby had not worked on that day, nor on the two previous days after Baby C’s birth.
Evans gave evidence in the trial when it had already been established by earlier witnesses that Letby had not worked with Baby C before the X-ray was taken. In the witness box, he departed from his written report and proposed two new possible causes of the child’s collapse. He said a large volume of air caused the diaphragm to splint on 13 June, when Letby was on duty, and that air may have been injected into the bloodstream.’

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/10/lucy-letby-police-cps-handling-case-raises-new-concerns-about-convictions