Lucy Letby: have you changed your mind - thread 3

[Typicalwave]

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

That was one of the most absurd parts of the trial.

“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.”

It is rather incredible, isn’t it?

You’re so close to understanding Dewi Evans here.

Bless you.

And, for anyone who has lived with an abusive narcissist - very familiar.

I feel I need to add a disclaimer here: I am NOT saying Johnson is an abusive narcissist. He’s doing his job. But what he’s doing here and what abusive narcs do are the same thing - bamboozling and needling and playing semantics to get you to not trust your own memory or perceptions and to ensure their narrative is the only ‘truth’.

I feel like a little reminder is needed regarding Dewi Evans’s extremely questionable credibility:

“Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Jackson said Dr Evans’ report was “worthless” and “makes no effort to provide a balanced opinion”.
He went on: “He either knows what his professional colleagues have concluded and disregards it or he has not taken steps to inform himself of their views.
“Either approach amounts to a breach of proper professional conduct.
“No attempt has been made to engage with the full range of medical information or the powerful contradictory indicators.
“Instead the report has the hallmarks of an exercise in ‘working out an explanation’ that exculpates the applicants.
“It ends with tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside Dr Evans’ professional competence and have no place in a reputable expert report.
“For all those reasons, no court would have accepted a report of this quality even if it had been produced at the time of the trial.”

www.chesterstandard.co.uk/news/23312472.lucy-letby-trial-judge-described-expert-witness-report-worthless/

Although it's correct to say there has NEVER been anyone but Lucy in the frame for this, strange that...

This is an atypical case in that either LL murdered the babies, or nobody did. There is no other suspect, and it's not a case of comparing forensics or alibis between two candidates. Far more often in murder cases you have a dead body with clear evidence of violent assault (or strychnine in their system, etc), and the police "just" need to find the right person. And as you have noted, this leads to circular reasoning: If there was a murderer, LL is overwhelmingly the prime suspect, and then the initial "If" can easily be forgotten, especially by a jury. And I suspect that very few of the people involved wanted to admit to the other possibility, which is that babies were dying at an alarming rate because the unit was a disaster.

Thank you for your condescension, but I know how adversarial trials work - I used to work in criminal defence and have spent many hours of my life sitting in crown court rooms and in conference with counsel.

In that case it is particularly astonishing that you don’t seem to understand the difference between prosecution allegations and fact, but you clearly do not. Amazing.

Yes, clearly 🙄

You said “Nick Johnson would throw all sorts of malevolent behaviour to you as if it were fact” - if he were being inaccurate about agreed facts then your defence counsel should absolutely pick him up on that.

Otherwise, yes you would obviously expect prosecution counsel to allege whatever it is they are alleging as part of their cross-examination (and your own barrister will have prepared you for that). Always a lot trickier to counter though, if you’ve actually done what they’re alleging.

This whole branch of our discussion has been around things that weren't agreed facts.

So it looks as if we are all on the same page. Johnson could indeed put the prosecution case in cross examination.

I don't see myself that not having done things makes it easier to disprove them in every case though. Obviously that applies to simple situations - I was in the office in Tunbridge Wells at 5 so cannot have been in Chester killing anyone. But how do I prove, or even remember, ten years on, who was in baby C's room at 11pm?

What's obvious, however well you understand the processes, is that some people have seen Lucy Letby's inability to disprove Johnson's inferences as significant, when in all fairness and logic we would start by asking, how could this be disproved, if untrue.

Did you mean NJ was being inaccurate about agreed facts when he put the question about the collapse then?

No, I wasn’t referring to any specific line of questioning.

Ok. What sort of stepping in did you have in mind when you talked about what you'd expect from your defence in the face of egregious unfairness and inaccuracy? I don't see that it's egregious or unfair for the prosecution barrister to put the Crown's accusations to LL if he wasn't being inaccurate about agreed facts. They're allowed to do it, and it needs to be done properly.

(By unfair I mean within the context of the adversarial system, I acknowledge the arguments that it's an unfair system generally but that's a different point)

I don't see myself that not having done things makes it easier to disprove them in every case though. Obviously that applies to simple situations - I was in the office in Tunbridge Wells at 5 so cannot have been in Chester killing anyone. But how do I prove, or even remember, ten years on, who was in baby C's room at 11pm?

@Oftenaddled and your own barrister has ample opportunity to help make that case for you over the course of a 10 month trial - they only have to plant any amount of doubt in the minds of the jury after all. But the problem for Letby was that there was also a lot of other evidence heard over the course of that 10 months which did not just rely on one memory set against another (eg hoarded handover notes, facebook searches, edited clinical notes etc).

I don't see how that in any way answers my point.

Sure, there was other, agreed evidence, but what I stated there was that not having done things does not make it easier to disprove them.

We all know about the Facebook searches etc, and I would hypothesise that anyone making the sharpshooter's error of taking them seriously as evidence may well struggle to distinguish between cross-examination and agreed evidence, because both are hallmarks of confused thinking. And confused thinking is what this constant refrain of, oh there was lots of other evidence, exemplifies.

We are discussing the difficulty of accurately tracking or agreeing people's movement around a number of rooms a decade on. That point stands regardless of Facebook searches etc, and is not solved by your suggestion that it would be easier for Letby to disprove her presence if she hadn't been there.

You’re missing my point. For starters, I didn’t say that it would be easier for her to disprove presence if she wasn’t there. I said it’s trickier to counter allegations made in cross-examination generally if you’ve actually done what is being alleged. My point was that I actually agree that individual memories of who was or wasn’t in a room years later are not necessarily reliable, but that is a straightforward argument for her defence to be consistently making over the course of the trial in order to undermine the prosecution. However, the other evidence was more problematic whether you like it or not (and if I never hear the phrase sharpshooter fallacy again it will be a day too soon). She was the victim of a conspiracy by the evil doctors, trust management, police, CPS and latterly the judiciary, yet had also happened to have hoarded handover notes, made inappropriate searches on social media for victims’ families and there were discrepancies in clinical notes that tied in with the allegations?

And yes, I know people will now come for me saying only a few of the handover notes related to babies on the indictment, but I guess we also don’t know what meaning the other babies had for her and whether she also harmed or attempted to harm them without any evidence remaining for her to be charged. If she is who her convictions suggest she is, then that could well be a plausible explanation 🤷‍♀️

I don't see that I've missed your point at all. You've restated it. I still disagree that it applies to the point under discussion.

Sorry if you're tired of hearing about sharpshooter's fallacy, but people can point it out if you commit it - as you've just done again in that post.

Nobody here has argued that there is a conspiracy against Letby, so I don't know why you are claiming that.

So if the misleading evidence is correct, the irrelevant information might be relevant?

Many people on this thread, and the previous two, have said that they believe she was used as a scapegoat for a failing unit/trust and to cover up medical incompetence - that will have required some form of conspiracy.

Delusion and groupthink would cover it.

“You said “Nick Johnson would throw all sorts of malevolent behaviour to you as if it were fact” - if he were being inaccurate about agreed facts then your defence counsel should absolutely pick him up on that.”

Yes, I did say that. Precisely that. I didn’t say he would be inaccurate about agreed facts, which is your addition. I said he would make assertions and allegations of malevolent behaviour as if those insinuations were fact and that is absolutely 100% true. That is precisely what he did in the specific segment of cross examination that we are discussing (as well as across the board, generally). It is how adversarial trials work here.

It obviously was not “agreed fact” that “Letby attacked babies shortly after parents left”. It’s facetious to argue that it was or insinuate that it must have been. It wasn’t. Why are you denying this? Who are you trying to convince?

In England and Wales the prosecution has a much freer hand than in the United States where objections are raised constantly. Such interjections are not proper courtroom etiquette here. The defence rarely interrupts such accusations, because such accusations are allowed; the tactical response (and the only real acceptable response in British courtroom etiquette) is to have the defendant deny them and argue later that the prosecution is exaggerating or spinning a narrative out of irrelevant minutiae, which is what Letby’s defence did. Anything else risks irritating the judge. Barristers are trained to respect the jury’s discernment and let such lines of examination collapse under their own weight rather than constantly intervening.

A fact: Baby K desaturated

A prosecution allegation: the alarms didn’t sound because Letby had disabled them.

The first can have many different explanations.

The second is part of the prosecution’s narrative, which is not a fact. It’s their ‘story’ about what happened which throws accusations of malevolent behaviour at Letby.

Nick Johnson used cross examination not simply to test factual matters but to put heavily loaded propositions and insinuations to Letby in front of the jury. For better or worse this is usual. The prosecution did exactly the same thing in every miscarriage of justice ever.

If you deny this you’re either being incredibly disingenuous or you simply don’t understand how adversarial trials work in the UK.

In my experience, in a failing system wgere multiple people have made multiple fuck ups and just followed along (and I’ve experienced that) it’s less of a conspiracy and more people unable to examine their own role and u thinkingly finding ‘evidence’ because they truly believe I’ve seen the ‘reason’ with Whats going ‘wrong’ - and then building layer upon layer of confirmation bias. I’ve watched it happen.

Dewi Evans did it himself - ooh, it’s deliberate harm (within 10 minutes) and then going forward and looking for ‘deliberate harm’, then submitting 34 ‘suspicious’ files to the police wgere he admits names were not redacted in nursing and medical notes, then whittling those down iver timed including AFTER Letby’s arrest in July 2018.

Emails between the consultants show them digging through everything they could find to throw suspicion on Letby and 'pique' the police's interest. But no I don't think it was a conspiracy in the most sinister sense. Once Letby was suspected, lots of confirmation bias set in and of course we know they weren't on the unit much and found it much easier to point fingers than notice their own poor practice.

There are many examples of scapegoating in the NHS. This is a well known issue. The mechanisms behind it are complex and have much more to do with cognitive bias and groupthink than active conspiracies. Such human social behaviour is evident in many areas with life and death stakes. This is why airlines use a no fault ‘just culture’ principle when investigating accidents. Are you saying that scapegoating is always “a conspiracy theory” or just here?

What is actually a “conspiracy theory” is the wild idea that a dozen or so world-leading neonatologists who hold senior positions in the best international teaching hospitals (e.g. the Karolinska Institute, literally the home of the Nobel Prize for Medicine), each decided to throw their reputations, legacies, and lucrative careers in the bin to shill lies for a nurse from Chester. That is the actual conspiracy theory here.

Sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland in this conversation and this is one of those times 🐛 🐇 🕰️ 🎩 ☕️ 🫖 🃏 😭