Lucy Letby: have you changed your mind - thread 3

[Typicalwave]

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

I realise memory can be distorted over time (I’ve experienced it myself) but that’s an odd thing to mis-remember, on Hodkins part. I mean, it wouldn’t exactly be a usual run of the mill thing, to feel the need to protect an employee bevause they were on the receiving end of increasingly agitated phone calls from another member of staff’s father.

So maybe you’re right, she made it up to cover her own arse.

Some people want to be told what to think, by someone they anoint with an overarching monopoly on the truth. They don’t want to (or are unable to) apply their own minds to rationally thinking through a specific issue to come to their own conclusion. Hence why lots of people have been parroting that women can have penises and you can be born in the wrong body. They didn’t believe that 10 years ago and they haven’t come to that conclusion via rational thought.

You can’t rationally persuade someone out of a belief/opinion they did not arrive at rationally (but I am in great admiration of those who are trying to do so and I know there are others reading for whom it is well worth setting the record straight).

That’s if they were actually spiked at all and there’s zero evidence for that. It’s just a theory that was concocted to account for the glaring fact that Letby wasn’t present and couldn’t have simply injected the babies with insulin. It’s a massive reach. The fact that the bags were not tested is extremely pertinent given that there is no actual reason to believe that they were ever spiked - not least the fact that even this theory required Letby to be like Mystic Meg and know in advance that one of the bags would have to be replaced while she was at home asleep. For the insulin theory to work the following would have to be true:

• LL spiked a TPN bag with Insulin
• She knew in advance that the line would tissue
• Preemptively added insulin to another stock TPN bag in the fridge
• left the unit and went home
• Hours later LL’s prediction came true (no wonder she won at the grand national!) and the line tissued meaning a new bag had to be hung
• Another nurse then picked the random spiked feed bag from the fridge and that was attached to the child
•. Luckily no other child was given the TPN feed bag that had been spiked but LL is psychic so she already knew that.
• The poisoning continued, even though LL was at home asleep.
• The other bags in the fridge were not poisoned as there were no other reports of insulin poising around that time.

As for Liz Hull (again, not the brightest) thinking that it’s “a bit of a coincidence” that the babies were hypoglycaemic and the immunoassay test was wrong - no it’s not a bit of a coincidence. It’s par for the course. Hypoglycaemia is extremely common in neonates. The only reason to order an immunoassay in the first place would be because the baby was hypoglycaemic. It’s a routine test. The test returned faulty results in quality control around the exact same time.

It’s like she thinks that test is only ever done when exogenous insulin is suspected. She’s insufferable. I cannot bear her performative saccharine attitude when it’s clear that if you scratch the surface even a little (or read any of her DM pieces) that she’s v nasty and mostly just concerned with profiting from all of this while using grieving parents as a human shield. I cannot stand her.

It’s an odd thing for sure, but De Berger is clear that she never received any such harassment from Mr Letby. In fact she never had a phone call from him at all. I believe her because there is no logic as to why he would harass her (a therapist with no power over the consultants) about this in the first place.

Everyone in this case is remembering back to years before. Things easily get conflated, exaggerated, and mixed up. Memories get distorted in retrospect easily once the idea of extreme behaviour, like that that LL has been convicted of, is introduced etc.

The whole issue of asking an accused person "what they think happened" is a psychological tactic to bolster prosecution ammunition.

Most people want to be helpful. If they have any applicable knowledge on a subject it's natural to share it. What then happens is accusations of perhaps arrogance, or wanting to demonstrate superiority.

The theory if insulin poisoning is presented as fact, yet Lucy is effectively tantalise into thinking she might be able to offer insight, and the stakes are high - her freedom is at stake. Co-operation is presented as a favourable option, then is used as evidence of attempts to manipulate. It's a very complex game.

It would have served Lucy much better perhaps to just say "No idea" and stick to it. But it's difficult to do that, and a trap I've been caught in.

I believe De Berger too - that’s not something you would forget really is it?

I don’t think so!

I guess so.

Im unable to understand that way of thinking, and I guess I never will.

Its akin to the Just World hypothesis that so many rely on so they never have to contemplate that they may no be as safe and secure and sensible to avoid disaster as they think they are.

She should have just said “I don’t know” over and over again but we all know that if she had that that would be used against her too.

Thing is, you don't realise there is a game afoot, because as an average person, you can't fathom that those who are driving the case could be anything other than noble sorts who value truth and justice and without agenda in such a serious situation. This is your life, after all. But it's their "job".

I thought i was pretty clued up, until my solicitor kindly sat me down and enlightened me in words of one syllable how things worked, because my emotional reactions and frustration and confusion were making his job really difficult. I had to learn to play the game, and in doing so waved goodbye to any shred of trust in the system, and a good chunk of my innocence, and alot of naivety.

I’d be worried about my memory if I did.

Even playing the game doesn't always work - and it is as you sat, a game. I don’t think very many people at all understand that.

Just look at the incredible exchange over the word ‘pyjamas’ - it really is all about smoke and mirrors and who plays out the best courtroom drama.

I have to give it to Johnson - he’s good.

These are fair questions. The management obviously didn't believe there was a serial killer at work. Well hopefully they didn't otherwise they more or less are guilty of corporate manslaughter. The doctors had suspicions they voiced them to management who did nothing. Same happened with Shipman people had suspicions but he continued with his killing spree. I can't see Letby being released any time soon.

I think you’re right and that’s probably the first time we’ve agreed on something! I don’t think that management believed the doctors that there were murders. Given the fact that the doctors refused to show them any actual evidence that they had (the infamous “drawer of doom”) it’s hard to see what they could do. They can’t just get rid of any nurse because a doctor demands it but yet presents no reasoning or evidence against her. That would be a dangerous precedent to set.

The doctors refused to show any evidence to management, they didn’t themselves go directly to the police or the Pan Cheshire Child Death panel once it was clear management weren’t on their side. They didn’t show evidence to the various hospital inspectors who were brought in (CQC, RCPCH etc). Why on earth didn’t they do any of these things? They had over a year. I just can’t square that circle without coming to the conclusion that they were far from sure themselves. All they really had were two misunderstandings about statistics - a normal random cluster (the death spike) was assumed to be abnormal (whereas it was statistically to be expected) and the idea that she was “always there” which was fixed on before they had any specific deaths in mind without taking into account other factors (she worked far more shifts than anyone else else, was single and saving for a house, was often called in at short notice etc).

Once you understand that this was the actual basis for the whole case, not a slew of deaths that were suspicious in and of themselves (in fact all but one had normal post mortems) the whole thing starts to fall apart. Add in Dewi Evans, his diagnosis of murder “in ten mins over a coffee” his ever changing murder victims and murder methods and I don’t know how anyone can still think she’s guilty.

All that aside, IMO the consultants behaved abysmally, even worse than management (who were also far from perfect). I think the behaviour from them is worse if she is guilty, but either way it’s unforgivable.

Are you alluding to Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker (not NYT) article here whrn you say (and I paraphrase bevause I’m on my phone using the dreadful MN app) ‘depends on whether it was biased or not’?

If you are, what makes you think it was biased?

I’m honestly interested to know.

It’s certainly the second: the scales of justice brutally fall from one’s eyes.

And once you see a shoddy investigation conducted in reverse so that evidence is cherry picked, it’s not so difficult to spot the hallmarks of it being done elsewhere.

It’s like accusing Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein of not being “balanced” about Nixon when they wrote their Watergate piece. Or accusing the Boston Globe Spotlight team of not being “balanced” about abuse coverups in the Catholic Church. That’s simply not the job of investigative reporting.

Exposes like this always feel “biased” to those invested in the official story, but scrutiny is the entire point of journalism. The Thalidomide scandal, phone hacking, and clerical abuse were all were dismissed as biased reporting until the evidence proved otherwise.

In my experience people usually only dismiss investigative journalism as “biased” when it cuts against their worldview or interests. Journalism is never totally neutral, there would be no value to it if it was, but there is a massive difference between bias and evidence led investigation.

What matters is whether the facts hold up under scrutiny. Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker piece on Lucy Letby isn’t “biased,” it’s literally just journalism doing what journalism does best. She didn’t argue that Letby is innocent. She showed exactly where the prosecution’s case was weak, drawing on court transcripts, medical records, and interviews etc. It’s not “bias” if evidence underpins the conclusions and Aviv brought the receipts. Her sourcing was rigorous (as it always is at The New Yorker, a publication that is world famous for its fact checking process).

This is why no one ever attacks specifics points within the article, they just handwave it as “American interference” or “bias” without engaging with its substance at all.

British justice should be able to withstand questions and scrutiny. If it cannot then we really do have problems.

Yup, agreed with all of that.

I’m still interested in what exactly @Firefly1987feels is biased (or untruthful), if they are alluding to Aviv’s article.

I would like to hear specifics about this too, but it won’t happen. It never does.

I’ve done a dive to remind myself about the Tony Chambers “threatening guns to my head” anecdote. I had forgotten something that came up at Thirlwall - in Chambers’ contemporaneous notes from that particular meeting he had actually written that it was the consultants, not John Letby, who were “threatening guns to (his) head”.

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/thirlwall-evidence/INQ0004299_2.pdf

Just goes to show how easily nothing becomes something once it’s been run through a couple of different filters.

It’s truly terrifying

Oh ye of little faith….

I genuinely don't remember us talking about the nutrient bags or Lucy's police interview. How do you listen to the evidence presented for each baby and conclude she's innocent?

This case is riddled with nothings that became somethings! Pyjama gate springs to mind. Personally whatever I’m wearing when I am sleeping is ‘pyjamas’ in my mind. But no, LL gets “You’re lying, aren’t you LUCY LETBY!” thrown at her for calling her blue tracksuit “pyjamas” when the police came knocking at 6am. The worst part is how many people ate it all up!

To be fair, that’s the role of the opposing council - to eviscerate and character assassinate.

It truly made uncomfortable reading - like I said at the time, that exchange is eerily akin to your typical exchange in a DV situation ( the narc/emotional abuser kind) I wouldn’t have bought it - but that’s because I’m a veteran on the receiving end of this type of exchange.