Lucy Letby - have you changed your mind thread 4

[MistressoftheDarkSide]

With thanks to the original poster @kittybythelighthouse and @Tidalwave for continuing the discussion.

“Do you not just think maybe people think there's enough overwhelming evidence to believe she's guilty? Why is that so hard to believe?”

@Firefly1987 I believe that you believe that. I believe that there are others who believe it too.

It doesn’t make it true.

In all of the conversations I’ve had and with all the research I’ve done I’m still waiting to hear this “overwhelming evidence” and I’ve looked very hard for it, believe me.

I don’t think it’s that complex or deeply thought about.

I’ve watched people in another institution do similar on the basis of thinking they were doing the right thing.

This all started because a could have Drs didn’t understand how chance works in a failing unit and because police often have a knack for developing tunnel vision.

And because our justice system is far more dalliance than most realise (I’m guilty of that - honestly believed she must be guilty, such was my faith despite what I’ve seen in slightly different arena)

Here are the ways in which people end up being wrongly convicted (and equally how people end up being wrongly acquitted)

1. Human factors

• Juries and judges are fallible. Jurors can misunderstand evidence, be swayed by emotion, or place too much weight on unreliable testimony.
• Cognitive biases. Confirmation bias (believing evidence that supports an assumption of guilt) and hindsight bias (seeing guilt as obvious once a narrative is formed) can creep in.

1. Police and investigative practices

• Tunnel vision. Once police form a theory of the case, other evidence can be disregarded or interpreted to fit that theory.
• False confessions. People under pressure, especially vulnerable suspects, sometimes confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
• Disclosure failures. Prosecution not handing over exculpatory evidence has been a major issue in recent years.

1. Reliability of evidence

• Eyewitness testimony. Widely shown to be unreliable, yet often persuasive in court.
• Forensic flaws. Forensic science is not infallible; contamination, misinterpretation, or overstating certainty can sway juries.
• Expert witnesses. Jurors may give undue weight to “expert” opinions, even if the science is weak.

1. Systemic pressures

• Resource imbalances. The defence often has far fewer resources than the prosecution.
• Pressure to convict. Police, prosecutors, and sometimes the public/media can push for convictions in high-profile cases.
• Adversarial system. The contest between prosecution and defence can obscure the pursuit of truth.

1. Post-trial barriers

• Appeals are hard. Once convicted, the legal system heavily favours finality of verdicts. New evidence must be truly compelling to overturn a conviction.
• Institutional defensiveness. Agencies may resist admitting mistakes to protect reputations.

Yes, I agree wholly. The evidence (if you can call it that now...) is bordering on "desperate" and "wild".

I don't want to say my role. But I have insight into medical practices. So I realise how uninformed the public can be with this area. (As naturally you'd expect. It's a specific area) The jury in medical cases will be easily persuaded of a "fact" that is only a "fact" in isolation. You could also produce a different "fact" with different information added etc.

Jury should be medics in these cases.

🎯🎯🎯🎯

Nice post. Thoughtful, logical and informative 👍 I agree with your insights.

Yes, I've not seen anyone dispute that some people hold an extremely strong faith in LLs guilt.

I in no way came up with the reasons our justice system is fallible - I’m not the au fair with it (though I’m rapidly learning) I just looked up the common ways that justice fails

‘A jury of your peers’

Oh I completely agree.
I saw a doctor go through the evidence for one of the babies on a reddit post and just list out all of the questions that he had off the top of his head about the care for that baby and he had looooads of them and that was just off the top of his head for a post.

For me, I'm someone who will often have questions when given information, but as someone who has very little medical knowledge I have no where to go with my critical thinking because I don't understand the area and can only go on what I'm told and I don't know what relevant information is missing.

I know it's just funny posters trying to psychoanalyse why I think she's guilty. I just think the opposite of you, it's not fear, I just know she's guilty. Wish they would psychoanalyse Lucy instead, we need more of that.

It doesn’t make it true.

Well one of us is wrong about her, and you being convinced of her innocence doesn't make it true either. You can't rely solely on medical evidence when you can't even get the experts to agree. So what you're left with is letting her out because you'll never get a consensus. But you can't just let a convicted serial killer out for this reason. It would mean all serial killers in healthcare should be released.

Absolutely! And it's in no way a criticism of the intelligence of non medics. We only know what we know. This is why we seek advice from specific experts (or a range of ) when we make big decisions in life. Because one person's "fact" is often in isolation or with bias of some degree. The deeper you look the more you can pull apart facts and discover there's a whole other "fact" our there that looks the polar opposite to the one you were just told.

So you say 'I just think the opposite of you'. We have told you that all along that we just think the opposite of you, and that we're not convinced by the evidence even though you are, and yet you have repeatedly stated that you can't believe it and also have repeatedly tried to psychoanalyse the rest of us. And you've been wrong on all counts on all your guesses about me.

If you look at drug reps. They'll present you with graphs, statistics and scientific evidence to prove their drug is better than rival drugs. Those graphs and facts are all true. its all factual information . Very persuasive. But what they don't tell you is how that information was collected and what they didn't include in their information gathering.

This is no different. Facts in isolation, as I said before.

Adding to my point. Shoo Lee and his world wide team of leading international professors and experts has no bias or nothing to gain from their findings. In fact : with how prestigious they are: they had everything to lose. Reputation being first and foremost. There was no financial gain for them . And no prior allegiance or affiliation or bias towards some little British nurse.

Make of that what you will. But I think it's very hard to even try to conjure up a motive of bias that would be worth risking a handful of top international worldwide published experts reputation for

But how do you "know" she's guilty?

Everything you're basing this "knowledge" on is evidence that is as you say the subject of controversy, but more medical experts have disagreed with it as presented than have agreed, including a panel if experts working pro bono with nothing to gain, and who are risking egg on their faces if Lucy Letby confessed tomorrow. I can't see why they would do that other than the medical evidence being obviously flawed.

If you think about it, we're in the same territory as Meadows with SIDS being more than likely murder, and any unexplained condition being FII.

And never mind the MOJ implications, these "methods" that Lucy Letby allegedly used could lead to children being harmed iatrogenically in the future if they are used as differential diagnoses.

For example, just hypothetically, a baby has an unusual rash. Could it be air embolism? Well, the vagaries around the appearance of the rashes for a start could have them barking up the wrong tree, and the wrong treatment might be given.

Getting this case right isn't just for Lucy Letbys sake, it's for HCPs in general, to improve the justice system, and most importantly of all, to protect and properly treat babies.

Can you not see this extremely big picture?

You can call it a set up if you want, but you’re the one who said that. I didn’t. Your own logic brought you there.

(I don’t exactly think of it as a “set up” and I’m sure they didn’t either btw. Not consciously)

“Especially if you're claiming nothing even links Lucy to it because she "wasn't on shift"

This isn’t something I’m “claiming”. It’s something that is true.

And again, you’re the one who connected the dots and brought it to its logical conclusion.

“why do you think they said she did this if it wasn't true? Just for fun?!”

I’m glad you finally asked. I think they accused her of attempting spiking the TPN bags in order to account for the fact that she wasn’t there and/or there were no other possible modes of delivery (no puncture marks)

I’m sure it wasn’t their preferred angle but needs must.

I think they had to find a way that she could have been responsible for those anomalous results, no matter how weak the connection was, no matter how unforensic or unreliable that test is, because none of the other cases had forensic or diagnostic evidence of inflicted harm.

They needed the insulin cases to prop up the rest of the cases.

The irony is that the insulin cases wouldn’t exist without the other cases, but the other cases would probably fail without the insulin cases.

And meanwhile it still hasn’t been shown by anybody how she could have poisoned these babies by injecting insulin into TPN bags:

• Without opening or tearing the outer cellophane bag
• Or messing up the screw cap (that she had to screw both off and on through the intact cellophane)
• Or messing up the tamper evident seal
• Or leaving any sign of all this tampering (which these tamper evident bags are specifically designed to leave evidence of e.g leaking, clouded liquid etc,)
• Without anyone suspecting or seeing a thing.

It has also not been shown how she saw the future in order to:

• know that one of the bags would tissue and need to be replaced AND
• had yet another expertly (you could say magically 🧙) poisoned tamper proof TPN bag (with no sign of tampering) waiting amongst other TPN bags in the fridge for the next nurse to correctly choose at random in order to continue the poisoning of the correct baby.

By the way, no. I don’t think they did it for fun. I don’t think this was fun for anybody.

(Except maybe Evans. It may have been fun for Evans)

Excellent post 👏

You said it better than I did.

What are they actually losing though? It's not like they're being ripped to shreds testifying for her in court. Surely Shoo Lee is just pissed they used his paper?

“Well one of us is wrong about her, and you being convinced of her innocence doesn't make it true either.”

Yep. I never said it did. I don’t rely on vibes though, so everything I give weight to is evidence, not vibes, and therefore falsifiable via evidence, but not by vibes.

“You can't rely solely on medical evidence when you can't even get the experts to agree.”

That’s not how medicine works. It’s also not how law works. Experts have pinpointed possible causes of death based on the evidence, each many more times more plausible than the prosecution theories. The defence don’t have to ‘pick one’ and dishonestly claim it as absolute fact because medicine doesn’t work like that even if Dewi Evans does.

The mere fact that more plausible alternatives than murder exist is more than enough to prove that murder is the least likely cause of death and thus more than enough to introduce reasonable doubt in spades, which is what the law requires.

“So what you're left with is letting her out because you'll never get a consensus”

No. In this scenario it would be letting her out because no murders happened in the first place.

“you can't just let a convicted serial killer”

In this scenario she would have been either exonerated or she would have won her appeal. There would be no “convicted serial killer” to let out. That’s why they would let her out.

“ It would mean all serial killers in healthcare should be released.”

Don’t be silly. No it wouldn’t.

On the other hand your position would require many more nurses to be convicted of murders. The whole country is crawling with serial killer nurses if you’re right and this evidence is solid evidence of murder. Every hospital probably has several nurses who would be convictable under the same standard LL was. When are we rounding them all up?

‘I just know she’s guilty’

Someone else said that, on camera (or a paraphrase of that) whilst shamelessly forgetting he also said this, several years earlier

‘We may never know the cause of (baby c’s) death, he was at great risk of collapse.’

If that's your flippant response - it's not displaying a vast amount of critical thinking is it ?

Why would he be "pissed" they'd used his paper to convict a murderer???

You may be "pissed" if you saw a paper with your name to it was used in an incorrect application. Therefore falsely used to convict. It's quite something he's bothered to get himself embroiled up in when nobody was questioning his paper.

What skin in the game do you propose the other world leading top of their field experts had in the game? All willing to risk their very prestigious reputations to join a fellow man's grudge that his paper got used in little old Blighty?

I believe he felt that strongly that the evidence didn't stand up at all when he did a deep dive after realising his paper was used, that he had a moral duty to stand up say "I can't see any murders commited here..." Hence peer reviewing his conclusions with world class experts.

But how do you "know" she's guilty?

I think I've been over this many times and I've been accused of being repetitive so...

I'm looking at the big picture, it's other posters dissecting every little bit of evidence separately and not looking at the overall picture. Yes maybe at a push you could find her innocent for one case, it's ALL of them put together that is damning. I once read someone describe it as "lots of little arrows pointing at Lucy and none pointing away"

I think she said it better than any of us could. But really made water tight observations that are completely accurate and well explained. I hope many people are reading that post.

None of them point away?

I mean they quite clearly do unless you are ignoring all the arrows that point toward hospital failures.