Lucy Letby - have you changed your mind thread 4

[MistressoftheDarkSide]

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

Reddit discussion on the Private Eye article is here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/comments/1n7e3jz/private_eye_today_expert_witness_pretrial/

and the article will be posted here, probably next Wednesday:

www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/lucy-letby

‘My questions are all about the justice system at this stage’

As in it doesn’t seem fit for purpose? Because that’s where I’m at.

I'm still sceptical of all these experts coming out the woodwork. However, I'm going to endeavour to read their arguments when I can find the time as I try not to dismiss things out of hand without at least trying to understand them.

However, it was mentioned above that the evidence relied on quantity rather than quality and that many of the individual cases are arguably ambiguous on their own. This is the case with many prosecutions. Look at the trials for male celebrities accused of sex crimes. There's no way they can prove beyond doubt that he assaulted somebody in private 10-20 years ago without having access to CCTV footage or audio recordings etc.

Typically, a victim comes forward and is then followed by many more. People who know the accused then start saying "well, we suspected it all along". It's the sheer abundance of potential evidence that often seems to be the deciding factor. There's rarely a public outrage about this and certainly there have been gross miscarriages of justice before like that African American guy who was either a basketball or NFL player (I forget which).

He was imprisoned and his career completely sabotaged. The only reason he was acquitted was because somebody recorded the supposed victim admitting that the assault never happened. Otherwise his name would still be dirt.

So, yes, the law doesn't always get it right. That's the risk. But I think we need to be sure that we're not giving somebody the benefit of the doubt just because we empathise with them rather than looking at it objectively. There's always a lot of confirmation bias with data. People will often accept truly shoddy data if it supports their views, yet will scrutinise/criticise every last detail of an opinion or piece of data which they don't like the hypothesis of.

I keep going round in circles about the insulin cases.

My first point is always if there were concerns about the babies unstable conditions due to high readings etc, why wasn't more investigation done at the time? Why did it only come to light much later that a lab result was concerning, which could have given the opportunity to retest / try different treatments?

The fact that this, which I think is a failure in duty of care, and which in and of itself requires redress at hospital level, then became a lynchpin of the prosecution case, despite no physical evidence or eyewitness testimony, really bothers me. As does the less than robust defence.

Essentially it did boil down to Lucy Letby had access to the bags, therefore it's a certainty.

That's before you even ask "how much insulin, over how long, would produce the observed result in each baby, factoring in all the variables such as stickiness etc" and "can you show that amount of insulin was missing / unaccounted for from the unit"?

Whether or not it "must have been exogenous insulin from some source", I don't understand how it could be stated as incontrovertible fact without much more supporting evidence, with regard to the TPN bags.

The logic has obviously been that one hit via injection would have produced different observable results, so it must have been administered over a long period of time. However, the changing of the bags is a big spanner in the works.

One hypothesis I've seen is that the babies might have kicked in with immature systems "coming on line" - to do with glycogen stores etc.

And the big question is what was the point of all this in terms of motive for Lucy Letby? It's a very ham-fisted and uncertain method of achieving anything, as both babies survived. And the argument that it didn't work the first time, so she tried again holds little water. She must have known that at any point a test result would have sounded alarm bells.

It always puts me in mind of that US case of alleged FII where a mother was jailed for poisoning her baby with antifreeze. While in jail, without access to antifreeze, she delivered another baby who suffered the same symptoms. Turned out it was a rare syndrome that gave results mimicking antifreeze poisoning.

Which is why I get very picky about medical evidence used to put people in prison / remove their children.

Even if there was insulin in the bags for baby F , the two biggest questions for me are: how did no one hanging them notice the heat sealed wrap was compromised and one of the port seals had been tampered with when the bags are carefully checked over? And even if there was insulin in those bags how does it prove it was Letby whi did it? The 1st bag was prescribed, the next a generic stock bag both if I understand correctly had been filled in the hospital pharmacy. How many different people had handled those bags?

This is it. What if a tired pharmacist misread or misinterpreted something while preparing the bags? A mistake? Was all this definitely ruled out / investigated?

The whole thing is the very definition if reasonable doubt.

And I do get the argument about the multiple incidents / pieces of "evidence" but these were allowed to build up. I always come back to the point that the oh so concerned consultants didn't raise immediate safeguarding concerns after the first one or two incidents they claim to have observed.

Hang protocol, management, HR process and the fear of litigation from the wrongfully accused, their primary concern should have been the safety of the babies . ...

Wasn't there also an instance where a doctor/consultant came in and she was standing over the baby watching without administering the first aid or whatever it needed? I'm sure she said something like it'd only just happened or she'd only just walked in. Something like that. Entirely possible but still a bit suspicious in light of all the other strange circumstances.

Dr Jayaram, who testified that he walked in the find her stood watching a baby desaturate and doing nothing.

Except, in a round of emails between the consultants prior to them going to the police, he says something quite different.
https://unherd.com/us/newsroom/hidden-email-casts-doubt-on-lucy-letby-verdict/

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/evidence/inq0003112-pages-1-2-of-email-correspondence-between-dr-ravi-jayaram-dr-stephen-brearey-and-others-titled-should-we-refer-ourselves-to-external-investigation-dated-29-06-2016/

That has been spoken of by many nurses working with babies. Apparently babies sometimes have a change that sets off alarms, but they can restabilise of their own accord. It's fairly standard to wait for a few moments before starting intervention, as handling when it's unnecessary can cause stress in neonates. There's alot if debate around the recollections of that incident but it appears to have achieved "significance" in retrospect.

Also, yes, the email described above.

Yes this was ruled out. The production processes are very tightly controlled to prevent errors, and there was no insulin available to get mixed up anyway, so an error is practically impossible. It’s in the testimony from the pharmacist who ran the unit.

Also, from one of the pediatric neonatologists

Sorry, cross posted with you

Thank you. I mean, I would have imagined this would have been done, but some of the things that have come to light since the trial - like Ravis emails etc, I kind of want a forensic pulling apart of everything again. I was sort of coming at it from the initial certainty that it was the TPN bags.

That narrows it down - how many more hands and opportunities (on the assumption there was insulin in those bags how- which I do not find plausible, but let’s pretend)

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/04/marthas-rule-now-in-operation-at-every-acute-hospital-in-england

As an aside, but tangentially relevant, this seems like a step in the right direction for patients and their parents and carers when things are going wrong during active care.

I think you mean the Baby K case? An email emerged from the time where the consultant is describing this event and he says that she actually called him to the room, which is the very opposite of what he claimed in court.

Dr Jayaram wrote to 7 of his colleagues on May 4 2017…

“Staff nurse Letby at incubator and called Dr Jayaram to inform of low saturations.”

Dr Jayaram also wrote at the time that the baby’s death (which occurred days later at a different hospital) was consistent with complications from extreme prematurity. The above section in the email about Baby K was not included in the final report to the police, the purpose of which according to Dr Jayaram was “for the police to have their interest piqued.”

He also claimed that the only possible explanation for the extubation was purposeful tampering, whereas every neonatologist and neonatal nurse who has commented on this says that is nonsense and that babies, including very premature ones, notoriously extubate themselves all the time. Apparently parents are actually given leaflets about this because it’s so common. David Davis has written to the CPS asking that Dr Jayaram be charged with perjury.

I see others have already addressed the Baby K event. I’m travelling today and have dicey internet access. Trying to catch up 🙂

Having spent many months in hospital with a very sick preemie I can say that alarms alarm constantly. A recent stay saw 1 year old baby have moments of very low heart rate after surgery. All of the alarms were muted, she was watched to see if she brought her heart rate up (under 40bpm) each time. If she didn't recover in a minute, they would move her - this went on for 24 hours. She had extra monitoring for a while but no intervention.

So, a nurse watching and waiting isn't unusual at all.

I've been witness to TPN being administered and it comes in a sealed bag - bit like a postage bag, it isn't see through

Also have NG fed - if you put too much in, it just comes straight back up!

I also think people are picturing full term newborns when thinking of these babies - some/most were tiny and very fragile

I think we have seen a major MoJ.

I wonder if the parents would have had an option to sue the hospital for neglect if LL wasn't implicated? I'm assuming they have recieved criminal injury payments, would they have got more through medical negligence??

It's interesting I think, that people who heard bits of the evidence, and thought "eh? That doesn't sound right" / plausible are now having their suspicions confirmed by new information being disclosed post trial. This points away from the widely held view that those questioning the evidence and the safety of the conviction were simply operating from a position of disbelief that "nice Lucy" was actually a serial killer.

My questioning always started from "how the heck did she manage that" and off I went to Google which would undermine feasibility just from standard NHS content around things like feeding and the consequences of air in the NG tube.

One of the dodgiest looking bits of "evidence" is the liver injury, and the omission of the needle aspiration information going to the Coroner. While it may not have been the cause of death, it adds another plausible variation into the big picture, which reduces the "inflicted injury" idea to an absolute nonsense, IMHO

Respectfully, you have been in multiple conversations with me across four threads now where you have brought up the same points and I have had to reiterate the same information. I think the same may be true with others but it has definitely happened with me.

We usually have polite disagreements though so I’m not trying to make a big deal out of it. I would be interested to know what would ever (hypothetically) change your mind here? Because you do seem to be extremely resistant to taking in, or even hearing, new information that challenges your set views, despite the fact that you earlier said that you are always open to changing your mind. I personally haven’t seen any evidence of that.

Your last question is an interesting one. Some parents were gearing up to do just that. Three inquests were pending of babies D,O and P when the police intervened and effectively suspended all investigations by the coroner. Now, ten years later, those investigations can never be as thorough.

But the male celebrities accused of multiple crimes are being accused of the same crime multiple times, often with the same type of victim and we're accepting from the victims' testimony that a crime has been committed.

If you had a serial killer of adults all with the same or similar method of murder and the accused had the opportunity to kill all of them you could link them together. If you've got good evidence that he murdered one, then it's likely he's the culprit for the others.

If one victim is completely different from the others or has been poisoned where the others have all been shot, I think you can't really justify that link. Also you can't add in a few burglaries in the area without more evidence too.

In the Lucy Letby case, the common factor that the babies all have is that they were cared for at the same hospital. They had different methods of death, were both male and female, singles and multiples. We know they were all vulnerable and not well because they were in the hospital in the first place. We know there were other similar deaths and collapses which it wouldn't have been possible for her to influence but nobody else has been accused of their murder, despite several other people being involved in their care.

Both the prosecution and the defence agreed that in the insulin cases someone must have deliberately set out to harm the babies. The reason that the prosecution assert that the method of introduction of insulin was the TPN bags is because she wasn't there for all of the time they were affected so a "remote" method had to be put forward. In all the other cases there's disagreement over whether harm was done deliberately or whether it was negligence or whether the babies wouldn't have survived anyway. The judge told the jury that they didn't need to be concerned about how the harm was done, they only needed to be sure that LL had deliberately set out to harm them. Often there's good reason for this - for example if you're certain someone has been murdered but no body has been found. In this case it kind of feels like trying to pin everything possible on her.

If you present an Xray as evidence and say it definitely shows signs of harm, then it turns the accused could not possibly have caused it because she'd not met the baby then you have a problem. Either you're confident something was done deliberately by that point and you're looking for another murderer (option not considered) or you're wrong about what happened. Just choosing another cause of death and a time when you know the accused was present is moving the goalposts.

“Have any of you EVER tried to see things from my POV, and why I think she's guilty? No, it has never happened. Not once!”

I have considered the arguments you make and I have considered arguments against them. I weigh up the evidence and go with what makes the most sense. That’s how I form my opinion. I do it carefully and I’ve researched this case a lot. I just don’t agree with you.

One way to check whether or not your thinking is critical and fair is to ‘steel man’ the other person’s argument. Instead of misrepresenting or weakening an opponent’s position, you intentionally reconstruct their argument in its strongest, most persuasive, and most reasonable form, sometimes even better than they originally expressed it.

The point of steelmanning is to engage with the best version of an idea, rather than an easy-to-dismiss caricature. This forces you to grapple with the real substance of an opposing view, which sharpens your own reasoning.

Restating the other person’s view so clearly and fairly that they say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.” is how you argue in good faith and not go round in circles. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do this, whereas we can present your argument back to you in a way that you’d fully agree with, but then show you exactly why we don’t agree. I’m willing to give this a test if you’re up for it.