Lucy Letby - have you changed your mind pt. 5

[Typicalwave]

New thread

Part 4 here - https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5400564-lucy-letby-have-you-changed-your-mind-thread-4?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

Originally started by @kittybythelighthouse

We only have to look at some of the responses to threads on MN to understand that politics / beliefs / conditioning frequently trump (pun intended) facts, sadly I don't believe the judiciary are any different and are affected by their own bias and possibly / probably political pressures.

Just to redress the balance - Alder Hey is 16th so one of the top performers. No wonder LL spent a lot of time complaining that CofC was not as well run.

Baby R is the third triplet.

I was wondering about this actually because I believe the third insulin case was baby Y, I didn't know there was an S, so was there also babies T/U/V/W and X?

ETA: Can't find a source about child Y so maybe I'm remembering wrong.

It seems blindingly obvious that much of the motivation for obfuscation about numbers of deaths / incidents is because while Lucy Letby can be tied to a worrying number, by her mere presence, and would have been tied to more I'm sure if they could swing it, is because it really does paint an extremely worrying picture of the safety of babies on that unit and would possibly show up an unacceptable number of "errors" / poor care in general.

ALL the deaths in the period in question should indeed be scrutinised, but not from the perspective of "serial killer".

I know I'm stating the bleeding obvious, but the whole defiance of logic and reason from start to finish just drives me slightly batty.

I thought the triplets were O P and Q

No isn't baby Q the one they said that she attacked in a rage because she couldn't kill all 3 triplets?

In the Thirlwall inquiry they refer to the parents of the triplets as Mother and Father O, P & R

This is from the consultants' email preparing cases for the police. It doesn't use the same lettering as the court cases. So we don't have information on these children.

They included all children who died on the ward and another 8 who had "collapses", including baby B but apparently no other court cases.

At court / Thirlwall baby R was the third triplet, who survived.

Child K medical notes from today’s new Thirlwall drop. Note the amount of crossed out/corrected words - Nick Johnson would have us believe that this is a sign of fakery, but apparently it’s only fakery when Lucy Letby does it.

thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/thirlwall-evidence/INQ0002287_13-15.pdf

Sounds like Baby K was a very poorly baby

Baby K was indeed a very poorly baby. Born at 25 weeks gestation. It’s not so long ago that there wouldn’t have been any chance of survival. Poor little thing.

Yes, she was very fragile indeed.

And it is very instructive to look at what the hospital communicated to the parents, as they described it at Thirlwall. This was about 12 hours after her birth, after her desaturations and changes of breathing tube:

Q. So around midday the transfer team tell you that Child K is stabilised and a doctor says to you the transfer is going to happen. What was his expression, what did he say to you?

A. "It's now or never."

Q. What did you take from that?

A. That was one of the first times I suppose that we both had the thought of maybe this isn't as plain sailing as what it was being made out or that we were aware of because we hadn't been told any different at that point. All it was was that she was stable and she was doing okay. We had probably already maybe had the conversation about "It's taking up quite a long time” because they must have got there about 8 o'clock, 8.30 or something like that, so it's now midday, but, yes, that was the first time we had that inkling of maybe this is not where she should be right now.

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Thirlwall-Inquiry-23-September-2024.pdf, p. 112.

(The mother's account of her child's life and death is beautiful if obviously terribly sad).

The medics at Chester really don't seem to have been good at recognising or communicating how unwell these babies were.

I knew someone who had a child at just under 25 weeks - I can’t ever recall them being told in that first few weeks snything other than ‘doing well but it could go either way’

So sad. Poor baby. Poor mum.

There is such a difference between a 25 week baby and even a 30 week baby, let alone full term, that I’m not sure how you could ever expect to manage with no neonatologist consultants on staff and only 2 consultant ward rounds per week. Premature babies are physiologically distinct. They hadn’t finished developing and may have various underformed organs etc. Particularly one as premature and tiny as Baby K, bless her.

I think many people imagine the indictment babies as full term bouncing babies, ready to go home. They were anything but once you look at the detail. Most of them were on the very edge of life and death and just didn’t get the right care, poor little things.

reading parents of child J’s account, so many issues with care at COCH. It’s unbelievable how bad the unit was.

From this substack it says

https://lawhealthandtech.substack.com/p/lucy-letby-the-trial-for-baby-k

Baby K arrived at Arrowe Park at 1:15pm on February 17th. The consultant neonatologist Dr Babarao reported that Baby K had a severe lung disease (remember that Dr Smith said shadows on the x-rays was pulmonary surfactant and not a chest infection and that Dr Jarayram said there was no infection - are we to believe the infection spontaneously appeared during the ambulance ride to Arrowe Park?). Another doctor on the transport team, Dr Kamalanathan, also described Baby K as extremely unwell, and said, in contradiction to the evidence of pretty much every single doctor at CoCH that this was not uncommon for such a very premature baby. Dr Babarao described Baby K as extremely ill, with a now low and uncontrolled blood pressure, uncontrolled blood sugars and kidney failure related to her prematurity. It is notable that none of these conditions had been identified or treated at CoCH. Further, when asked during the trial to review the 3:30am intensive care clinical note he points out a different value, the VTE value of 0.4, which he says is the volume of gas reading and was very low, supporting the contention that the 94% leak reading might actually mean air was escaping and not being correctly delivered to the lungs of Baby K. This testimony contradicts Dr Smith’s and again supports my own contention that there was a lack of competence in the care of premature neonates at CoCH.

Do you reckon that's why the prosecution chose not to proceed with the murder charge for child K and instructed it to be a not guilty verdict instead? Even though they're all far fetched this particular case seems far more far fetched to try to say it was a murder.

Who knows for sure, but I think so. It was that plus the fact that the baby didn’t die until several days after she left COCH.

Does anyone know what the next steps are regarding an appeal/ retrial?
What options do the defence have now?

They're still waiting for a decision from the CRCC.

Ah thank you

Mark McDonald says they hope to have it early next year. But if they refer it back to the court of appeal, it could take a few more years before it is heard. And there could be a retrial after that potentially so another couple of years.

She is a long way from being freed, and the CCRC could easily take two or three more years to start with.

The slowness is agonising, and so unreasonable when the evidence is so strong that it needs to be looked at. What an inadequate justice system.

Yes I have changed my mind. She was scapegoated to coverup the fact the consultants didn’t know what they were doing. A panel of the world’s leading neonatologists found no evidence that any of the babies were murdered.

Trailer of the new documentary is out.

Oh dear! Dewi Evans is not coming across well.

That was shocking at the end from the parents. I haven’t had time to properly process what I just heard but immediately I don’t know why you’d tell a child that whilst they’re still a child, given the families are all protected by anonymity.