Lucy Letby not charged with further crimes - what does this say about her current convictions

[mids2019]

So no more charges for Lucy Letby currently.

I can't say I am surprised as the tactics the CPS used the first time to secure convictions wont wash. There have been too many questions about the 'expert' evidence in the first trial and in my opinion the CPS don't want to take the risk of trying again with a more possibly more aware jury.

The police seem to be not too happy and probably thought they had similar evidence as they had initially so were taken aback by the CPS decision. They have had to approach parents to say that their children dies either through medical incompetence or through natural causes. The poor parents will now feel distraught and confused being lef up the garden path and the police maybe telling them Lucy was guilty.

I wonder if this is paving the way for a retrial?

Well I’m sure they’d be pleased to hear that from someone who didn’t sit through the evidence for months on end.

I’m sure they don’t give two hoots what us internet randoms think.
They may, if they care about justice, be more bothered by the stream of senior neonatologists and other highly qualified and experienced professionals who have articulated serious doubts.

So how do we administer justice then? Just ask someone from Mumsnet what they think? There were no tricks by anyone, no mind games, just a woman who is clearly guilty, had a shit case, couldn’t produce one single medical witness backing her up despite at least one being instructed to write a report for her, tampered with medical notes, searched families of her victims on Christmas Day, seemed to take delight in babies dying to the extent that multiple parents and staff members were disturbed by it and gave her evidence in a consistently self-serving way (can’t remember many significant events but can always remember if it helps her case).

Weird that the evidence was so exceptionally flawed yet the defence never produced a single witness who had actually reviewed the evidence and came to that conclusion. But lots of armchair experts and a panel (who come out with things like “this was probably caused by a birth injury” when there was no direct evidence of such).

I would bet that, if they were allowed to say so, there is more than one of those 24 people who now think they made the wrong decision.

They deliberated for 76 hours before they handed down verdicts on some of the charges and were sent back to try to reach agreement on the rest which they did at 110 hours.

Anyone who has sat on a jury knows that this means the strongest characters in the group spent a good part of 76 hours convincing the unconvinced that she was guilty, then a further 34 hours convincing the unconvinced that she was guilty of the rest.

The prosecution have to prove guilt, the defendant does not have to prove innocence. The prosecution have to prove a murder took place, the defence does not have to prove one didn't. That's how British justice is supposed to work.

And the "armchair experts" you are being so snide about ARE reading genuine expert advice, unlike that provide by Dewi at the trial.

I’m guessing you’ve watched some movies 😂 yeah yeah she’s innocent and it was just that the dominant characters took against her and bullied the others. Not like they weighed up the evidence they’d heard or anything. Thats why they also found her not guilty on some of the charges.

Guessing you do accept jury verdicts when you like them though.

Armchair experts? Over 100 medical professionals have raised serious doubts about the evidence used to convict Letby; they started speaking out as soon as reporting restrictions were lifted.

No one asserts that the liver injury caused death, so how it happened is largely irrelevant, except that it points to a unit that is failing.

Dewi actually made up evidence that has no basis in science, has never been documented in any other coroner reports, textbooks, or peer-reviewed papers, to explain how a baby with blunt force trauma of such severity, it is comparable to a car crash, can have no external bruising.

He also argued in court that a textbook illustrating symptoms of air embolism, written by experts on the topic and backed by previous cases and extensive research, was wrong, and he was right. He's been retired for several years, never managed to have a paper published, and did not specialise in air embolism, but he knew more than the authors of the medical textbook. Does that seem likely to you?

I think GlowingUp’s definition of armchair expert is something like ‘someone on Mumsnet who has an opinion on Lucy Letby I don’t agree with.’

Dignified indeed! But you'd think someone as invested in Letby's guilt as Dewi is would realise how easily that one can be mirrored back.

After all, it's common enough knowledge that people's age, sex, appearance and ethnicity can all have an impact on how they're treated by others. That works in all kinds of ways. There are millions of people with strong opinions on this case, some of them are going to be getting a thrill out of condemning a young blonde woman and wouldn't be half so fixated if she had a different demographic profile. People can get sexual thrills out of moralising. All kinds of weird shit.

And they did prove guilt. But you’d think that if the evidence was so bad it would have been really quite easy to find someone to write a report to contradict it and that would hugely undermine the prosecution case. And she did instruct experts but never put their reports forward despite them engaging in a joint experts meeting with Dr Evans and the other's pre-trial.

The trial was a shit show.

My mum worked at the countess as a nurse and she doesn’t trust the conviction, neither do the majority of her colleagues.

Ironic really considering the amount of bullshitting she's done this thread. Textbook example of someone who doesn't know what they don't know!

As a nurse it's scary how a young nurse can be a scapegoat of NHS failure despite these well qualified people speaking up and I am not convinced she is guilty. I have seen trusts like hers and they'll blame anyone but themselves.

No, I sat on a jury where a man would have gone to prison if I hadn't happened to be that strongest person in the room. He certainly wasn't guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

And I was a JP for many years, so I was part of a jury of 3. I've had to accept a 2 to 1 verdict that I knew was completely wrong on 2 occasions. I've also done a few appeal against conviction trials and appeals against sentence, which are eye opening.

If you PM me I will tell you my name and you can check me out, provided you accord me the same courtesy.

No one knows why Letby's team didn't use their expert, but she did have one, and since then, over 100 more have come out to publicly voice their concerns. You can't claim she doesn't have experts able to dispute the evidence put forward by Evans.

We cannot allow a potential miscarriage of justice to carry on because the defence should have done better in the original trial.

Indeed, the defence instructed “a number of expert witnesses” and “many reports were served from the before and during the trial”. From the CoA judgment:

It comes down to the structural issue again. David Allen Green explained it very well in the article I linked to upthread, I'll put it again in case anyone missed it.

https://davidallengreen.com/2024/07/the-lucy-letby-case-some-thoughts-and-observations-what-should-happen-when-a-defence-does-not-put-in-their-own-expert-evidence-for-good-reason-or-bad/

The defence might have legitimate tactical reasons for not calling an expert in a particular area, albeit I think the Letby case will have influenced defence teams views on the risks v benefits calculation. But it then means the jury are left without potentially essential information.

The interests of the jury aren't necessarily going to be the same as those of the defence, so we need to think about whether our systems must change.

I can’t see how either of the two ‘potential and legitimate’ reasons suggested in that blog stand up in this case though.

The first reason doesn’t account for why they wouldn’t have put forward any of their other witnesses to undermine the prosecution case on specific areas, even if they had concerns that Michael Hall’s general evidence couldn’t contradict every element of Dewi Evans’s.

And the second reason given is if no actual expert evidence is possible in an area of knowledge, or because it is a novel or developing area. My understanding is that only a small proportion of the case being made by the expert panel is based on new information or science and much of the rest is just different opinions from those put forward by the prosecution experts. In which case we’re back to why didn’t the defence call the experts they had instructed originally?

Of course another possible, and entirely obvious, tactical reason for a defence team not calling expert witnesses would be if the experts they had instructed were unable to contradict the prosecution case because the client had actually committed the offence/s they were being accused of.

Thing is, it's all very well saying you can't see (or can) but the whole point is that none of us know. You do not have the information to make an assessment. Me neither. Nobody does except those involved with her defence, and the rest of us can only speculate, some more informed than others.

But also, it's about much more than Letby. Let's say she is indeed guilty as sin. We still have a system where juries can be left without expert evidence in cases like this. It's a structural problem within our adversarial system, even if it hasn't actually led to a wrongful conviction here. A jury could end up without the necessary evidence to do their jobs properly if, say, the potential expert witness for the defence is likely to be a terrible performer in court because their ego will piss the judge off (seen this before!).

We do actually need to be thinking about risks and how best to mitigate them, and this will still be the case even if tomorrow some CCTV footage emerges of Letby doing everything she was accused of and more.

Take NEC as an example. Nurse 1 aspirates the Ng tube and notes 3ml of aspirate, then gives a 12ml feed. Then the next time they note a 4ml aspirate. This continues. Nurse 2 takes over, gives their 12ml feed and the baby suddenly deteriorates. It might seem like nurse 2 is 'responsible' but the NEC has been developing for hours and it's only at that point that the baby decompensates.

Similarly, babies can seem like they are doing well with their breathing but they are gradually tiring. They hold it together, hold it together, hold it together, then their body says 'enough' and their sats plummet and they stop breathing. The nurse who is with them isn't responsible. They just happen to be there at the time.

I'll say it again. This isn't about "Could she have done it?", "Is it possible she did it", etc. This is about "Do we, the jury, think that these babies were deliberately harmed, and are we sure beyond reasonable doubt that Lucy Letby harmed them?" It's obvious that the answer to both questions should have been no, given the weight of concern that experts are showing.

I've seen an argument put forward (I think I read it on Private Eye) where, for medical or complex cases, instead of having experts hired (and paid) by the defense and prosecution, which will obviously lead to bias, we should have an independent panel of experts, from across various relevant professions, who give their testimony to the jury in group conversational manner.

This would mean the jury gets a more balanced view of each side than they currently do, and important questions raised by either side's interpretation of the evidence would be raised by people with the knowledge and experience to do so.

I like this idea much more than our current system, where ultimately, the case rests on the expert themselves and their ability to convey their side to the jury effectively as much as it does the actual evidence.

So it sounds like you are saying that defendants should be compelled to put forward expert evidence/witnesses even if it will completely undermine their defence (quite possibly because they are ‘guilty as sin’)? We would just chuck out the principle of innocent until proven guilty?

Nothing in any of my posts says anything remotely resembling this.

There are models that allow for an independent panel. @Frequency sets out one of them in the post just above yours, you may have missed it. No doubt it wouldn't happen on cost grounds, but I wonder whether it would actually be any more expensive than years of prison and appeal courts.

I can’t see how you could ever fully ensure the independence of each member of a panel like that. Either there would be interminable back and forth trying to reach agreement between prosecution and defence on the membership, or if court appointed the system would then be wide open to endless appeals based on the membership’s expertise and/or bias.