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?

Except that Lucy Letby wasn't there for all of those "suspicious" collapses.

But enough that it was becoming extremely noticeable.

For the second, a consultant and a nurse worked together on collapses of children transferred to other hospitals. These records were anonymised. This exercise threw up no strong association with Lucy Letby.

I must've missed this-do you have a source? Also why were they only looking at collapses of children who were transferred? Surely we want to know anonymous results for all collapses-or is that what they did and it just so happened to throw up Lucy's name every time? What do you consider "no strong association"?

Despite this, when the consultants sent their cases to the police, they only included sudden collapses where Lucy Letby had been on shift. These were handed to Dewi Evans. He identified a mixture of suspicious collapses from these files - since they were looking at all of the children's medical records, they might have some collapses with Lucy Letby present, some not.

OR the sudden collapses directly correlated with her shifts. He's claimed time and again that he never knew who was on shift at the beginning.

Despite having his cases pre-selected so that all surviving children had been cared for by Lucy Letby, Evans identified 2/3 "suspicious" collapses with Lucy Letby on shift, and 1/3 with her off shift. That 1/3 with her off shift were never investigated further.

Where are you getting this from? Where has DE said he didn't investigate any collapses that LL wasn't there for?

The best you can say of the consultants is that they fell victim to confirmation bias in a stressful situation. Perhaps they didn't realize how much they were skewing the data; perhaps they really trusted the police to investigate thoroughly. But it's clear that they presented a selective sample of collapses. That is simply not debatable since the evidence that has emerged from Thirlwall and police leaks on these points.

You really don't give them any credit do you? It's amazing how sure you are you're right and all these people actually involved in the case are just misguided.

Except that Lucy Letby wasn't there for all of those "suspicious" collapses.
But enough that it was becoming extremely noticeable.

if 1/3 of cases where when LL was of duty and 2/3 when she was on duty, thats would surely pretty much correlate with someone working full time doing overtime as they were short on staff, opposed to someone working part time and not doing overtime

why weren't the suspicious cases the LL wasn't present for investigated?

The collapses of children transferred out were investigated by John Gibbs and Ann Martyn. Gibbs explained that this was because examining all collapses would be too onerous a task. (They're not that rare). Transfers out also implies more serious cases, with the children needing care or treatment at more specialised units.

We don't have figures for the outcome but "no strong association" was the response of management when they de-anonymised the notes.

Gibbs explained at Thirlwall that he had identified six potentially suspicious collapses; Lucy Letby had been caring for three. He also said that there had been confusion about the status of two collapses, suspicious or not, but which two was never made clear.

Here's an article for the collapses that we didn't hear about in court

https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-the-letby-case-isnt-closed/

The cases of surviving infants which consultants passed the police at the beginning of the investigation all seem to have involved Lucy Letby's care (as suggested both by their confirmed email correspondence and the recent unverified leaks of further correspondence. So they were already working with a distorted sample set.

He can't say it's normal, abnormal or extraordinary without a fuller data set.
He's just speaking as a scientist. I don't think Panorama was a great place to do that but what he is saying supports Lucy Letby's case.

The expert panel summary report literally says the ratios were within “the expected range” and “within the norm” for preterm infants. So who’s expected range/norm is it if other qualified experts find them to be “extraordinary”, and he is saying nobody knows what normal is anyway? (Whilst also saying that other experts are not wrong to call these results extraordinary).

It's obvious the police were given a biased sample set. This is explicit in the consultants' correspondence. The number of cases Evans examined leading up to the first trial (33 or 34, as he says) is not enough to include cases not coinciding with Lucy Letby's care, even though the hospital's investigations as revealed at Thirlwall show that such cases existed.

After charges were brought, Evans did examine another twenty something cases and believed some of them to be suspicious - perhaps they related to the charges that were dropped recently. We don't know whether these involved Lucy Letby in all cases as we know very little about them, but they were obviously not what shaped the case brought to court.

Leaving aside leaks or information from Evans on the investigation:
It is obvious that the police did not take a broad view of what might have happened on the unit from the start, since they allowed the consultants to act as coinvestigators and select cases for them at the beginning, and over the years before they brought charges. I can't see any reason to give them credit for running an effective investigation here, though I'm sure they acted in good faith .

And Chase was saying that "within the expected range" was not ideal terminology, and he would go for unusual but possible instead, ideally.

That is perfectly reasonable. Unusual results fall within norms, statistically. They not necessarily outliers. Assuming that by "expected range", the report meant within the norm, it could be both accurate (from a statistical point of view) and confusing (to a layperson who might see normal as "usual"). There's a quite good article on that sort of thing in the NHS here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6352401/

As to the dataset, one could have enough information to establish a statistical norm without being clear on what was physiologically normal, i.e. healthy

All of that probably sounds over complicated and in a way, it is. All you need to be able to do to reconcile the expert panel's statement with Chase's is to say that this sort of result might happen about 1 in 19 times (unusual, possible, within the expected range).

The main question for Chase to answer was, is this thing the jury was told was impossible, really impossible. And the answer is no. It's unusual (or we wouldn't all be here!) but it's not impossible

@Oftenaddled so the insulin results are unusual (at best), the fact she was on shift for 10/13 deaths (to use your stats) is unusual and yet you still insist she's not guilty? It's been said many times but if she's not guilty she must be the unluckiest person in the world.

Do you think unusual events mean somebody has caused deliberate harm?

How many unusual events do you think happen on hospital wards?

If an unusual result comes back one time in 20, for example, you'll see it eighteen times a year if you run one test a day.

It's been said many times but if she's not guilty she must be the unluckiest person in the world.

that would not be LL but Kathleen Folbigg, as we now know what happened, but not until she had served 20 years in prison

And where does “extraordinary“ as per the other scientists’ assessments fit in with that? Would they really describe something with a 1 in 19 chance of happening as extraordinary?

And do you have an excerpt from the transcript where the jury was told this thing was impossible?

Plus the people saying LL would have to be the unluckiest person in the world might want to check with the parents before granting her that accolade. Since losing a baby, being wrongly told they'd been murdered and eventually learning otherwise would be sufficiently horrific to merit inclusion on the shortlist.

But really, it's a dim point to make. The idea evidently is to try and make it sound implausible that LL has been wrongly convicted. Yet the fact is that whatever has gone on here, it's inherently unbelievable and unfortunate. Because either there was a serial killer murdering vulnerable babies in intensive care over a sustained period, or there wasn't and we've wrongly imprisoned someone for it. Both of those things require, to say the least, an astonishing sequence of bad luck for a number of people.

Yes. All victims of miscarriages of justice are unlucky, of course.

I always remember reading about one of the Birmingham Six. Five of them were arrested because they got on a ferry together to go to an IRA funeral in Ireland, so they looked as if they were trying to flee the country after the bombings, possibly.

The sixth, Hughie Callaghan, a gentle, sickly man, owed one of the others one pound. So he called around to repay it, found the others ready to walk to the station together, played with the kids while they finished up, and walked that way with them before going home.

That's all it took - he was locked up for over sixteen years.

When people go looking for a criminal, you can just be unlucky enough to fit into the picture they've imagined.

It they mean extraordinary = outlier, that wouldn't fit the norm/ range, but there's no way to pin down what exactly unnamed experts meant by extraordinar when speaking to a BBC journalist. It's just angels dancing in pinheads. It's pointless.

Chase offered a perfectly clear account: unusual but possible.

You sound exactly like I imagine her managers did-refused to listen to the doctors concerns over and over again parroting that there's not enough evidence and that it's just bad luck. All because you are convinced you know better. And there's at least 2 (possibly 3 I think) unusual insulin results that only involve Letby so not just one time did it happen, plus the tube dislodgements I almost forgot about and her proximity to most (all?) of the deaths. So that's 3 unusual events right there involving just her and she only worked there for a few years.

What would you do then just leave her on the unit and see what happens? How many deaths would it take? Because you seem to have an answer for everything.

Quickest answer: from the press reporting as reproduced on the tattle / innocence project wikis:

Ben Myers KC, defending, is now questing Dr Milan on the process for analysing blood - from ward to lab. She says 'ideally' blood will be taken and cooled within 30minutes to preserve it. Mr Myers asks if blood is left for hours, will it cause issues - 'it can do yes'

Mr Myers asks if a sample hasn't been handled correctly, will it effect the relatability of the findings - and specifically in this case. Dr Milan says it can effect findings, but it 'wouldn't create insulin in this sample'

Dr Milan repeats, that the only explanation for the readings in this sample is external administration.

Her managers suspended admission of complex cases, commissioned an external review of the unit and reviews of the cases the doctors asked to have reviewed. The external panel's findings suggest that this course of action was certainly necessary - most likely it saved lives.

Well named expert Prof John Gregory said on Panorama he couldn’t think of any plausible explanation for such high insulin levels. And that finding insulin concentrations of that order in a newborn baby is exceedingly unlikely to have arisen from naturally produced insulin. And that the absence of significant c-peptide simply underlines that point.

Which does not smack to me of something he would be expecting to see 1 in 19 times (or in fact had seen ever before by the sounds of it).

Sure - we know there is disagreement on this issue. Chase has undertaken a research project on the subject, given the paucity of data, which I doubt Gregory has done, having no reason to. So I would expect Chase to be speaking from his research findings.

We do know a third case existed, just at Chester in the same period, but that Lucy Letby hasn't been charged for it. (The evidence that Thirlwall accidentally uploaded then removed suggests that the test was done before she met the baby at all). So, if the lab was accurate - a big if - either we have an innocent explanation or we appear to have a Second Murderer

I think you know what I mean. Obviously the parents have gone through the most unlikely and tragic situation-but if it wasn't them it would be other sets of parents instead we'd be talking about (and there are many parents who think their babies were harmed by her) every person who is the victim of a serial killer is suffering a very unlikely situation-we don't say serial killers don't exist for this reason.

Both of those things require, to say the least, an astonishing sequence of bad luck for a number of people.

Rare things happens, yes. Lucy being at the centre of SO many things that need to be argued are "unusual but possible" every time is not plausible in the least. In fact it's verging on the impossible. If someone deliberately harms babies then all these rare and bad luck events are answered aren't they-they weren't bad luck at all.

And most importantly-removed Lucy off the unit.

ETA-though that should've been done far sooner.

It seems unlikely that the RCPCH imagined the problems with staff cover, emergency transport, and resuscitation techniques that they noted in their report; and hard to blame Lucy Letby for these things. The decision to close the level 2 unit was the right one.

It's a great pity that the sort of taskforce Phil Hammond has argued for didn't exist to conduct an official review of the cases and the environment.

Yes, I know exactly what you mean, and as well as erasing the parents it's a really stupid point to make.

You actually kind of set out why it's such a bad argument here anyway. Victims of hugely unlikely and unlucky things, like serial killers, exist and we don't say they don't exist just because it's really unlikely. This is true, yes. It's also true of other really unlikely and unlucky things like, ooh, being wrongly convicted of murder.

Basically, leaving aside your own beliefs for a minute, one of two things has happened here. There's a serial killer of babies, or there isn't and someone has been wrongly convicted of being a serial killer of babies.

Everyone knows both of these things are really rare and bad luck. But one of them has happened. We are choosing between two very implausible and unfortunate possibilities. There is no explanation here that isn't absolutely appalling luck, it's just for some reason you're choosing to leave the parents out of your analysis about misfortune.

We know the unit was below standard-two things can be true at the same time. Since you seem to know absolutely everything about the case-who was in charge of the decision to downgrade the unit?

We have no idea, of course, how many initial events happened around anyone else; how many unexpected blood tests came back; or even how many of these "unexpected collapses" (identifed as such months or years later) happened around other staff members.

Lucy Letby was at more deaths over a particular 13 month period than the number of shifts she worked would make usual. This was less surprising by virtue of the fact that she worked nights in an under resourced unit and came in to do extra shifts when there were more acute cases on the ward. So she was there when children were more likely to die.

Her being present at so many deaths is easily explained by two things: first, the fact that she was working with the most seriously ill children more often; second, the natural clustering of events, which is a scientific fact, even if that annoys you

The other collapses, including the insulin cases (where she was on shift for only one of three cases when testing took place) are clearly cherry-picked so don't support your argument that there was a wider pattern of unusual events. You are giving us a good insight into how the doctors who accused Lucy Letby thought, but they really weren't qualified to think in terms of statistics. It's very sad that they didn't understand this.