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?

Given that the police drew the media away from listening to Letby's defence summing up at her first trial by inviting them to a press conference with statements to be used if she was found guilty, I'm sure they were preparing their press strategy here too.

@mids2019
Will they have to be inquests? Some of those babies may have already had inquests I assume or their cause of death would already at least be formally recorded somewhere wouldn't it?

They all had death certs or postmortems (the 18 children who died on or after transfer from the ward), Six of the eleven Lucy Letby wasn't charged with killing never even had postmortems, so it would be quite a stretch to query cause of death a decade later. The other five all have a postmortem result so unless a coroner's inquest had been planned and suspended, there wouldn't be any reason to reopen their cases.

I’m interested in why so many posters seem to think the police shouldn’t stand by their belief that other offences were committed by Letby, just because the CPS’s evidential bar for charging wasn’t met this time.

A CPS decision is only a snapshot of evidence available at that point, rather than a determination of what is likely to have happened. If the police had to abandon their belief after a CPS refusal it would mean them being forced to treat any unresolved and concerning incidents as innocent and therefore could create false (and potentially dangerous) closure. This would be a big problem in the investigation of crimes like historic sex offences and institutional abuse which often only become provable in aggregate.

The police being able to retain their professional belief/working hypothesis allows them to recognise patterns in future, understand gaps in evidence and respond appropriately if or when any new information emerges or allegations are made.

The system relies on that separation - the police investigate and form views, the CPS independently tests the evidence, the courts decide guilt.

I think the issue here is not the general principle but the fact that the police had accrued evidence that did not meet evidential standards but were convinced that the evidence would suffice. I think you can surmise that the evidence in the police's eyes wad equivalent in nature and extent to the initial charges or they wouldn't have spent resource on this or put a new set of parents through a fresh hell.

To my mind this does nake you question if we could reverse time knowing what we know now whether the CPS would have accepted the initial lot of evidence.

They might believe it but they shouldn't say so because by saying so that effectively makes a public statement

"The CPS are wrong and therefore they are incompetent"

The only other interpretation, given that they said the evidence was a string as on the first cases, it's that the verdicts on the first cases are incorrect. And we know they don't mean that, even though it's quite possibly true.

It's completely unethical for a Police Force to call an independent body (that was set up to prevent them from making charging mistakes) into question in the public mind like that.

I'd be very surprised if there aren't some very stern words being said behind the scenes.

Yes, I think we need to know what 'stand by' means here, and whether it includes the making of a public statement about the CPS or not.

I would imagine there are definitely stern words being said.

Also to the best of my knowledge, LL does get an appeal it will be this branch of the CPS who make the decision on how to proceed, it won't be the original CPS who decided the original evidence was good enough.

The police said “We believed the evidence submitted met the CPS charging standard. The CPS did not agree and despite our representations we must respect the decision that has been made.”

How have you interpreted that as them saying “the CPS are wrong and they are therefore incompetent”??

How can one not?

What did they say that was negative about the CPS and/or factually incorrect?

By reading what the statement actually says?

To add. Mealy mouthed words about respect do not change the message "They were wrong and cannot be trusted to get decisions right"

Not sure why you're asking me that, as I certainly don't think they aren't factually describing their own feelings! If there's one thing I expect everyone agrees on here, it's that their disagreement with the CPS is genuinely felt.

But you answer my question first, when you talk about them 'standing by' do you mean the statement or does it only refer to the other things you mentioned?

I have no issue with the police publicly disagreeing with a cps decision. It only serves to underline the key principle that is the separation between those two parts of the justice system - as per my earlier post.

But this statement about your personal view doesn't explain whether your definition of 'standing by' includes the Cheshire Police statement or not. This is important, because presumably we all realise that it's possible to stand by their decision, identify future patterns, maintain a working hypothesis etc without issuing a statement publicly disagreeing with the CPS.

I think it's unprecedented for a Police Force to state that they still believe their evidence is strong enough to prosecute. It just isn't done. That will be for a reason.

The separation is supposed to stop people from being wrongly charged. It does not operate in the other direction.

I remember it being set up in response to bad charging decisions by regional police forces, dragging people through the court system with insufficient evidence.

Does anyone know of other instances where a police force have issued public statements like this one? I can't think of any but not to say there might be some I hadn't heard of.

I can find on a Google AI search police criticism of delay and complaint that the bar for prosecution is set too high.

I can't find any statement that explicitly states that the Police have presented evidence as good as that which resulted in previous convictions after the CPS has said it isn't good enough.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Police/CPS meetings discussing this.

The police aren't medical experts so they must have been swayed by one or more 'experts' to think the evidence was concrete. This brings into question how much in thrall the police were and are to unknown experts when it came to seeking charges. Maybe the experts weren't that expert?

Yes, my definition of standing by includes the police statement. Unusual and with the potential to raise hackles internally, but doesn’t breach professional standards.

It,s not exactly going to be a case of a PC saying 'Sarge we have a statistically abnormal insulin level here... want a butchers'

The police obviously have had to be guided by medic and essentially to my mind their charging decisions would be very much guided. I am just really curious who was aiming the police for the dropped charges.

Right.

Your definition is a bad one then, because a public police statement disagreeing with the CPS isn't required in order to stand by their belief that previous offences were committed, identify patterns in the future, understand gaps in evidence or any of the other things you mentioned.

It clearly isn't a binary choice between taking the unusual step of issuing a public statement of disagreement and entirely abandoning one's position in previous cases. This means what you said about them being forced to treat unresolved incidents as innocent is wrong, and so are the conclusions you tried to draw from it.

We'll have to disagree there. Having had a lot of exposure to CPS decisions, and understanding why it was set up in the first place well within my living memory, I do believe that it does breach professional standards.

It would be akin to a tennis player saying to the line judge on court that they have got a call wrong, which they do anyway but are disciplined for; a teacher telling a headmaster in front of the parents that he was wrong to discipline a child, and a million and one other and probably better examples which would all result in disciplinary action.

I don't have an opinion on whether it breaches professional standards, but there's a reason we don't let the police mark their own homework.