Lucy Letby ( To understand)

[PassingStranger]

What made her kill these babies. Been in the news again today.

It's hard to understand?
Presume as she is in prison and not a hospital, she is not mentally ill?

Will anyone try to find out, I guess if people don't admit they are guilty it's hard too.

Instead of people saying give me 5 mins in a cell with her, surely it's better to stop this happening or maybe it's not possible?
Why does she want to be one of the most hated women in the universe and not give a shit about the babies families and even her own parents?

So much better to be known for doing something nice and have people like you?
AIBU to wonder why she took this road in life?

@EnjoythemoneyJane

"Nobody is born evil. It’s ridiculous nonsense - evil is an entirely religious construct, as per @5128gap upthread. By blaming the amorphous concept of ‘evil’ for the horrific things people do, you effectively throw up your hands and believe bad acts are inevitable and outside of our control or understanding - ‘aah, what could anyone do though? That baby was was always going to be an evil one regardless’.

’Evil’ is borne out of any number of physiological, mental, emotional, environmental and accidental factors which, when brought to bear on certain individuals in certain catastrophic combinations, result in terrible things.

Lucy Letby is no exception. ‘Monsters’ aren’t monsters. They’re just people. Fucking awful people, but people nonetheless. To believe anything else is literally medieval logic - you might as well bring out the pitchforks and ducking stools"

Yes, please stop clutching pearls and saying it's evil. She's a very unwell young woman, sociopathic or psychotic. Unless she has a huge amount of therapy in prison we will never know why she did it, and threads like this are just ghoulish drama.

There are a few of them out there if you go looking, they have influencer type profiles but with stoma bags and the like. It can be hard at first to distinguish them from disability advocacy influencers but after a while you can spot things. The red flags.

Plus there are groups, somewhat like the pro-ana chatrooms that the social media companies eventually tidied up, These are very helpful for getting ideas on how to deceive medics or find better ones, how to present symptoms, get unusual diagnoses and so on. The ‘top girls’ sort of compete with each other to be the most disabled, have the most visible or dramatic medical ‘accessories’. Really hard to deal with because of course all these girls are ‘disabled’ and they are ‘just sharing experiences with their support groups’. My family member is in a very dark place.

I don’t think people are born evil, but I do think personality disorder and other mental disorders are evident. You have to be without any empathy and be completely cold inside to watch a baby die, while you’re focused on how this could benefit you.
Professions and institutions with vulnerable people have to be super vigilant. These scary predators will seek out positions where they have power over the most vulnerable; the easiest of targets. Our hospitals, care homes, nurseries and schools could attract them.
Although we know the vast majority of people choose caring professions because they want to look after the most vulnerable, a few will be led by the darkest of motives.
We can’t let the image of the caring role blind us to that possibility. There seemed to be a lot of protection around Letby when concerns started to be raised - no one wanted to think the unthinkable.

I never forget that there have been terrible miscarriages of justice. I have absolutely no idea whether LL is actually guilty or not, and respect the verdict of the court. But I still don't see what the actual "smoking gun" was when the original coroner reports all gave natural causes as their verdict on the deaths at postmortem.

There's a good chance she has some mental illness. There's a difference between mental illness and knowing right from wrong. If her mental illness isn't deemed severe enough for her to have been unable to control her actions she will be sent to prison. The prisons are full of mentally ill. It's a sad fact. But clearly doctors think she knew what she was doing. That doesn't mean she doesn't have a mental illness.

Post mortems are the gold standard in establishing scientific cause of death. The post mortem results tally with the hospital clinical data for each baby as detailed at the trial. The deaths were not reported as unexpected at the time and the RCPCH review found nothing suspicious about the deaths, but noted the considerable failings of the unit and made key recommendations.

The post mortems were overridden in parenthesis with the bogus air embolism theory and the exogenous insulin theory for which there was zero evidence, by Dewi Evans, who is not a pathologist, and who will eventually be consigned to the Roy Meadows heap of dodgy expert witnesses.

So where were the experts to say Evans was wrong?

I struggle with this too @Currymaker, I really hope that she isn’t in there out of failing of the NHS. If she’s guilty she deserves to be there but there just seems to be little motive and the evidence never made huge sense to me unless there’s more we don’t know.

The defence did not call any expert witnesses. The had one, but they didn’t call him. Why is being debated: could be the cap on the legal aid budget, could be incompetence.

I totally agree. I think there were a thousand slight changes that could have averted what happened and turned her attention on to other things, and she could have easily gone through life without harming anyone.

She had a top drawer defence team. Trust me there was no incompetence. They didn’t have anyone who convincingly could rebut what the prosecution were saying. They also didn’t want to bring any good character evidence about her because that would make it open season for the prosecution to rebut it and show bad character.

Maybe people were afraid to stand up and defend her? Didn’t want to risk their own reputations? There was such a baying mob at the time. I started a thread at the time about how I didn’t think she was guilty. First mumsnet took it down because they thought I was trolling. Then when they realised I’m a genuine poster they reinstated it, but i received such a torrent of nothing but angry abuse in response that mumsnet took it down again! This was before I had time to realise it had been reinstated again. Im an anonymous nobody online. I can only imagine the personal and professional risk of standing up and trying to defend her in court!!

I think she comes across meek and awkward. I think she took her anger out on parents who had everything that she wanted (loving partner, beautiful baby etc). Plus she clearly lapped up the attention and sympathy she got from colleagues especially this Dr A.

Having read the New Yorker article, I’m far from convinced that she’s guilty. It would hardly be the first miscarriage of justice in recent years and since doing jury service myself, I have no faith at all in the jury system

And you’re aware now of the blogs and podcasts by doctors critical of the case as well as the New Yorker article?

I have heard it said U.K. medics don’t like being expert witnesses as it can affect their careers - thus expert witnesses often come from the US and that makes them much more expensive,

Be that as it may, even slam dunk murderers get expert witnesses. The expert is not supporting the defendant but simply providing the court with specialist, unbiased and objective knowledge in their area of expertise so that the court can apply it to the case.

Agree on the face of it, it sounds like a pleasant enough life, but it’s what was going on inside her head.

People who are psychopaths ( and there are many who don’t kill, and live quietly among us) don’t feel emotions in the same way, so need a bigger hit. She probably liked the thrill and the drama, and as pps have said the attention and excitement of being at the centre of the drama.

Maybe although I think having a severely premature baby who is likely to have issues throughout life isn’t necessarily something that most people would be jealous of. If it was jealousy I’d expect her to target healthier babies. I think it was more that she wanted the drama and excitement and also a sadistic streak that came out maybe when the parents expressed relief that their children were doing well and improving. I think there was something in the evidence where she’d been talking to parents and they said they were relieved the baby was doing well and she said something along the lines of “don’t get too confident because he might deteriorate”. I think a colleague was with her at the time and the colleague was really shocked that she’d say that.

The expert is not supporting the defendant but simply providing the court with specialist, unbiased and objective knowledge in their area of expertise so that the court can apply it to the case

Of course I understand that, I just think given the strength of emotion around this case, how high profile it was etc, I wonder if people were afraid/ reluctant to be associated…
It’s just my wonderings about one possible contributing factor. It’s hard to fathom why the defence didn’t put on more of a defence…

can someone link to the New Yorker article? I haven’t read it

Wasn’t this Dr A seeing her secretly outside of work? I’m sure there was mention of them staying at hotels etc together in some of the news reports. He was married with kids.

What caused you to have no faith in the jury system?

I believe they were incompetent.
Why on earth did they not try to submit the evidence by Dr Shoo Lee for the first trial and only try to submit it for an appeal? During the trial he just said the evidence was crap basically and just said that in his closing statement, might have been handy to call that expert at the time.

Sorry I wasn’t intending to imply you didn’t understand that! I was trying to make the point that the absence of expert witnesses in this case is thus bizarre.

If anyone is wondering to what this refers, see the New Yorker article:

The trial covered questions at the edge of scientific knowledge, and the material was dense and technical. For months, in discussions of the supposed air embolisms, witnesses tried to pinpoint the precise shade of skin discoloration of some of the babies. In Myers’s cross-examinations, he noted that witnesses’ memories of the rashes had changed, becoming more specific and florid in the years since the deaths. But this debate seemed to distract from a more relevant objection: the concern with skin discoloration arose from the 1989 paper.

An author of the paper, Shoo Lee, one of the most prominent neonatologists in Canada, has since reviewed summaries of each pattern of skin discoloration in the Letby case and said that none of the rashes were characteristic of air embolism. He also said that air embolism should never be a diagnosis that a doctor lands on just because other causes of sudden collapse have been ruled out: “That would be very wrong—that’s a fundamental mistake of medicine.”

I had my first born in the hospital she worked at. A few months later it came out that she was suspected of harming the babies, it affected me so badly mentally and played on my mind every day how someone could harm innocent and sick babies. I watched the documentary recently and cried start to finish. What wound me mad was her friend defending her!!! And the higher up management not doing anything when people had been raising concerns for a long time. Those families were robbed in the worst way and there are so many people that have blood on their hands. Lucy doesn't deserve a second thought she's right where she belongs, locked up like the animal she is