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?

She made around 200 facebook searches a month and the parents of the babies were just a small % of those..

She had a top KC representing her. On what basis do you think your opinion of what evidence to call trumps his? The potential reasons for not calling a particular witness are many but usually it’s because they won’t say what you want them to say and they won’t materially assist your case.

Yeah I don’t think the searching is evidence of much. I often search people when I am bored. Doesn’t mean I’m a murdering sociopath.

@Mirabai

even a cursory google reveals that it is not illegal to have CCTV on hospital wards. This is a 2012 article but it postdates both bits of legislation you say are conclusive by over a decade…

amp.theguardian.com/society/2012/may/08/cameras-monitor-hospital-staff

Is that portion back in the New Yorker now?
It was removed at the time following concerns from an English court, and now we know that they tried to use that evidence to bring an appeal, so maybe that's why it was removed at the time.

ETA - Just checked and that portion is still not back on the New Yorker article.
It still says

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, a concern that arose from the 1989 paper. But skin discoloration is a feature in many medical crises, and, in Myers’s cross-examinations, he noted that witnesses’ memories of the rashes had become more specific and florid in the years since the babies died. [Editor’s note: A portion of this paragraph has been removed and language has been altered, following concerns raised by an English court.]

The most likely reason the Defence called no expert witnesses in her defence, is because they couldn’t get anyone that supported her case. Either that or for reasons best known to herself, she instructed them not to use them.

I firmly believe in her guilt, however, and think she loved the trial as a way of reliving the drama.

@C7682 I can totally understand how distressing that must’ve been for you. You had the tiniest most precious thing in the world and those thoughts must’ve been unbearable. I hope you are both doing great now.

Myers is the KC - ie barrister, and not afaik a solicitor advocate (solicitors who have additional training to appear in superior courts). The criminal solicitor in the case is simply a local Chester solicitor Richard Thomas who is also a solicitor advocate (ie is qualified to represent clients in a superior court). It may be that it was he who was the cause of many of the failings in the case, however, I assume that the decision not to call Prof Michael Hall was Myers’ decision.

There was apparently another expert witness who wasn’t used: a statistics consultancy, which should have been invaluable in exploding the dodgy non-statistics provided by the prosecution.

Well it seems like Dr Shoo Lee would have said what he wanted him to say, but the KC only tried to bring him in for the appeal!!

Why did he call he a plumber only? And not call an expert in the types of bacteria that could be found if there was plumbing issues, and the types of illness that would lead to? He shouldn't have called the plumber if he wasn't going to bother doing that because then it just looked like all we can find is a plumber who knows nothing about bacteria and illness, but no experts will back up what we're getting at. As a 'top KC' he is aware of how things can come across to the jury but thought that was a good idea?

This is a common misconception: the duty of the expert witness is to the court not to the instructing party. They are not there to “support her case”.

As a barrister I am well aware that the expert’s duty is to the court - however, the barrister gets to choose how they run the case, and if they don’t like the evidence they know the expert will give, they’re not going to call them…it’s the most likely explanation for why she had no expert witnesses. That or some weird instruction of hers not to call them.

If that's the case then it can't be said that she had a fair trial. Maybe 'fair' legally in the sense that she was allowed to try to get experts and failed so they weren't actually stopping her, but it wouldn't be considered fair in the true.

It seems several of the prosecution witnesses were allowed to be anonymous. I doubt the defence witnesses would have been allowed, but if there was a fear of damage to their reputations then that should have been allowed.

It’s perplexing. It also begs the bigger question of why the hospital didn’t call in an epidemiologist themselves wrt the sewage leaks and the deaths.

If you’re a barrister why are you talking about “supporting her case” when you know that’s not the role of an expert witness? As I said in my above post I assume it was Myers’ decision not to call Hall. I don’t see why LL would make that choice.

We know Michael Hall’s perspective from the New Yorker article:

Michael Hall, the defense expert, had expected to testify at the trial—he was prepared to point to flaws in the prosecution’s theory of air embolism and to undetected signs of illness in the babies—but he was never called. He was troubled that the trial largely excluded evidence about the treatment of the babies’ mothers; their medical care is inextricably linked to the health of their babies. In the past ten years, the U.K. has had four highly publicized maternity scandals, in which failures of care and supervision led to a large number of newborn deaths. A report about East Kent Hospitals, which found that forty-five babies might have lived if their treatment had been better, identified a “crucial truth about maternity and neonatal services”: “So much hangs on what happens in the minority of cases where things start to go wrong, because problems can very rapidly escalate to a devastatingly bad outcome.” The report warned, “It is too late to pretend that this is just another one-off, isolated failure, a freak event that ‘will never happen again.’ ”

Hall thought about asking Letby’s lawyers why he had not been called to testify, but anything they said would be confidential, so he decided that he’d rather not know. He wondered if his testimony was seen as too much of a risk: “One of the questions they would have asked me is ‘Why did this baby die?’ And I would have had to say, ‘I’m not sure. I don’t know.’ That’s not to say that therefore the baby died of air embolism. Just because we don’t have an explanation doesn’t mean we are going to make one up.” The fact that the jury never heard another side “keeps me awake at night,” Hall told me.

You are really clutching, Mirabai.

LL had £1.5m Legal Aid funding, which paid for top silk Ben Myers KC.

Funding and incompetence was not an issue.

No one wanted to lie for her.

How far do you think 1.5 goes on a case like this? The crown spent 2.5 - the difference of a million.

Great they want to reduce attacks on staff but how about the assaults on women patients from men patients? They're never too bothered about that.

That’s why barrister’s get witnesses- to support their clients case. The fact that the expert’s duty is to the court, does not change the fact the a client’s legal team is trying to get an expert opinion that supports their case. Just like you want to call witnesses who will give evidence that supports your case…I mean you’re not going to call someone who will undermine your case, are you? Not sure what you don’t understand about this. I can only assume you have no familiarity with running a case to trial 🤷🏻‍♀️

Bundy wasn’t devastatingly handsome or breathtakingly brilliant, but he was a good-looking guy, and he was a law student, albeit one who had not-great LSAT scores and grades. The tongue-in-cheek saying among US lawyers is that the A students become professors, the B students become judges, and the C students make all the money. (Source: am a US lawyer.) Bundy was reported by his own partner, but scores of other people had also been suggested to the police as potential suspects, and police were trying to focus their limited manpower on the people they thought were the most likely.

The judge didn’t exactly “praise” him, either - it was more like, “What a waste you’ve made of your life, because you could have been a good lawyer if you hadn’t chosen to be evil.” Bundy has just served as his own attorney at trial and done a much better job of it than most people in that position do.

As for why they didn’t call their witness - we’ll never know - legal privilege. But the relatively minimal additional cost of him appearing at trial is unlikely to be the reason.

I have a relative who is convinced she is innocent but we clash a lot on this and other topics so I won't discuss it with her any longer.
I haven't read through the whole thread but wasn't the insulin in the baby's system only there because someone had injected it into them, meaning there was no way the baby could have died from this had it not been injected. That was one of the main points as well as a lot more that came out including what has been mentioned about the doctor she was after.

They thought it was in contaminated feed bags

The Judge said You'd have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner, Take care of yourself. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that."

No babies died from insulin poisoning.

You really think at £1.5m that LL’s defence couldn’t afford expert witnesses? Pull the other one.