To think the Lucy Letby case needs a judicial review?

[Edenspirits73]

2 more detailed articles in main stream papers today questioning the Lucy Letby verdict - mirroring the well known New York Times article that wasn’t allowed here during her trial- surely with this much questioning, there should at least be a judicial review?

aibu?

If she is guilty after review then fair enough, but yet again convictions are being viewed as unsafe.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/09/lucy-letby-serial-killer-or-miscarriage-justice-victim/

I hope that a forensic psychologist can study her and get to the truth of what's going on in her mind.

Yeah it was on a post-it note but I believe it was addressed to all three triplets (obviously the names have been blanked out) how is that explainable other than she intended/fantasised about killing all three?

And you keep these rough notes you fished out of bins for years under your bed?

I suppose there’s a good reason she moved house and kept all the old handover sheets too, taking them with her (found stashed under her bed)?
Keeping the photograph of the sympathy card she had written?

She really is desperately unlucky with all these “coincidences” isn’t she.

@lawnseed Would you then have kept that note for years, even between house moves?

I'm very curious about the "car crash like" liver injury. How is it believed to have happened? I just googled the size of a newborns liver and it's somewhere on average between 4 and 7 cm, often around 5cm. Wouldn't a forceful impact of such magnitude shown external signs?

CPR was performed that morning. Despite what the court was told injury after CPR is reasonably common and CPR in neonates is associated with high mortality - as much as 60% according to various studies.

The question of the five 'missing' suspicious incidents from the board of shift patterns could have been easily been resolved by a serious investigative journalist. Write down descriptions of all the incidents mentioned in the trial evidence. Plus all the incidents which it is claimed should have been included but weren't. Plus some other incidents which happened at a completely different neonatal ward, as a control. Then show them to 3 experts, who don't know which ones are real/when LL was on shift. They decide which ones are suspicious and which not. Then you can find out what a reasonable set of 'suspicious' incidents is, and do the shift analysis based on that.

Obviously random people on YouTube and Mumsnet couldn't carry out this analysis. But The New Yorker easily could – why didn't they?

I was just reading the testimony on the subject given at trial. The certainty that it could not be CPR certainly adds a new level of horror to proceedings. Also the assertion that despite the violence and severity if such an attack, the baby wouldn't show any external signs. Baffling to be honest.

No, I didn't keep them on purpose, it was more by oversight. I'd then have a big purge and burn them.

I can see that her behaviour was strange and obsessive. I don't know whether she deliberately killed them or not, I'm concerned about the judicial processes and seeming lack of expert witnesses - a shortage of which is explained by them not wanting to have their name associated with child murder trials.

Amongst other elements of course. Anyone can find themselves in the dock. You want to trust the judicial process, but this case makes me nervous.

It was discovered during his autopsy and an injury as a result of CPR was ruled out. He had two separate sites of bruising, as well as areas of a blood clot / extensive haemorrhaging into the liver which was only seen previously (by the medical expert) in road traffic collisions and in non-accidental assaults from parents or carers.

The baby was also injected with air so the the liver injury partly contributed to his death - but Letby liked to experiment with various methods to inflict damage, we have injecting of air and over feeding milk through their NGTs into their stomachs, injecting air into their blood stream, messing with breathing tubes, traumatic injury to throats, injecting insulin into TPN bags - maybe she tried something new? Or just got angry - who knows.

Two separate sets of bruising? On the liver or externally? Or both?

I was reading some research a couple of days ago which said that abdominal injury during neonatal CPR is rare.

Another site said that liver injury can be caused by infection.

She was careless with those notes she left. I wonder that her Google searches threw up. Did she ever search air embolism etc.?

Did the post mortems definitely show that air had been introduced or was it theoretical?

There needs to be a bigger enquiry into why when consultants had suspicions & brought them up with management, they were dismissed & why she was allowed to return to the ward where she committed the crimes.

I think the post mortem x-rays showed air was present.

I've just been rooting around for more info and I found an interesting article on a site called "Science on Trial". As a very lay person I see that various experts have various opinions on the source of the air present.

Apparently no evidence of searching for air embolism was found.

The post mortem didn't rule out CPR.

"A post-mortem examination found free un-clotted blood in the peritoneal (abdominal)space from a liver injury. There was damage in multiple locations on and in the liver. The blood was found in the peritoneal cavity. He certified death on the basis of natural causes and intra-abdominal bleeding.

He observed that the cause of this bleeding could have been asphyxia, trauma or vigorous resuscitation."

Have you read the substack pieces?

It is also odd that the pathologists who did the post mortems weren't called as expert witnesses by either side.

No it wasn’t. CPR was one of the possible causes listed on the autopsy for the liver injury.

How many neonate CPRs had the “expert” seen? Claiming he hadn’t seen it before is meaningless and merely anecdotal.

There was zero evidence the baby injected with air. And no studies to indicate what that would look like.

If you haven’t you should listen to the podcast: “We Need to Talk About Lucy Letby” with retired doctor Michael McConville.

And read this blog (caution, it’s 400+ pages) by another retired doctor under the pseudonym “Jamie Egan”. https://jameganx.notepin.co/
It goes through the medical evidence.

The author of the New Yorker article claimed to have some leaked information from the hospital, but I didn't get the impression it extended to full detail of these cases.

They did know that there were other cases, and that there was another case that triggered the positive insulin test.

I think your test would be difficult anyway, because nobody saw anything suspicious in some of these deaths initially.

So the question without a lot more information was, do you divide the deaths into suspicious and unsuspicious by their nature, or suspicious in any case where Letby was present?

@lawnseed

she’d had training on air embolism at work, no need to search it on google

@Cleavagecleavagecleavage didn't she watch something on the TV about it as well?

It seems like there are also a 1000 of pieces of evidence in the other direction though and much of that is only being looked at now.

She wasn't obsessively searching for the families any more than she obsessively searched for others. She made an average of 200 facebook searches a month, the searches for the families of the babies made up only a small minority of the searches.

You're making assumptions that people just struggle with this because they can't work out the motive or they don't like to think things like this can happen.

Nope, I fully believe that these things can happen. I just don't think it has been proven in this case. .

If I thought the evidence showed that she definitely did it then I wouldn't be looking for a motive either. It's not like the motive would be anything normal, it would be because it was fulfilling some need in her..so it doesn't need to be understood in the way a motive would be expected in a more normal murder trial.

It's getting very old to be told that if you think that there may have been a miscarriages of justice then it's because you don't like to believe it can happen, or worse because she's pretty and white. It's simply not true.