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/

Not quite.

Mr Hughes said: "We looked at it individually, every case needed to be investigated on its own merit. I wanted to allow people to come to a determination of what they were finding on their own." After six months using this tactic, Mr Hughes then introduced weekly team meetings, where investigators shared information. "All of a sudden the picture would start falling into place," he said. "It was chilling really at times, to see it drop into effect.
"A detective would give the update of their investigation, they would say, 'What happened in my case was…according to the medical evidence the collapse took place at this time, at this time the designated nurse went on a break handing over care to Lucy Letby, the parents left and the child collapsed,' then another detective would go, 'Oh my God, that's exactly what happened in my case.' Patterns emerged. That's what happened as we approached mid-2018," he added.

Fairly easy to see how they all came to the same conclusion considering they all discussed it together.

6 months of investigations about just one case each and it doesn't sound like any of them actually had anything.... It doesn't say that any of them suspected Lebty at that point, just that they were describing when the collapse happened because they had nothing.... and they must have been getting nowhere if after 6 months they needed to start bringing the teams together to see if they could come up with some kind of similarities, and then they said OMG that's exactly the same as what happened in my case.

Dud you know that it is believed by medical professionals and child protection experts that babies and children with medical issues are at higher risk of abuse because of the stresses associated with caring for them?

Here is an example. A very young baby is found to have occult fractures. It is the only thing "wrong" with them, despite being born prematurely. These are fractures considered pathognomic for child abuse. The mother is told she has caused them deliberately, over a five week period. There is no other possible cause. The mother denies it and is distraught. In order to keep her baby she is told she has to come up with something to prove her innocence.

She discovers that connective tissue diseases exist that might explain it, such as OI. The doctors rule this out as some of the classic features aren't present. One way of assessing it is to do a biopsy, which may or may not confirm it. She is then told that wanting the biopsy is proof of wanting to harm her child as it is an invasive procedure, and even if OI is detected, it wouldn't rule out abuse as children with rare conditions are at higher risk of abuse. The biopsy is not done.

You're going to tell me this is impossible because it sounds impossible, doesn't it?

Ask me how I know about this.....

and Private Eye is mostly satire, it's not the most trustworthy of sources. It's the kind of stuff you stick in the loo to read and laugh about

I was just about to point out their decades-long work in exposing the Post Office Horizon scandal but I see @placemats has had the same thought.

@Edenspirits73 thanks for this thread. I haven’t followed the LL case in minute detail, though of course know about it. I’m open-minded about the verdict. But I’ve now read the Guardian and NYT (not the New Yorker) articles and most of the other links given here, including a good deal of the ‘Jamie Egan’ blog linked by @Mirabai - and that especially is deeply worrying. The light thrown there on some of the evidence of treatment from certain doctors, the medical experts called at trial by the prosecution and the extremely poor health of several of these tiny babies in a seriously underperforming, understaffed unit raises massive questions for me.

@kkloo You’ve cherry picked that quote and then twisted it. Detectives interviewed have said that it was obvious from the first group case conference that they all felt Letby was involved. You are actually accusing the police of fitting her up. Which is quite a wild accusation. They followed the evidence independently. All evidence led to Lucy. I know that is hard to accept if you really believe her.

But it would also explain her wild lies on cross examination. She is liar. She proved that in court.

No, not fitting her up.
I think they genuinely believe that she did it and that they found a serial killer, confirmation bias and all that, but that that doesn't mean that she did it or that they did in fact find a serial killer.

HUGE difference.

Dewi Evans mentioned in his evidence there were 60 incidents he was initially looking at.

That’s awful. 😢

That's really sad 😔

Why assume the criteria were only that Letby was working? It's vanishingly unlikely that it was as simplistic as that. The prosecution would have considered each case and whether there was strong enough evidence to get a conviction on them. She may well have been present for the other cases but they simply decided there was not enough evidence of her responsibility over and above that to base a charge on. That doesn't mean she was innocent in the other cases.

@kkloo You implied that a full investigation hadn’t been done and that there needed to be one. There has been an entirely thorough, years long investigation into these incidents. It ended with the trial of Lucy Letby and her conviction.

Just because you don’t like the outcome doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fair and thorough investigation.

Picking through sound bite and bits of interviews with experts who haven’t seen the evidence to justify your viewpoint is a pretty flawed method of proving your point. You, very much like Lucy, are claiming that you know better than every person involved in the investigation, trial and conviction. Does that not strike you as hubristic and arrogant?

@Chartreux That poster has everything the wrong way round. The police gave DE every incident they thought might be suspicious and DE narrowed it down to the ones where he thought there was a case to answer for foul play. The police assigned detectives to each of the
families involved and told them to investigate just that case and draw their own conclusions. Only once each team had conclusions did they come together and share- at which point they had all come to the same conclusion independently- that Lucy Letby had means and opportunity in each case. That is when shift pattern data became relevant. People get this so arse about face in their desperation to make her into a martyr.

I'm so sorry to read this. It is absolutely nightmarish and I can well believe your story.

It is really problematic that the consultants spent so long suspecting LL. Her every action is interpreted in the most extreme and negative way.

You can see this in the Panorama when one of the supposedly chilling things she said/did was after the team meeting they had in the wake of a death on the ward (I'm sorry I don't know which one). They were all told to get some rest over the weekend and LL is reported to have to said to the consultant "Not me, I'm back on duty tomorrow" with a slightly emotionless smile. I wouldn't consider this an unusual comment at all. In fact, I would have expected the consultant to be appalled she was rostered on again.

@deplorabelle See my post above. The police investigation did not use the hospital investigation as the basis. All those comments weren’t used in the trail and weren’t part of the evidence for conviction.

What needs to be established is how many other collapses and deaths happened on the ward during the relevant time period- we know that there were at least 6 more deaths and 35 more collapses, and how many of those LL was or wasn’t present for -
(same with the other permanent nursing staff on the rota).
Without that information the chart shown to the jury showing Lucy always present is totally misleading and all claims that “Lucy was the only one always there” etc need to be totally disregarded.
It is outrageous to me that this hasn’t been properly established, at least with regards to the other deaths (collapses may be harder to count/ verify).

They have also started investigating deaths of babies from when she was on a placement in a Liverpool hospital, though unsure when this was or if is still ongoing

(panorama episode about Lucy for reference)

What you have described in your post @Ratsoffasinkingsauage is confirmation bias.

statistically for that table to be used as evidence all the unexplained crashes and deaths need to be included.

Not just the “unexplained” ones, as almost all the deaths Lucy was charged with were explained, and “unexplained” is clearly subjective.

The criteria would need to be more objective- we need all deaths, and all sudden (perhaps?) collapses (the latter is probably harder to verify in retrospect, but the former surely is easily established.

No I'm not saying this was part of the police investigation I'm saying it poisoned every interaction between letby and these consultants for years and this will have had a serious impact on all of their working lives and the surrounding team.

During this time they were phenomenally under-resourced and over capacity. It's a recipe for absolute disaster.

The question is whether this disaster was a horrifically badly run unit where trust had broken down completely between consultants and nurses. Or whether you think it was that situation PLUS they were fairly sure a serial killer was operating unsupervised in this environment and were dealing with it as an HR matter in the first instance.

I came late to this case. Mostly because I am aware that personal bias could easily influence my thinking, and I have a residual naivety in that because this is a hospital based case the evidence must be sound and compelling.

I believed that at the point the crimes were discovered it was because something so blindingly obvious happened that it was indeed a slam dunk.

Until now I have almost actively avoided looking into it as it brings me back to a dark place in my life and I've worked very hard on myself to get it into some sort of perspective.

My tipping point was seeing that concerns were raised after three alleged incidents back in 2015 and Lucy Letby was not taken off the ward at that point.

That was my WTF moment. As soon as it is suspected that a caregiver of any kind is harming a child, certain steps are supposed to be taken. The most important factor here is the protection of these mist vulnerable children. Whether there was any merit to the concerns or not, in this professional setting the best interests of the children comes first and unless someone is a complete psychopath even though it is distressing to be accused, the logic is clear and one has to hope that subsequent investigation will prove or disprove the allegations.

Whether Lucy Letby is guilty as charged or innocent is not clear, but the real horror is that if she is guilty, the hospital gave her a free pass to go on and harm at will.That is a major failing indeed.

I repeat, the protection of the children over rides the accused's rights to be believed innocent, painful though it is for the accused.

So coming back to the now, reading through all the medical jargon, the issues of probability, confirmation bias from every corner in both directions and reading phrases I have imprinted in my soul is chilling to me.

In terms of criminality, given that Lucy Letby has been away from her alleged "hunting ground" and thereby technically children are protected from her, it comes down to justice and punishment. If her guilt is as clear cut as is suggested, then her punishment is just. But given the complexity of the medical evidence and the arguments surrounding it that is in doubt. And it's not just armchair detectives and "conspiracy theorists" saying it.

The ramifications of taking the evidence as presented as gold standard could lead to a precedent by which any baby discovered with these findings after an unexpected death could be claimed to be a murder victim. This is why careful consideration of all the other medical and environmental factors should be weighed up and given proportionate weight.

In this situation we have pre-term high risk babies with extra health challenges like haemophilia. We have a unit that was reportedly under pressure and where other negligent mistakes were made, one of them by a doctor who accused Lucy Letby. We have a culprit who yes displayed some odd behaviour but with nothing like the psychological profile reported in other similar cases. We have parents of alleged victims also criticising their general experiences in the hospital.

There is blame shifting and arse covering galore, all muddying waters which we are told is crystal clear.

The fact remains, this didn't have to happen. Claim all you like that the management's hands were tied that no-one could do anything, that Lucy Letby pulled all the strings. At the very beginning when the first suspicions were raised she could have been removed from the environment. And she wasn't. In my eyes that is the biggest crime of all.

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel posted the link to this blogpost a few pages back - https://www.thejusticegap.com/become-convicted-serial-killer-without-killing-anyone/ It really is quite staggering. Richard Gill essentially predicts the exact situation that came to pass - writing in 2014, before it actually happened.

The conditions required - as outlined eloquently by @MistressoftheDarkSide above - were all in place.

(By the way, I got it about-face earlier confusing the NYT with the New Yorker - the very long article on the case is from the New Yorker)

@placemats No. It isn’t. What IS confirmation bias is cherry picking interviews and stats to make it look like she was fitted up for a crime she didn’t commit by inept policing and a bad judicial system.

She is a manipulative liar who has carefully cultivated a narrative of martyrdom and childlike innocence. It began during the hospital investigation and continued during the police investigation and trial. And lots of people fell for it. Poor innocent Lucy, so young and sensitive. She’s been framed. She’s been badly treated. The mask slips in court were very telling.

Lots of people have been taken in by an exceptionally talented manipulator. The texts with her collègues in the context of events are a chilling record of that.

Really? I've never heard of that.

Totally agree @MistressoftheDarkSide LL should have been removed from the ward to safeguard both the babies and also her, since management thought the accusations were nonsense. This would have better protected working relationships (which is not a cuddly nice to have, it's essential to have trust in a team of healthcare professionals, or really any team).

There should also have been an immediate criminal investigation. It's easy for us to say but much more difficult when you're actually in the midst of it. I have been involved in a minor safeguarding situation in my own life and things that seem clear cut when you do the training absolutely are NOT when the messy truth is happening around you.

Whatever has gone on in this case, it has been compounded by a system failure of under resourcing which will certainly have cost the lives of babies.

PS like you I was initially trying to shut out details of this case owing to my own personal circumstances and biases. But I was expecting to find a more clear cut picture of LL's guilt than has been presented anywhere I can find.

If she was that great a manipulator surely she never would have been caught......