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/

They went to the CDOP far too late. Whether Lucy is guilty or innocent the doctors were negligent to not report the deaths to the CDOP immediately. The function of the CDOP is to learn and improve. Any unexplained child deaths should be reported. My guess as to why they didn’t is because they knew that their practice would also be questioned. They were very arrogant from what I have read. Reluctant to seek advice, reluctant to transfer.

It wasn’t within the doctors’ remit to report the deaths. That’s a management responsibility and management failed to listen, let alone report. So here we have posters exonerating Letby and exonerating the top management that failed to address the issue and blaming the clinicians who drew attention to the situation. Unbelievable.

Who is exonerating Letby?

People here are trying to examine what took place.

Oh come on. Dr Jayaram was absolutely certain in his testimony that he walked in on Lucy Letby having directly harmed a child but said and did nothing ? (So he didn't actually see the action but just "knew" she'd done something) Paralysed by disbelief? Perhaps, in the moment but if his retrospective certainty was so great he should have acted. You can claim we "don't understand" policy procedure and NHS "culture" all you like but it still doesn't make sense.

A parent suspected of abuse in such a setting would be separated from their child and authorities called in straightaway.

??? GMC guidelines state that doctors should follow the procedure at work for reporting serious incidents and near misses.

If they are not satisfied with the response and/or there is immediate risk to patients they must contact a regulatory or investigatory body.

They do not need proof, simply “reasonable belief”.

Nothing to stop them going to the CDOP in 2015.

It was his duty, as per the GMC guidelines, to report and take further if he believed patients were at risk.

You can’t almost catch someone red handed anyway, you either you do or you don’t. He didn’t.

I agree. At the very least did Dr J say "What's happened?" to Lucy Letby as that would seem important - you know, getting a full picture in order to inform treatment.

This is an extremely troubling part of the prosecution evidence. It essentially accepts a hunch and turns it into fact several years down the line.

I have to correct an error I’ve made on this thread. I suggested the reason for not calling Defence experts might have been because Lucy admitted to her legal team that she was guilty. But (as if I’d been thinking about it properly I should have realised) this can’t be the case - because while you can plead not guilty having told your legal team you did it - you can’t then give evidence saying you’re innocent- your legal team would then be “professionally embarrassed” and have to withdraw because they’re not allowed to mislead the court (obviously wouldn’t tell the court / prosecution the reason why). So in this case, given LL has actually given evidence saying she’s innocent, there can’t be a behind the scenes confession to her lawyers. Sorry for being misleading in that, I was being totally dim!

Just to add to this - the CDOP is not just for if you suspect that a someone is murderjng children. It’s to speak to other experts about a case and go through everything you did and see if there was anything you missed or could have done differently. The doctors go to the CDOP not the managers. They should have been taking all the deaths there right from the start to see if they missed anything or could improve. I suspect they didn’t because they were arrogant and didn’t like to be critiqued.

No worries, that’s interesting, thanks.

The testimony reads like he walked in to check because he was already concerned and he caught her in the act but said nothing so she remained on the ward and around the baby.

Then there was a second desat, he still left knowing that Letby was there.

At 7.19am, door swipe data shows Dr Jayaram is shown heading towards the office part of the hospital. He says at this point, he believed everything was stable, and he would be preparing for the day ahead without going home.

How is everything stable if the serial killer who just tried to harm the baby twice is still there with the baby?

Within minutes he was back in the neonatal unit for a further desat, but yet still left Letby there even though Child K was still there and other babies.

Doctors not understanding nursing practice and misinterpreting behaviour. A tale as old as.....well, since there's been doctors and nurses working together really. They're two very different professions working closely alongside one another. Add in the egotism and elitism that doctor training seems to encourage and it's a recipe for disaster.

Why didn't the defence pull this Dr Jayaram up on his behaviour? Mutual professional respect from a peer perhaps? Whereas the young, working class, female nurse was fair game? I'm repeatedly not seeing how the defence were worth their pennies tbh.

Shame you weren’t on the defence legal team @lawnseed.

Don't be sarcastic. People mightily more qualified than me have questioned the defence team.

The defence did. Not saying the defence was great but they did pull him up on this. Said if he really saw that he would have called the police. The fact he didn’t means that isn’t what he saw. He said the alarms were off but another nurse testified they were on.

they found her guilty at the retrial as they were able to consider her previous convictions as evidence. So the argument of 2 fair trials is ridiculous really - I’d bet money on her being found not guilty at the second trial without that being used as evidence.

Guardian letters:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/15/the-lucy-letby-trial-and-the-limits-of-expert-opinion

An interesting response from a paed in the guardian.

Before 2005, a procedure known as the “whoosh” test was commonly used to inject air through a nasogastric tube in neonates. By listening for a “whoosh” over the abdomen, the sound of expelled air indicated that the distal end of the feeding tube was correctly sited.
This procedure was subsequently abandoned because of a lack of accuracy rather than safety.

so air used to be purposefully put into the abdomen with no known consequences.

if a newborn is intubated I’m often asked to listen with a stethoscope over the lungs for air entry to make sure the tube is in the right place when resuscitation is occurring. Sometimes the tube isn’t in the right place and the air is going into the abdomen….again never known of or ever been told to watch out for any adverse effect of that.

Wow.

Anyone remember which doctor/expert said something like 'We can't just go injecting air into babies to see what happens?"

I had a family member with a NG tube as a baby and they used to suck out the tube with a syringe and use pH paper to check that it was acidic (ie stomach acid). That’s what they were taught to do by the hospital. I haven’t seen anyone say that happened. The main concern was accidentally putting the tube into the lungs. No mention ever of worrying about air in the tube.

I think if I was a jury member it’d be hard to get over the defence's acceptance of the evidence that some babies were poisoned by insulin. If that could have been challenged there might have been a stronger case for the idea that it was just issues with the hospital and sewage etc.

How does anyone explain the overfeeding? Negligence again? Or the fact one poor baby projectile vomited further than anyone could imagine a baby that tiny vomiting? Plus babies that cried in a way doctors had never even heard premature babies cry before?!

What evidence do you have for overfeeding?

The whole “I’ve never seen vomit/cry/air bubble/rash/blood like that before in my life” is a prosecution tactic. It’s entirely anecdotal and subjective. It’s meant to convince the unsuspecting that this vomit is special vomit so it must be murder vomit.

That’s why that was such a mistake. They must have had a rationale for doing so but it messed up the case.

There’s plenty of evidence of the problems at the unit and with the plumbing the defence just didn’t explore it.

Unfortunately I think the insulin issue boils down to the fact that it was presented as incontrovertible evidence as tests had confirmed it. The reliability of the test is in question as it is not designed for forensic use, and as it returned essentially anomalous findings, it should have been noted and further tests done. But it wasn't.

If Lucy Letby had tried to challenge what was presented as such a fact in court, she would have opened herself up to a savage attack, with accusations of arrogance and delusion. How dare she question the experts? I think the strategy used by the defence was basically an attempt at damage limitation.

Questioning experts if you are not an expert is fraught with risk.

This is an absolutely awful podcast. The presenters get their kicks out of the traumas of others. They're flippant and their research is appalling. Dreadful pair.