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 totally agree with every point. Thanks for your posts on this thread.

It's entirely possibly the mortality spike was a statistical anomaly or evidence of poor care.

Exactly. And/or possibly higher admissions + higher acuity over that period. In the context of neonate mortality spikes nationally, CoC is not even at the top.

As there is no evidence of murder in any of the cases or any evidence to link the deaths to LL in particular, all the armchair psychologising of the salsa dancing serial killer is beside the point.

If it were just a few, I might believe they were “trophies”, but with that amount they must have been for patients that were not tied to this case and that left hospital ok.

@Twototwo15 Only about 20 out of the 257 had names of babies involved in the cases against her. I imagine if these ones were segregated or had anything distinct like extra fingerprints to show she’d handled them more then that would have been brought up.

I can’t now remember who, on this very long thread, posted a link to this blog, but I’ve been reading every entry (more than 20) and imho it provides devastating evidence of a prosecution case that massively simplified and downplayed facts, a defence that inexplicably failed to do its job, and a media that wanted a scalp.

The author has a medical and statistical background. Many of the numerous commenters are doctors (including neonatologists), nurses or otherwise with medical expertise. The complexity of the evidence that they describe and interpret (in great detail that can be challenging for a non-expert) is so huge that, for me, a ‘person off the street’ jury could have no hope of understanding it as it needed to be understood. I can see why Private Eye’s ‘MD’ (Dr Phil Hammond) has, in the last week, very publicly moved to call for a re-assessment of the case and has proposed that in such complex matters, having adversarial medical evidence just isn’t appropriate. He was initially convinced LL received the right verdict but he’s changed his mind to believe there’s overwhelming evidence that it needs re-examining.

It’s far too long to go into here but there are so many examples detailed there of ‘facts’ I’ve read about what happened or that LL did that it turns out she didn’t do at all.

Removed accidental double post.

@ThePure
Air embolism is notoriously silent. How can it ever be proved either way that this happened? It can't.

Yep.
Interesting reddit thread here discussing the evidence provided for child C.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/comments/1e8x4rw/baby_c_air_injection_into_stomach/

Discussing an xray from the 12th of June, Professor Arthurs said the most striking feature about this image is the dilatation of the stomach, which is 'full of gas.......

Professor Arthurs says, for his conclusion for Child C, that the 'marked gas dilatation' in the stomach noted at June 12 had several potential causes, including CPAP belly, sepsis, NEC or exogenous administration of air by someone.

and
Mr Myers says the 2019 report said Dr Evans raised a possibility of deliberate injection of air from June 12 via the naso-gastric tube.
Dr Evans, reflecting on that report, said: "Can't rule it out".
Mr Myers refers to a 'massive gastric dilation' was 'most likely' due to an injection of air on June 12.
Dr Evans: "That was a possibility, yes."

Only issue that is that Letby wasn't working from the 9th until 13th....so she was accused of injecting air on the 13th or 14th. I'm not sure which date, child C died on the 14th.
If she'd been working on the 11th and 12th then that evidence would have been seen as attempted murder by injection of air.

What caused that then on the 12th if it wasn't Letby? Presumably it was one of the other things Professor Arthurs said such as sepsis or Nec.
But yet when the baby dies on the 14th it's because LL did it?

A friend of mine is a doctor (now a consultant but he was a doctor at the time he told me this) and told me that doctors, as you say, fuck up ALL THE TIME. Becausde they're tired, hungover, distracted or just got it wrong, all the usual reasons why anyone fucks up at work.

he said there's a culture of omerta though in that doctors will always help each other cover up each other's mistakes, it's just the done thing. But they would never do that for nursing or ancillary staff.

She's suspected of many more, we have no idea how many but it's conceivable she was causing harm on a smaller scale for years. Some could be trophies the rest could be how she picked victims. Why else do you think she had 257 then?

I can't imagine the other staff would be stalking parents on facebook or keeping hundreds of handover sheets or writing they're evil and killed babies on purpose, no. It'd be very worrying if they were.

Air embolism is notoriously silent. How can it ever be proved either way that this happened? It can't.

So for any potential other health serial killers out there that want to use air embolism go right ahead because it can't be proved either way according to @ThePure gee I wonder if that's WHY she chose that method?!

If there were no murders then all the hoarding of handover notes and Facebook activity in the world don't matter.

There absolutely were murders, and far more to come out yet. But you seem to think health care killers don't exist just by virtue of their job.

They do exist

Harold Shipman, Beverley Allit and Charles Cullen are health care serial killers

Lucia De Berk, Daniela Poggiali and, in my view and that of the CCRC, Colin Norris are not healthcare serial killers although they were wrongly convicted as such. The people they were said to have killed died of natural causes

Which group Lucy Letby falls into time will tell but for me her case has all the hallmarks of the miscarriage of justice cases and none in common with the actual serial killers.

What way does the CRCC work if they do agree to look at a case?
Is it a retrial? Or is it a case of looking at the apparent strongest evidence versus the new evidence that has emerged and then deciding that the conviction was unsafe or wrong based on that?

@kkloo thats really interesting I didn’t realise that. How can that be overlooked?

I listened to the last episode of the Liz hull daily mail podcast yesterday just to see what they were saying.

they discussed the appeal and the reasons for the appeal. And discussed the New Yorker article. They said that the sewage had already been brought up in the trial and the jury just didn’t buy it. I don’t get that. How can a jury of ordinary people understand how serious sewage leaks in a neonatal unit is? Probably again Ben myers fault for not calling a microbiologist or someone to explain its significant.

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2022/04/italian-nurse-acquitted-of-murder-after-statistical-analysis

www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/how-the-worst-serial-killer-in-hollands-history-went-free/

ccrc.gov.uk/news/commission-refers-the-murder-and-attempted-murder-convictions-of-colin-norris-to-the-court-of-appeal/

Miscarriages of justice in purported healthcare killings happen a fair amount because of dodgy stats and dodgy medical evidence. If you can seriously read the above cases and still feel certain that Lucy Letby's conviction is secure then explain to me how you come to that conclusion?

CCRC don't retry cases they have to refer them back to the court of appeal for them to do that but they have a very high bar to do it. There must be new evidence that would make it a realistic prospect that the original conviction was unsafe.

Are you referring to the air on the xray on the 12th?

If so they seemed to overlook it like they did with everything else.

If it happened when she wasn't there and they couldn't blame her they'd ignore it, or if it could be put down to other reasons they'd ignore it but if they could find a way to attribute it to LL causing harm then they would!

Yep the plumber needed to be followed up with an expert who could explain the types of pathogens that could be in a hospital with dodgy plumbing, along with someone who could explain how that could affect babies.
Did Myers expect the jury to just guess?

Oh yes I understand that there's a high bar, I'm just wondering how the court of appeal works? Is it a new trial? or it is that they look at the new evidence and from that they can decide whether a conviction was unsafe?

I think they said that there wasn't any evidence of infection consistent with sewage leaks or something?

I don't know much about Colin Norris I had to google but this seems pretty damning- Suspicions were raised when Norris predicted that healthy Ethel Hall would die at 5:15 am one night, which is when she fell into a catastrophic arrest, and tests revealed that she had been injected with an extremely high level of man-made insulin. Insulin was missing from the hospital fridge and Norris had last accessed it, only half an hour before Hall fell unconscious.

Lucy said similar although not to that accuracy. You'll be trying to tell me her and Colin Norris just have psychic powers next...

Drs and nurses say stuff like this all the time. It's not at all uncommon. We can often tell when people are about to die what with it being our every day reality. These people were very elderly and sick. I doubt very much that this tabloid quote reflects exactly what he said.

'Healthy Ethel Hall' WTF as she doing on a hospital ward if she was healthy!

The insulin tests were not to a forensic standard. Up to date medical evidence has now shown that all the deaths he was accused of causing were most likely natural causes

I put the CCRC link upthread. Here it is again

ccrc.gov.uk/news/commission-refers-the-murder-and-attempted-murder-convictions-of-colin-norris-to-the-court-of-appeal/

www.thejusticegap.com/science-fact-and-science-fiction-the-case-of-colin-norris/

Do you think the CCRC would refer the case back to the court of appeal if the case against him was 'pretty damning'.

What you are doing is classic confirmation bias. Attributing significance to a throw away comment in retrospect

He may very well have said similar about patients who did not die but no one would remember that.

A comment like that is not in any way shape or form evidence that a murder took place.

They probably did say that but that doesn't mean that there was no infection.

False negatives are common when testing babies for infection, and we don't even know what exactly they tested for.

And from the testimony I read it seems that some of the babies were definitely showing signs of infection, they just tried to make out that all the babies were doing great and in 'good condition'.

They also tried to say that child K didn't have any lung infection and that the haziness on the xray was due to surfactant yet when she was transferred the other hospital said she arrived with severe lung disease among other things that the COCH apparently didn't notice.

I wonder if that's why after initially charging her with Child Ks murder, they chose not to present the evidence and therefore the judge ordered a not guilty verdict?

Would there not be some evidence of infection in at least one baby if there was a problem though? I'm not saying I think she's guilty. And I think it's surprising that there was no evidence of infection if there was a problem with the sewage and the babies were too close together due to overcrowding. But presumably they look into these things during an autopsy?

Not to that degree, and certainly not down to the minute they'll collapse! Doctors predictions (and by that I mean their estimations that they've been asked by family to give, not volunteered the info out of nowhere) are often wrong. They could say someone who is actively dying will die in 2 days and yet it takes a week. And that's someone who is in the dying process, not a healthy woman who is just recovering from a fractured hip! And in no way even expected to die AT ALL. Posters on here really need to get their facts straight, she was not sick, neither were most of the babies in the LL trial to the point any of the nurses (bar LL) expected them not to make it.

Why not believe Beverly Allit is innocent too? I mean that was all insulin, maybe things weren't up to a forensic standard in her case either.

There was evidence of infection in some of the babies.

There was a note for suspected sepsis for child A

With child C there was concerns for NEC, suspected Sepsis

With child D the doc gave an update on her condition to her parents and said 'likely sepsis'

Child E 'suspected sepsis' and they were so sure the cause of death was NEC that they told the parents a post mortem wouldn't tell them anything.

Child F was being treated for suspected Sepsis

Child G 'suspected sepsis'

Child I 'suspected sepsis' at one point, then suspected NEC

I'm sure that there's more

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-55196-6

Hip fracture is very commonly a terminal event in elderly patients. Anyone who says that an elderly lady dying after a hip fracture op was not expected to die AT ALL just has no knowledge of common medical facts.

Obviously I know that Drs predictions of death aren't accurate largely because I am a bloody Dr. What I am suggesting happened here is he made a silly joking comment that by a bizarre coincidence turned out to be right. Given the frequency of death on a geriatrics ward and of black humour in nurses this is not at all an unlikely association.

It was in the wake of Shipman and people were on the lookout for medical serial killers so when Mrs Halls collapse was suspected to be unusual that one comment was taken in a different light and out of 16 people with access to the insulin that night they decided he had killed her and then went looking for further suspicious incidents when he'd been on duty none of which were in fact suspicious at all it now transpires.

People in hospital are sick and at increased risk of dying vs the general population. When you work in a hospital you know that someone dying unexpectedly when you had not expected it is a completely commonplace and unremarkable event.

The first patient of mine who ever died when I was a junior house officer many years ago was due to go home the following day after cancer surgery. Her surgery was curative and I was so pleased for her but she had a huge CVA out of the blue in the night and never woke up. I cried my eyes out in the linen cupboard. I have lost count of how many times people unexpectedly died (or indeed unexpectedly survived) after that.

When you are in an environment where death occurs all the time then by a matter of chance you sometimes might appear to have 'predicted it'. We had a schizophrenic patient on the respiratory ward for a while who completely spooked everyone by appearing to predict people's deaths but in fact it was just that a lot of people die on a respiratory ward in winter and his delusions were about angels and death so he talked about it a lot. Just by chance he was 'right' a few times and people then recalled every time he was right and forgot every time he was wrong ie confirmation bias. Lots of staff really believed he was psychic.

But anyway none of that actually matters

The most important thing is that the actual criminal cases review commission think Colin Norris convictions are unsafe. It is not my personal opinion. It is the view of the legal body set up to review whether a miscarriage of justice has taken place. So you may think as you please but legal opinion is not with you on this one.