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/

Scott McLachan.

Here he is talking to Norman Fenton about the case:

Oh yes it is, thanks for that 😊

Xpost.

Never heard this before. From 6:40 😳

Have to find that data now and take a look!

I’d forgotten that bit. Does anyone have access to the ONS data he refers to? I have the FOI data which gives 2 neonate deaths for 2018.

This is exactly why the legal system uses "reasonable doubt" as the standard, because it agrees that it is better for someone guilty to go free than someone innocent to be locked up.

When you look at sexual assault cases, it causes problems in the other direction; very hard to establish guilt "beyond reasonable doubt" when it's just two people's differing recollections.

The civil standard of proof is "balance of probabilities" aka 50/50. Beyond reasonable doubt is significantly higher than this. And a jury felt like it was established. Two juries.

You can disagree with their verdict of course, but the fact remains that clearly your and my peers in society felt the evidence against her was extremely compelling.

I can't find it. Someone in the comments said he used the figures for the whole area and they were related to where the parents lived and not the hospitals themselves but I can't find the data.

I wonder were the COCH guilty of this?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/16/nhs-logging-baby-deaths-stillbirths-avoid-scrutiny/

I

I don’t think that the second verdict is proof of anything, considering that the first verdict was evidence.

juries have got things wrong before. Non scientific people are notoriously bad at understanding science. And that’s what this was. Just look at the Elizabeth Holmes debacle. The scientists all knew she was full of it, but she convinced so many people.

What does that say about scientific education in our country though?

It’s wasn’t just the jury that couldn’t engage with the science but the media too.

Here’s the MBRRACE report for 2018 - haven’t had a chance to look through it.

mbrrace-uk/reports/perinatal-surveillance-report-2018/MBRRACE-UKPerinatalSurveillanceReport2018-TablesandFigures_v3.pdf

Yes of course juries have gotten it wrong. But it is reasonable to give equal weight to the consideration that they may have gotten it right, as to the consideration they have gotten it wrong. Otherwise you're just choosing an outcome that suits your perspective.

What’s reasonable is to look at the evidence.

It’s of no meaning she couldn’t have a fair trial by that point and she’s been convicted on nothing.

Anyway it looks as if Jayaram has stuffed it up with the key card switch.

But the second jury was presented the previous conviction as evidence. I don’t see how that can be seen as an unbiased conviction.

Im in Australia and I’ve not heard of allowing previous convictions to be presented to the jury like that. It’s seen as prejudicial and leads to unsafe convictions.

one of our most famous murder convictions of a boy called Daniel Morcombe, he was abducted and killed by a paedophile who has previously raped and abducted other children and served jail time for it. However this was not revealed to the jury at the time, until after his conviction. You want a jury to convict on the evidence not be influenced by previous convictions.

@diktat it was presented as evidence to the jury. They were allowed to consider it in their decision.

which kind of makes the second trial a sham

It was considered "evidence" because it had gone through the legal process and a conviction made. So it is now considered fact; whether you agree or not. That doesn't make it a sham in the slightest, even though it is certainly a huge blow to her if innocent.

What key card switch?

It’s not surprising the jury came to the conclusion they did because they were presented with an entirely biased set of interpretations of the evidence from medical witnesses. The defence failed to call anyone to challenge this except a plumber. In cases involving such technical medical evidence , what is a lay jury to do? If the only experts stand up and say “this is the only way to look at the medical evidence”, and there’s no other expert to challenge that, they can only take it as fact. This was basically a trial whose outcome was decided by Dewi Evan’s in my view.

I’ve just been looking this up. As I understand it, the police mixed up the swipe-card logs by confusing exit- and entry-times to the unit. Entry was by swipe-card (to restrict access, for obvious reasons) while exit was just pushing a button to release the doors, no card needed.

The police mislabelled the two events so in the first trial, when evidence was presented in court that someone had entered, they had in reality left the ward, and vice versa. This was discovered and counsel were aware of it and had to keep reminding the jury to mentally reverse it. It ended up a total, confusing mess.

It also seems to have had a significant impact on the contention that LL was alone on the ward at various times because the error meant there were other staff there; the police were reading the logs wrongly.

This sort of evidence is absolutely crucial in my opinion, as it speaks to opportunity and whether the mechanisms of injury (which are contestable imho) could be accomplished completely unobserved especially as during some of the events there were a number of other people present both staff and parents. Not to say it elevates suspicion of them of course, it simply throws into question the likelihood of Lucy Letby being physically able to do what she was allegedly doing in the time frames given.

It's things like this that are dangerously ambiguous and invite too high a level of speculation from a jury.

It's why a number of experts question the "air via NG tube" mechanism. We have seen that induction of air has been used legitimately to clear tubes without clear caveats regarding risk. Therefore it is argued that the volume of air allegedly introduced was harmful. So you ask how much air would be harmful and the answer us "We don't know because you can't ethically inflate babies to find out". So the next question would be has it ever happened accidentally? Were lessons learned from that? How long did it take for the effects to be recognised as harmful? How harmful was it? Is there now literature in nurse training to ram it home that air getting into an NG tube is potentially harmful?

And the question of opportunity and time frame depends on accurate reporting of who was present and when, and how that is established.

What key card switch? Did this information emerge during the trial?

These damn doctors have a lot to answer for. They've cooked up this so called 'evidence' and presented it as fact. Doctors are not experts. Some doctors are experts, but most doctors are absolutely not. Quite a few of them aren't actually that bright if truth were told. Passing exams does not represent intelligence in its entirety. The whole thing is an absolute disaster.

Yeah, plod aren't exactly known for being that bright either.

I honestly think this case is beyond the fathoming of these people - doctors, judge, jury, police and they've been after a conviction and Letby was the unfortunate one doing the most shifts on the unit by the sounds of it.

Who is leading the enquiry?

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/about/the-inquiry-team/