Lucy Letby’s scribbled notes

[Figmentofmyimagination]

At times when I’m feeling acutely distressed, it’s not at all unusual for me to scribble all sorts of dreadful thoughts down on paper eg die die die, hate hate hate, I hate you, I hate you, what’s the point of you, my fault, stupid me, etc etc etc, usually scribbling them all out so nobody can see what I’ve written. I’m pretty sure this is quite a common response to acute mental distress. I agree with this article that it feels very surprising that Letby’s scribblings were used as evidence of a ‘confession’.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/03/i-am-evil-i-did-this-lucy-letbys-so-called-confessions-were-written-on-advice-of-counsellors

Why are you asking me? Why not ask the defence team?

I'm starting to think that the defence team, bamboozled by all of the experts, probably believed that she was guilty.

Now of course, defence lawyers have to defend people who are bang to rights the whole time. I saw an interview with a barrister once who was asked what he did in that sort of situation, and he said "As a minimum, our job is to keep the police and the prosecution honest, if only for future cases". In other words, make them work for "beyond reasonable doubt".

But it can't be easy. Imagine you are the defence lawyer of the unsuccessful 7/21 bombers, or the accomplice of the Ariana Grande co-conspirator, or Ian Huntley. There's always some hothead who thinks that very very bad people shouldn't have legal representation, even though barristers are assigned on the cab-rank system (even if you have a private solicitor rather than legal aid). Indeed, one of the smears levelled at Keir Starmer before the election was that at some point he had defended some particularly unpleasant individual in court, although he would have had no choice in the matter.

So there will have been a lot of pressure on the people in LL's defence team. They will have known that it was the case of their lives, and that if she had been found innocent, the mob would have wanted answers. I don't know if this caused anything to change consciously, but it can't have helped their degree of diligence.

A very long case like Letby's becomes something of an opera or theatre. The mood of the court, if it's stuffy, if admin errors cause hold ups, there's a lot going on.
Being an expert witness for the prosecution brings little reputational risk as an array of other people agree with you already and you are unlikely to be singled out for blame.
An expert witness for the defence is much more risky - tell the court that a defendant is undoubtedly innocent or unlikely to re-offend and they go on to do so, your career will be in tatters.
That makes the pools to draw from are much smaller for defence. If an expert witness is the foremost expert in their field but talks down to the judge or is dismissive of the jury they could be a liability. The certainty of a Roy Meadow is hard to counter if you are trying to deliver a comprehensive and fair response. Most scientists are not well suited to dealing with prosecuting counsel.
For Letby's KC, it's a judgement call - albeit one where someone else pays the price for failure.

Because here you are singing like a bird about how important these ‘expert witnesses’ are 😆

And yet here we have all these ‘expert witnesses’ queuing up for their 15 minutes of fame on GMTV 😂

You know I don’t know so it’s just performative - ok.

The ignorance displayed on this thread simply underlines how important it is to spell things out in court for those who do not have the capacity to understand the scientific evidence without help.

As others have said, the hospital was downgraded at the same time as LL was put on admin duty. The jury was also not given a list of 6 deaths that occurred at the same time as the others, but which LL was not present for.

No one wants a killer to go free. What they want is for cases like this to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The fact that terrible things happened doesn't mean we can lock people up without solid evidence.

Excellent post.

Swearing now eh? Impressive.

In fact the judge and the CoA made their own errors wrt science in this case - indicating they needed medical advisors themselves. It’s part of the problem of complex medical case being tried by non-scientists. Ultimately it may lead to reform as to how these cases are tried.

Evidence please. You can't just blame people for being racist when they have opinions or raise issues you don't like. People are raising valid points.

I'm not saying that she is innocent but that the conviction was potentially unsafe & the terms of the judicial review should be expanded. So I don't know if I'm your conspiracy theorist.

For what it's worth, statistically speaking me & my kids would potentially be at more risk from a cover up and scapegoat culture, with a bacteria ridden hospital with leaky plumbing, underfunding, lack of enough nurses and an arrogant consultant culture, so giving the judicial review a wider remit is in our interests.

When my 22 year old son died after being hit by a car in 2022 I went through all sorts of emotions and I used to write things down in the following weeks because it helped to just get it all out of my head and I used to write things like "I killed him" but of course I didn't bloody kill him but the guilt I felt that I wasn't there to protect him made me feel like I killed him and I don't think it's abnormal to write things like this in a distressed state

For me, my questions are -
Why were the deaths when she was off shift were discounted from "she was present at all of the suspicious deaths"?
What made these deaths not suspicious in comparison to the ones that were?
What caused these additional deaths that were still at a higher rate than normal?
Why were all of the deaths found not to be suspicious by the pathologists? Were they tested for P. auruginosa? Were the babies that were ill and survived tested for it?
Why were there more stillbirths than normal? Were these women tested for P. auruginosa?

Then in turn, was raising each of these not permitted as evidence, or simply not raised by the defence? And why.

For what it's worth, statistically speaking me & my kids would potentially be at more risk from a cover up and scapegoat culture, with a bacteria ridden hospital with leaky plumbing, underfunding, lack of enough nurses and an arrogant consultant culture, so giving the judicial review a wider remit is in our interests.

So true. And a sad indictment of the state the NHS.

I guess they maybe felt they already had enough damning evidence. Plus they likely weren't scratching around for ways to cast doubt on an already fairly conclusive verdict as many on here seem to be.

I don't have a full opinion on the verdict, but the use of these notes as evidence makes me very uncomfortable. I don't think stream of consciousness journal entries can be definitively said to be truthful or an accurate representation of a person's behavior or even likely actions.

There are forms of CBT or practices like The Artist's Way where you're encouraged to write down all thoughts, including intrusive ones.

I once sat on a jury who convicted the defendant on the basis of this kind of evidence. My opinion was that they were a fantasist and I was devastated to be involved in a verdict that essentially condemned someone for their thoughts.

no the stats were selected by the prosecution team and this has been widely condemned by statisticians as false representation.

@Galadriell that's literally the defences job!

A fair trial isn't 'scratching around for ways to cast doubt on an already fairly conclusive verdict.' There are so many cases where a suspect has been identified and against the odds proven innocent or DNA evidence has freed people. We shouldn't just say 'it's a fairly conclusive verdict' and cherry pick evidence to support conviction.

The ward was not adequate to be dealing with such ill babies, there is chance letby has been used a scape goat. There is a new york times article that explains all the mishaps the ward had with said babies which means its possible to hospital was at fault and they have pushed the blame elsewhere. It sounds far fetched but the ward was performing very very very poorly.

The deaths could have stopped because they stopped sending such ill babies to the ward as it was not adequate to deal with them and the spot light was on the consultants to make sure mistakes stopped being repeated

I also feel like this wouldn't be the same if the sexes were reversed. Not to be that poster, but it's an interesting exercise to recognise our biases.

If a woman was found murdered and they then discovered that her husband had written 'I killed her' in his diary, I doubt people on here would be rushing to point out that he maybe didn't mean literally.

Ok then-could you be any more of a patronising ‘person’. I see you’ve set yourself up as the expert witness on this thread. Armchair lawyers are so much more entertaining than real ones 😂And clearly much more sensitive 😉

Well... a sick woman, in a hospital that has sewage coming through the taps, with an autopsy that stated natural causes...

‘Sewage’ 😂This is gold.