Lucy Letby case - Rob Rinder and David Davies

[LimeFawn]

Going back to thread in summer about Lucy Letby case needing criminal case review- surely that has to happen now?

In the past couple of days, I have seen David Davis MP talking about this on Good morning - apparently senior neonatal doctors contacted him directly;

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5HcW71BSGSM

Rob Rinder who is an expert in criminal law has also raised concerns- pic included below.

And article in guardian about her notes which was used a lot in this mumsnet thread as proof of guilt:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5115849-to-think-the-lucy-letby-case-needs-a-judicial-review

https://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

Surely there is enough new information coming to light to justify a criminal case review - her conviction really doesn’t seem safe at all?

I wondered about that. If someone is in hospital with a serious condition would they even look for signs of foul play and it sounds like you know the answer.

The police caution does imply a certain prejudice if you don't answer and then do later, e.g. "You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

I don't think there's been any misuse of statistics or flawed investigations but I'm sure the police will be extra careful to make sure the next raft of cases against her are just as watertight as the current ones. Nobody is witch hunting... what world do you live in where you even think that. It smacks of conspiracy theory nonsense to me.

The original convictions are safe and dont' need any more 'robust testing and scrutiny' - there's no legal avenue for that. Justice has been done in that handful of cases. Now justice for her other victims and a continuation of the lifelong punishment for the murderer. I only hope she's encouraged to attend future trials by videolink because she enjoys her moments in the spotlight far too much.

The problem is that nobody had any reason to suspect foul play when these babies died. But even if it had not been a matter of foul play, and just an inability to explain or to accept the hospital post-mortem, it would have been possible to request a coroner's post-mortem.

But nobody did. I think that, deliberately or not, the doctors who have reported suspicions are exaggerating the extent to which they found those deaths extraordinary or inexplicable at the time.

By the time it came to murder charges, of course, the bodies weren't available for examination, so the hospital post-mortems has fuller resources. They raised no concerns.

That simply isn’t true. The doctors raised the alarm and the hospital management refused to allow the police to be involved. The chief executive actually said something about not wanting crime scene tape all over the hospital. There was a concerted cover up by the executive team. That ended up with the consultants being forced to apologise to Letby. It took literally a couple of years to get the police involved.

After the chief executive was finally sacked his successor was horrified by the events he’d allowed to happen.

What they seem to have done though is to have raised concerns retrospectively once there had been a run of deaths, not regarding the certification of death in any specific case.

The podcast Double Jeopardy is worth a listen. The barrister gives a good overview of the Court of Appeal’s decision. He talks about how important it is to view this case in its entirety, and is very skeptical of so called expert opinions that are based on individual elements of the trial, when those individuals don’t have access to the full details, and indeed in most cases have not even read the appeal decision.

I’ve listened to views on both sides, and his is one of the more measured and balanced ones I’ve heard. He was also involved in the appeal of Sally Clark, and it’s interesting to hear him talk about how he does NOT think any of the opinions that have emerged since the trial point towards a miscarriage of justice in this case.

Also interesting to hear the Daily Mail journalist who did sit through the trial, talk about the other deaths during that year, the ones that were not included in the table. She talks about the reasons they weren’t included- essentially that they died of explainable causes and weren’t viewed as suspicious. LL was apparently present for two of those deaths, as well, but those babies were still classed as dying of natural/explainable causes- so it’s not as if they simply picked all the ones that LL was present at and included those.

When I first read the New Yorker article, I actually felt a little relieved- I’d actually love to find out that a nurse had not done these awful things. But hearing that podcast and reading the Court of Appeal decision has made me feel that justice was done.

No, you are alleging that. Concerns were raised about Letby and the police began an investigation. Do you really think they’re so stupid/corrupt/whatever that they assume the reports that she might be a murderer are true without any investigation? They did the same as the police did for Allitt - investigated whether potential crimes had been committed, then drew up a chart to see who was on duty when these suspected crimes occurred.

Why would they be biased against Letby? They’re police. They don’t believe everything they’re told. Nothing about Letby would leap out at them. She looked normal, no criminal background, etc etc.

That's really interesting, thank you. I'll give it a listen. It's one of the biggest red flags to me, that the so-called experts 'raising concerns' haven't actually immersed themselves in the full details of the trial (and even if they did, don't have access to the full detail that her barrister did. Lucy Letby kept her barrister on for the new trial so she was happy he'd done the best he could with the resources available to him.

I really don't think an expert needs to be immersed in all details of the trial to comment on anything they find unlikely according to their area of expertise.

An expert can say that they find the idea of murder by injecting air into feeding tubes implausible with reference to their specialist knowledge. They don't need to have an opinion on insulin, air embolisms or Facebook searches to state this. So long as they are transparent about what they are responding to, that's fine.

The police were given a list of suspicious cases by doctors who believed that Letby was the murderer (and who were unlikely to include cases she wasn't involved in for that reason). That was their starting point.

The experts don’t need to know the law or the case, if a toxicologist can ascertain someone was poisoned by a particular substance then that doesn’t need to know the law surrounding a case.

the experts are questioning the evidence, that is the part you don’t seem to be accepting- no expert needs to know the the entire case. Just the part in isolation they are expert.

the experts aren’t qualified to be explaining to judges if or where they have gone wrong / that would be totally overstepping the mark & unprofessional

They looked at many more deaths than those she was charged with. Watch the YouTube video.

So you think the expert who said the skin rashes weren't consistent with the skin rash that's associated with air embolism didn't need to read any of the testimony from the people who saw the rashes? Bit odd. The 'experts' most certainly do need to know all the relevant facts pertaining to their area of professed expertise.

the experts are questioning the evidence, that is the part you don’t seem to be accepting- no expert needs to know the the entire case. Just the part in isolation they are expert.

True but then they can’t make any pronouncements on whether the conviction was unsafe. That wouldn’t be their role if they were called in the trial - they can speak to their area of expertise but not opine on whether the jury reached the correct conclusion. So the statistics experts who say that the chart does not have statistical significance. Well, no but the prosecution never said it did. They didn’t call any statisticians to say that there was x level of probability that someone on shift was responsible. They used it to show that she had opportunity to carry out the crimes - she was there all the time and usually directly involved with the child in question.

I repeat - she could have called multiple experts herself to challenge the evidence against her. She didn’t. On appeal, she tried to introduce the evidence of Dr Lee and the court did hear it but dismissed it and refused to formally admit it because the point it was making was not related to what the prosecution was arguing anyway.

I've seen that. The starting point for the police enquiry was the cases brought to police by the doctors who suspected Letby. They identified the cases they viewed as suspicious as those associated with Letby. The police have stated in their own documentary that they had Letby in mind from the start.

Evans reviewed two sets of cases for the police. The cases brought to trial came from the first batch, which I would assume came from the doctors. None of the batch he reviewed later were brought to trial, even though he said he found some suspicious.

So the case does seem to have been open to researchers' bias as soon as police investigations were opened, or before since the doctors concerned had been gathering evidence and arguments for a while.

Why would they be biased against Letby?
Simply because she was their suspect. That’s how confirmation bias works. It happens in all kinds of contexts and it’s not necessarily intentional. This was not a case that started with a suspicion of a murderer loose of the ward- investigating all staff - that ended up with lucy Letby. The police’s investigation always started and ended with Lucy.

The claim by the prosecution was that there was an unusual /
concerning spike in deaths- and that Lucy was the one “common presence”. (“malevolent presence” or whatever he famously said).
Since the beginning of the trial statisticians have pointed out that this is a misleading inference- since the jury were shown only a sample of the deaths- and this wasn’t a random sample. It was a sample of deaths on the ward put together by police and a prosecution witness who already knew that the subject of investigation was Lucy Letby.
People have been searching and searching for clarity on exactly how many deaths occurred and how many LL was actually present for- and this information has been troublingly elusive.

Now it appears that we are getting closer to answers. It turns out that LL was only present for about half the deaths that occurred over that timeframe. So what do you think caused the (large) spike in deaths for which Lucy clearly wasn’t responsible? Were there other problems on the ward during that time perhaps?

6 of the 7 babies letby was ultimately accused of killing had postmortems at the time of death. Five of these found a (natural) and specific cause of death. One death was un-ascertained but no foul play was suspected. The seventh didn’t have a postmortem as doctors were already pretty confident that they knew the (natural) cause of death. None of these deaths were thought to be “suspicious” (in terms of foul play) by the pathologists who examined their bodies at the time. It was only in retrospect that Dr Dewi Evans- after offering himself to the police to help with the investigation into Lucy- decided that the deaths that occurred on Letby’s shifts were “suspicious”. And those that occurred when Lucy wasn’t on shift (still an unusually large number of deaths) were not.

If I thought my child was innocent I'd be in every newspaper in the land campaigning for her release and shouting from the rooftops. If my friend was convicted of something they didn't do I'd be doing the same. It's not happening.

I feel so sorry for the parents of the babies who died that they are having to suffer people saying Lucy Letby must be innocent after she went through a trial lasting many months where the jury were presented with detailed evidence. And then found her guilty.

They can opine on the safety of the conviction if they want to. They're not in court. If they have informed reservations about the expertise of the prosecution witnesses, or about major elements of the evidence, they may doubt the safety of the conviction and they are free to say so.

Doubting the safety of the conviction is not the same as insisting Letby is innocent, and if your professional expertise suggests a murder method is impossible, for example, you can certainly express doubts about the conviction.

It's also perfectly reasonable to say something like, I don't know much about the wider trial but I can confirm that this phenomenon is / isn't common in premature infants. People don't have to pretend to have paid 10,000 for a transcript or attended every day of a trial to make such points.

But that makes sense, doesn’t it - that they’d start with those as they were what the doctors were alleging. I doubt they’d stop at those though, and I believe they’re now looking for more possible cases that Letby might have been involved with. Do you not think that once they were investigating that they never asked whether there were any other suspicious deaths? Imagine someone raised one. Do you think the police just dismissed it out of hand because Letby wasn’t on duty?

Shipman was found out when he forged a will. The police then looked back at other deaths among his patients. Just his, yes? But not because they had an irrational bias against the man but because evidence had arisen that suggested he might be involved in foul play. That’s not bias, it’s normal.

Letby wasn’t found guilty of all the deaths on the list anyway, so, even though they were on the list, they weren’t judged as murders.

Sure, but researchers' bias is what the previous poster was claiming, and it's clear the police could have fallen victim to that - they knew it was Letby they were being asked to find guilty of murder. I suspect Evans did too, since he contacted them after hearing of the case.

They were asked to investigate a series of suspicious deaths - not Lucy Letby specifically although they would have been informed of the suspicions that it was her. But it’s a bit of a leap to suggest that they only concluded it was her because that was what the doctors told them. They also found evidence against her.
Dr Evans would not have been instructed to pass any comment on who did it - merely to state whether he believed the death to be non-accidental.
There were five other medical experts giving evidence for the prosecution- Dr Evans was just one. They all thought it was non-accidental.

Investigating a suspect isn’t bias. Part of investigating a suspect is also seeing if there could be a different perpetrator. This was a serious investigation. While they clearly had an initial suspect (Letby) because of the claims made by the doctors, if they’d found anything else in their investigations that suspect could have changed.

Medical murders almost always use methods that could be seen as natural. How many people did Shipman murder before he was caught? He dispatched people in ways that made their deaths seem plausible. He didn’t attack people with axes or strangle them, he used his medical knowledge, access and the trust people had in him to kill his patients. Nobody suspected a thing. I can’t remember if it was you who said he wrote the death certificates, but he needed the cremation forms undersigned by a second doctor - which they happily did. Also, his victims had relatives and those relatives believed the deaths were natural too. Only later did we find out they weren’t.

They weren’t being asked to find Letby guilty! They’d been alerted to possible suspicious deaths and been given the name of a possible suspect. That was the starting point of their investigation but it wasn’t limited by that.

One thing I find extremely concerning is the possibility that pretty much any baby Lucy Letby had contact with during her entire career is going to be looked at as a potential victim, and their history re-examined to possibly pin more cases on her. Given the contentious nature of medical evidence presented so far there's a potential that any infant with anomalous findings and with whom LL had contact could have their notes re-interpreted to fit the assumption that she must be guilty of harming them.

How long a time span would this cover? How many babies? How many parents might be re-traumatised?

How would further trials look, with witnesses likely unable to recall times, dates, sequences of events because at the time nothing seemed to be amiss? If she was indeed such a prolific killer or attacker, why didn't it get picked up on much, much earlier? Is the argument that she slowly built up to a frenzy in those two years? Refining her technique?

Moving forward the ultimate suggestion would be that the only way to protect babies from killer nursed is to have CCTV everywhere and for nurses to only ever work in pairs.