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 don't believe for a second that the doctors were all completely inept and/or evil scapegoating monsters, the police were biased against her and didn't do their job properly, the CPS didn't look at the evidence properly, the highly experienced defence team were bad at their job, and then bad at their job a second time when Letby inexplicably retained them, the experts called were all to be discredited for various reasons or were just plain wrong, the defence weren't able to call any witnesses that supported their case for totally legit reasons, the highly experienced judge was wrong in how he oversaw the trial, the catalogue of evidence against LL can all be dismissed, the parents' experiences should be ignored, the numerous pieces of strange behaviour (facebook stalking, illegal handover note collecting, confession note writing) is all irrelevant etc.

It takes absolutely enormous mental gymnastics to get to a place where this is in any way a plausibly unsafe conviction.

Goodness me! if you've listen to the spotify podcasts then I cannot see how you could not conclude that her conviction is NOT beyond reasoable doubt and an unsafe one at that.

Her defence did not call any expert witnesses to make counter claims about the obsurd statistics used to outline Lucy’s guilt. The experts go into great details about statistical analysis of the data around neonatal deaths and Lucy’s on shift rota and how it was presented outside of a broader concept
.
This will be one of rhe UK’s greatest miscarriage of justice. You simply cannot put blame at a single nurse when there were a catalogue of failings in reporting any concerns a whole year before she was removed from the unit. One major issue was the horrific sewage leak through the neonatal unit where you have the most vulnerable babies some weighing as little as 800 grams!! Just why was this unit allowed to continue its care in these circumstances fgs!!?

There’s no point looking at this case in terms of what you “believe” about the people involved. What matters is the evidence that was used to convict LL and whether it stands up to scrutiny.

Yes it's amazing how our police, jury, judges are suddenly so inept in their jobs all because of Lucy Letby. This case has stumped them so much, they have no idea what they're doing or how to do it.

Interestingly, the judge that turned Letby's first application for an appeal down is the same guy who led the prosecution of Sally Clark.

Another point on statistics.
Still birth rates had increased so cesarian section had increased (to try and reduce these still births) and therefore increasing activity into the neonatal unit.
Lower births weights / twins and triplets increases likely hood of increasing need for specialist care.
The unit was understaffed (hence LL working overtime) under resourced with inexperiences senior staff who did not escalate the needs of the babies to higher graded uniits. The list goes on.,,, there are many many, and very sad to say, Management failings before concluded their was a serial killer amongst them!

And a lawyer involved with freeing her has said he sees no parallels in the cases and that Lucy Letby is clearly guilty on a very safe conviction. You can draw any parallels you like on either side. Which is why I say that the ONLY thing that matters is the law.

The law was followed. The defence was highly experienced and had every chance to defend. The jury found the defendant guilty beyond reasonable doubt on multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. They also failed to return verdicts in some cases. They didn't find her 'not guilty' on any of the charges whatsoever. One charge was retried and she was found guilty by another jury. The first case was appealed and the appeal was refused. She's now in the process of appealing the latest conviction (but even if successful she's still guilty of all the others - and it's very unlikely she'll be successful).

This is literally all that matters. She's in jail on a whole-life order and thankfully that's where she - as a convicted and deeply evil baby murderer - will remain.

Unfortunately the law was not followed by way of a duty of care to report concerns to numerous medical committees where there is a police presence who can support in cluster mortality as such at the Chester. This is a classic case of ‘bias’ had a more data driven investigation been carried out it would sadly have unveiled a catalogue of human error of judgement and an increase in demand on a unit that was ill equipt to deal with the surge. All this data is available in the public domain. It goes without saying an awfull tragedy for all involves but the justice system really does need to do much better.

As this thread is rather long, the private eye reports might have been missed by some, and I found them an interesting read.

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/lucy-letby

My view for what it’s worth - having spent some time following the case. The notion of ‘confirmation bias’ along with dubious circumstantial evidence, together with the fact that the loss of babies lives is particularly heart wrenching because they can only ever be innocent, means that this is a huge matter of public interest.

Where wrong occurs, either deliberate or otherwise, human nature and history tells us we tend to need a scapegoat. Look for example at the world wars, it’s easy to blanket deem certain countries as ‘baddies’ and ignore potentially horrific war crimes committed by those fighting for the ‘goodies’.

I find it much more plausible that this is an institutional failure, covered up to protect those more senior as it snowballed. We’ve seen this recently with the post office scandal, and I’ve unfortunately had own experience of corporate cover ups which protect the powers that be, who have blood on their hands (literal or metaphorical) through negligence amounting to corporate manslaughter. I find it shocking but not surprising that whistleblowers were faced with detriment and that potential witnesses for the defence were advised to stay out of it for fear of their own career.

I won’t repeat what’s in the private eye article but I tend to believe that this is a horrific miscarriage of justice.

The Law states innocent until proven guilty. It strikes me that the reverse was applied here due to the tragic loss of lives and emotive nature of the case.

In short - I believe Letby is a convenient scapegoat demonised by the media and public opinion from day one. I believe there is an institutional cover up to protect the reputations of the senior clinicians and management along with the ‘trusted and revered great British NHS.

The Private Eye article suggests that it should be mandatory for the defence to put forward expert witnesses, but what happens in cases where the defendant is guilty but protesting their innocence, and such experts might reveal their guilt?

Should the defendant be compelled to put forward a witness who will tear down their own defence argument?

I strongly believe that the defendant and their team should be free to decide on the most appropriate strategy to give them the best defence available - forcing them to potentially give evidence against themselves makes zero sense as a policy.

I’m sorry but this is doing nothing but demonstrating your total lack of empathy. It’s witch trial logic and witch trial vitriol. Every single thing she does is evidence of how malevolent she is, apparently. Did you ever, at any stage. even consider the possibility that she may be innocent? Someone engaging with this trial with a genuine open mind would not sneer as you do here at actions that have a perfectly human explanation - stress and trauma. Even if she is guilty I would expect her to express stress and trauma during this process. I still wouldn’t sneer at it.

If she expresses psychological distress after 6 years of the most unimaginable psychological torture. Including imprisonment, “look how mad she is! she definitely did it!”

If she cries on the stand “Weaponising tears!”

If she doesn’t cry “cold hearted bitch”

She says the tracksuit she was wearing when arrested at dawn was pjs “Tracksuits are not marketed as pyjamas, ergo this is an abhorrent LIE!!!”

How do you think you would feel and behave if you were innocent and you’d been dragged through what can only be termed psychological torture for YEARS? You act like PTSD is an absurd proposition for someone who literally had their entire life torn apart while still in their 20’s.

Has it never once occurred to you to consider the possibility that all of this wasn’t an elaborate act? Did you even for a moment consider the possibility of innocent until proven guilty?

You make it clear that you were already sure she was guilty before the trial even started by sneering at her for expressing any psychological pain. That exposes very well how incapable you are of balanced and careful thinking.

Of course you think she’s a guilty chancer. You thought so before the trial even began.

P.s: if you’re wearing a tracksuit at dawn when the police knock on your door I do not think it is an egregious lie to call this pjs. What an utterly stupid thing to say. Do you only wear things marketed as nightwear as nightwear? Ffs. If this disingenuous claim wasn’t so sinister it would be laughable.

Exactly this. There is no rational argument in favour of hand waving away the multitude of experts in relevant fields who have expressed doubts with the evidence. At this stage they include Nobel Laureates, heads of royal societies, and the former forensic regulator for the UK, and that’s the tip of the iceberg. There are now dozens of eminent experts expressing grave concerns. It isn’t just a handful of fringe cranks. This is a genuinely unprecedented response to a potential miscarriage of justice. A proper review of the evidence can only strengthen the conviction if indeed it is sound.

She doesn’t deserve empathy. She is an evil bitch who murdered babies because she could.

Where was her empathy? Oh wait. She is incapable of it.

The ones on this thread lacking empathy are the poor Lucy bleeding heart conspiracy theorists who seemingly couldn’t give a shit that the parents of her victims could never see mn as a place they could get support because too many people are siding with the bitch who murdered their tiny babies.

There plenty of conspiracy sites where people can join the poor Lucy fanclub and protest her innocence. A parenting forum is not the place.

Nobody on this thread is “siding with a bitch who murdered babies” by arguing that there might well be a miscarriage of justice here. That follows quite straightforwardly using logic.

This is a public forum. The UK is still a democracy. I am as entitled as you are to comment on matters of public interest, particularly those that pertain to the integrity of the justice system which we all live under. We are all entitled to hold the justice system to account, and to demand scrutiny and rigour.

You may not like that, but it is a very good thing for all of us that the British public, media, and independent experts can engage with discourse around convictions and trials. In fact public scrutiny is a crucial check on the justice system. It is an important step towards any miscarriages of justice eventually being righted, which I assume is something you support.

This gets overlooked all the time. The babies all (bar one) had post mortems by experienced neonatal pathologists (bar one as the doctor on duty was so sure this death was due to infection). They all retuned natural causes and were uncontroversial at the time. One was listed as “unascertained” which means “unascertained but natural” which is a common finding in neonatal death. The pathologists, of course, actually examined and autopsied the bodies. Nobody said “wait a minute! I think that baby may have been murdered!” at the time. Nobody.

Several years later those post mortems were essentially overturned by Dr Dewi Evans, a retired Paediatrician who was never in his life a neonatologist or a pathologist, without ever seeing the babies either in life or death, using the contemporaneous notes of the actual pathologists.

Now that may or may not trouble you as it troubles me, but there it is.

Oh dear

I have no idea what their motivations were but other doctors have since come out and expressed similar doubt over these babies’ apparent stability.

What I mean by “caveats” is explanations of how unreliable we are in judging odd behaviour. I believe that similar explanations can be given regarding the reliability of eye witness testimony in some courts. But the fact we seem unable to use statistics correctly in U.K. courts, and assumptions seem to be made that statistics are just obvious to a lay person (which is blatantly false) so juries aren’t given any direction from an expert on how to understand them, I don’t hold out much hope re this issue!!

The media vilified LL during the trial. The country was ready to string her up. Her friend who was in the documentary got all sorts of abuse for it. Her parents seem to be, on the face of it, quiet, mild-mannered people. There are plenty of reasons they may not have "run to the press". All you are doing here again is saying because people have not acted exactly like how I THINK I would act in these extremely difficult and unusual and traumatic circumstances, then she must be guilty. You have no idea what they are going through, what they've thought about and how they are making their decisions. You can't possibly put yourself in their shoes.

@BreatheAndFocus

"Some of Shipman’s patients died of natural causes during the time he was killing other patients. That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill the other patients. Some of his patients will also have died when he was nowhere in the vicinity nor had been for ages before. Again, that doesn’t mean he didn’t kill the patients he was found guilty of murdering."

So there was an unusual peak of deaths but only some of those deaths were due to LL, the other deaths were what then? Are you suggesting there were TWO unusual peaks over the same period of time, one due to LL and one due to some unknown cause? That seems very unlikely.

The mental gymnastics was that there was a serial killer.

Everything else, all of the other issues with the hospital have been completely ignored and instead this picture has been painted of a good hospital where they were looking after well babies and out of nowhere they collapsed or collapsed and died. It's wild.

SensorySensai

it’s got to the point now on this thread that you’re just making stuff up

you’ re convinced your belief are worth more than experts - who are not saying that LL is no guilty. They are suggesting the evidence presented ir how it was presented is not as it seems.

they are entitled to do this and the public are allowed to discuss that

I haven't been able to find an answer to that either.

I'm also wondering why he didn't review all the notes, did Myers just not put them to him or did he only agree to get involved insofar to the extent he did get involved. It said he wrote 2 reports I think?

I wonder did the prosecution experts contact Dr Shoo Lee for the original trial? Would anyone know what the normal procedure would be there when they're relying on 'evidence' that's not widely replicated?

Haven't read the full thread (there's too many of these Lucy Letby threads to keep up with) so this might have already been said but a nurse who had previously worked there detailed a huge amount of issues with the hospital and she also said.

"“I am so sad about the deaths and collapses of babies since I left, whether those in 2015 and 2016 or otherwise.
“However I also now feel that Countess of Chester did me a favour making me redundant. I was the senior nurse and I was always with the sickest babies. There but for the grace of God go I.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/24/lucy-letby-hospital-accident-waiting-happen-nurse-claims/

It seems like if these threads weren't all about Lucy Letby they might have been named after a different nurse!

I suspect her taking the stand threw off the experts the defence were going to use. No way was a plumber their actual only choice, but seen as her testimony was contradictory and heavily implicated her, I guess they were limited in who they could utilise without causing further damage to her case.

I’d recommend that you read some of the reporting around the trial itself. At no point did the prosecution assert that the hospital was good or that the babies were well. In fact, part of the case is that the prosecution believed that Letby chose the most complex babies as a cover and acknowledged that the unit had issues, which is why Letby was able to continue to harm babies for so long. However, the staff that worked there ( and not just the doctors) noticed something ‘odd’ was occurring from the beginning. The only person not wondering was Letby herself.
Reference this text conversation between Letby and her colleague after Baby D:

One of Letby's colleagues raises concerns about the babies' deaths in a text to her.
Nurse: 'There's something odd about that night and the other 3 that went so suddenly.'
Letby responds: 'What do you mean?'
Nurse A: 'Odd that we lost 3 and in different circumstances… ignore me, I'm speculating'.
Letby: 'Well Baby C was tiny, obviously compromised in utero. Baby D septic. It's Baby A I can't get my head around.'