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 have read a lot of the reporting, plus the daily transcripts, and many of the rebuttals online. I am well informed.

They absolutely did make out that they're well, it's in the testimony, describing babies who were needing a lot of intervention and/or who were clearly deteriorating and they said things like how they were well babies or they had no concerns.

She had every opportunity to call witnesses if the “obsurd” statistics were indeed wrong. Why didn’t she?

Thanks but I know about bias. However, so do those in professions where bias might affect them. Initially they had Letby in their minds, but if evidence had shown a different person, or even an accomplice, the idea that bias would have overridden that is frankly silly.

If bias was so common, we’d have hardly any Not Guilty verdicts. Our papers would be full of people wrongly convicted just because they’d been named as a suspect.

There are numerous opportunities to point out bias in an investigation, a decision to prosecute, and in court. The global justice systems would be worthless if the police and courts in thrall to bias.

More than that, if this is an unsafe conviction for those reasons, then maybe we’d better look at the numerous convictions that - shock, horror - began with a suspect who was then found guilty. That would include Allitt, who totally must be innocent because not only was she a suspect at the start like Letby, the police also did a chart! They must have been biased!

No, it doesn’t. People who murder babies can do it in any hospital - a good one or a not so good hospital. Who knows what compels them to do so. More than that, if murder was an idea entertained by the person for a while, an understaffed unit with a higher number of deaths would be a good place to do it.

I don’t know why you keep saying that idea is silly when the whole point is that it happens all the time because it’s part of our basic human psychology.
Its weird.

just because it happens often doesn’t follow it happens always. Furthermore often our intuitions are very often very accurate/ correct. Theres a reason the human brain works this way, because it is both fairly accurate and efficient.
i recommend the book “thinking fast and slow”.

So there were two unusual spikes in deaths?
One spike was caused by something that happened in the hospital , the other - which happened exactly the same time - was due to a nurse with who started serial murdering babies?

we’d better look at the numerous convictions that - shock, horror - began with a suspect who was then found guilty

we absolutely 100% should do this. No question at all.

Normally an investigation starts with the identification of a criminal incident- a theft , a murder etc . What is so unusual and difficult about this case is that it didn’t start that way. It started with an unusual spike in deaths and an investigation into Lucy Letby. Which included a determination about whether any crime had been committed at all.

It could be. A natural uptick in deaths because of failings in the hospital plus the actions of Lucy Letby. It’s really not beyond the realms of belief.

Anyway I think that for some people on here, even a retrial and a fresh attempt to bring her own expert evidence wouldn’t be enough because chances are the jury would still convict her. They want her to be exonerated without a retrial because they cannot countenance a situation where she could be guilty, even if this is proven in a court of law.

It’s really not beyond the realms of belief

it’s not beyond the realms of belief, no. But it absolutely makes a nonsense any claim about guilt based on statistical inference - references to the usual spike in deaths , patterns of when they occurred- etc etc.
it is clear that the integrity of this conviction now stands and falls on the medical evidence alone.

Also it’s pretty unlikely, as it would depend on two unusual and independent events happening at the same time. What seems far more likely / obvious is that the thing that caused the unusual spike in deaths that Lucy wasn’t responsible for , may have caused some or many of the others as well,

To be clear what I mean is- The determination of whether a crime had taken place at all (were the deaths “suspicious”) was not independent of the investigation/ suspicions about Letby, the two were fundamentally tied together - one never existed without the other. This is what is so unusual and problematic in this specific case , and makes it so susceptible to bias in a way that most criminal investigations are not.

I don’t think the prosecution has ever based their case on statistics, although they have noted that LL was on shift for every suspicious collapse, including four separate ones of the same baby on non-consecutive days. But they never brought anyone to say “the chances of LL being there for this many incidents is 1 in 10 million” or whatever. That is something I think DID happen with Bev Allitt.

It’s not that unusual or problematic. You’re trying to make it so but it isn’t. There have been plenty of murders in the past where the perpetrator has tried to stage it as natural causes, accident or suicide and the police have been suspicious of a particular individual and have tied the two questions together - was the death a crime and was it perpetrated by X? It’s not some novel concept that they’ve never dealt with before, rendering them incapable of a proper investigation.

You don’t need to site specific numbers to make a statistical inference. “Unusual” “unlikely” “coincidence” “common” - these are all claims that make use of statistical inference. When the prosecution famously said that LL was the “constant malevolent presence” that - “constant” - is a statistical inference.

I know the court of appeals claimed that stats weren’t relevant - that the chart was only supposed to demonstrate “opportunity” . but I think you can clearly see in the public debate / discourse how statistical inference has permeated this whole case - from references to an unusual “spike” in deaths on the ward, to how they stopped after she left, how Lucy was always there , the shift rota etc etc. people aren’t discussing the medical evidence because they don’t understand it, but if you say that this case wasn’t about statistics then the medical evidence is all that’s worth discussing. The case stands and falls on whether the prosecution can prove that those deaths must have been murder - beyond reasonable doubt- because of the medical evidence.

It’s very unusual. Most wrongful convictions are overturned when another party is found responsible- eg through DNA or other new evidences .
What’s so unusual about this case is that if LL is in fact innocent , it’s likely no crime was committed at all.

Well these were very relevant circumstances- the fact that she was always there and usually in the centre of things for all the suspicious collapses. Obviously anyone who was the killer would have been there for every collapse or they’d have had an alibi for some of them. Are you saying this information should have been excluded from the trial or something? It was literally true - she was there for all the collapses, nobody else was. AND they then also adduced evidence that these collapses were not accidental. Regardless of whether you agree with the experts, they did give evidence to that effect.

That is very different to Sally Clark where they said “you’ve had two babies die and statistically that’s so improbable to be a coincidence that you must be guilty of murder”.

It’s really not. And yeah, if she’s innocent, there’s no crime as there’s no other suspect in the frame. But that’s really not unusual. It would apply in every case where a death could have been natural/an accident/suicide. If it turns out the person convicted for it was wrongfully convicted then there would have been no crime if there’s no other potential suspect. This isn’t the groundbreaking stuff you seem to think it is.

Are you saying this information should have been excluded from the trial or something?

No, but I’m saying it means nothing at all if the prosecution haven’t already shown that the medical evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that these 7 deaths were murders and the other 9 were not. That can only be done with the medical evidence.

Since we now know that it was highly likely that LL was only present for about half the deaths, this case is now all in with the medical evidence, which is why it is so deeply problematic that we only heard one side of the expert medical opinion at trial.

Ok there’s no point in this discussion if you are going to continue to insist that black is white.

Have a lovely day!

Also nobody knows 100% whether the deaths were natural or unnatural but several experts have testified that they believe them to be unnatural and that this explanation is more likely than it being a natural death. The jury was satisfied that they were unnatural. There is only one suspect as nobody else on the ward was there for any significant number of the incidents, so if they were unnatural, it can’t have been someone else because they wouldn’t have had the opportunity. If LL walks free, that by itself doesn’t chance the cause of death - it just means the prosecution has not been able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that LL was the murderer.

If someone dies through a combination of stabbing and strangulation then you don’t need to argue about whether it’s an unlawful killing. It clearly is and couldn’t be anything else. However, if you have a victim found at the bottom of a cliff or stairs, it could have been an accident, it could have been suicide, it could have been murder. So the prosecution have to prove it was murder and that the defendant did it. In the stabbing/strangulation case, they just have to prove the defendant did it as the fact it was murder can be accepted as a given.

In Lucy Letbys case, the prosecution DID prove it was murder. You might disagree with the conclusion by the experts but the prosecution did lead evidence that the killings were unlawful. From several medical experts.

I've said on other threads that I avoided this case while it was ongoing for personal reasons. Despite my own experience at the hands of one arm of the justice system I still wanted to believe that after those high profile cases that were finally overturned due to issues with medical evidence, that a case so serious must have pretty solid evidence at its core.

How on earth a nurse could do such things, undetected for so long was such a horrifying thing to contemplate.

Once the trial was over, and the reports questioning almost every aspect of the case started to gather momentum, I cracked. I was back in the days when I had to become my own expert in order to prevent my son being lost to the system permanently. And I went straight to reading everything I could around the medical evidence. Breaking it down to the proposed mechanics. Analysing via information found easily on the Internet not related to the case, some from actual NHS websites, regarding the physiology if neonates, size of equipment etc etc and I could see it didn't add up. Neonatal practitioners were also questioning it.

The testimony of the experts in court was chilling to read. In particular the liver injury. There is no clear, cogent explanation of how that was "inflicted" with the force associated with car crashes or falling off a trampoline. I saw the same circular logic and emotive language as I'd seen in my own case 30 years ago, and my last shred of faith in the justice system and the way medical experts are used within it dissolved.

I've shared a tiny part of my experience here and on other threads, not because I want attention or sympathy but because unless you have been in the position where experts, some of whom have never met you or know anything about you are making clinical pronouncements that will determine the entity trajectory of your life that you know are wrong, I understand that those questioning this conviction sound like fantasists and conspiracy theorists.

If I hadn't had the experience I had, I too would be much more inclined to believe in the system. I would still believe that truth wins the day, there is no smoke without fire, that experts are impartial and justice is blind. That miscarriages of justice are rare. That those caught up in the system for the most part have only themselves to blame as I did when I was 25 and nursing a newborn who arrived 5 weeks early due to missed pre-eclampsia. Rude awakening doesn't begin to cover it.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's possible some reading my posts are appalled I wasn't prosecuted for child abuse and are wondering if they could get my case re-,opened. It's also possible that others with similar experiences are too traumatised and fearful to talk about it but have experienced similar. Some may have had shocking treatment in hospitals when their children were born, victims of sub-optomal care whose concerns have been ignored or rubbished.

This is all very very complicated and emotive and bears discussion because how it is handled and the outcome will have massive implications on both the medical and legal fronts.

The Thirwall Inquiry is important. However, it is being conducted from the viewpoint of how hospital failings allowed a serial killer to operate on the wards not whether one was. Ideally two parallel investigations should be done IMHO. One on the first premise, and one taking LL out of the equation entirely, just focusing on the spike in deaths. That might be an enlightening exercise indeed.

You might disagree with the conclusion by the experts

No, I’ve read a huge amount about the medical evidence and read the opinions of various experts. It’s deeply problematic that at trial the jury heard only one side of the medical expert opinion - from prosecution witnesses. Furthermore these witnesses were a retired medical doctor, ( without expertise in neonatology and with a problematic history of offering himself as an expert witness in criminal medical trials), and the doctors who were present at the crime scene at the time the victims either died or were attacked. This is NOT usual and it’s not good science.