Cheshire Police are an incompetent bunch of useless bastards

[GossIsAGit]

After Sally Clark

They should have remembered that If a doctor of medicine tells you that a coincidence is so unlikely it must mean a woman has been killing babies then maybe you should consult a statistician and actually listen.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/10/lucy-letby-police-cps-handling-case-raises-new-concerns-about-convictions?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther

She is absolutely 100% guilty.

You can’t possibly believe that.

Given the number of respected experts from all areas associated with this case that now have grave doubts about the safety of these convictions, and are expressing them publicly despite the risk to their reputations, I find it incredibly arrogant that anyone can assert that Lucy Letby is 100% guilty.

I think that it'll eventually be revealed that she's not guilty. There are too many questions that haven't been addressed.

@GossIsAGityes I do. Im a paediatric nurse and every other person I know is also convinced of her guilt. These babies were in a district general hospital. Therefore they were unlikely to be critically ill. That many babies do not just collapse. And she was present for most of them. And didn’t respond appropriately in an emergency situation.

“That many babies do not just collapse.”

They clearly do when attended by paediatricians who don’t know what they’re doing.

Still, if you like to think that what happened to Lucy Letby couldn’t happen to you carry on.

Sounds like some of the consultants might have concern of negligence claims against them. Maybe why they turned on Letby

Possibly Cheshire Police have more information than you do? Plus, they are required to work to a higher standard of evidence than the gutter press.

I don't think the Guardian is the gutter press?

That Cheshire police have failed to disclose evidence - Dear Dewi’s latest report on Baby C for example - can only be further grounds for appeal.

I wouldn’t call the Guardian, the Telegraph, File on Four, Private Eye or Channel 4 News the gutter press.

That can be true and also be other failings

With respect, you’ve clearly not bothered to read the numerous criticisms of how the prosecution case was put together, nor about how chaotic the unit she was in had become.

For a start, the unit was looking after critically ill babies - babies that had problems that fell well outside the unit’s accredited level of competency. They were downgraded to only providing care for fit and healthy babies just after Letby was put on trial, and severely criticised for the conditions on the unit.

Their staffing levels were well below what was mandated for safe working practice, the unit was filthy (including sewage contamination) and the Drs, consultants and many of the nursing staff didn’t have the experience needed to look after babies as sick as the ones in their care.

Letby wasn’t on duty at the times of many of the deaths on the unit, and the main expert witness (who had no recent appropriate experience) changed his determination of the method of ‘murder’ several times to account for gaps that came to light as the case was investigated.

The statistical analysis carried out by the CPS was nonsensical, not least (but not only) because it used incomplete shift pattern data for her. They also discovered that at least one of the key card pads on the unit wasn’t recording entries and exits so the underlying data wasn’t even verifiable.

The method of death that she was supposed to have used has been written off as not credible by many pathologists and experts since the trial. Babies that died and showed the same pathology (but who couldn’t have been murdered by Letby because she was off shift and proven to be elsewhere at the time) were ignored. More than one experienced pathologist examined the ‘murdered’ babies and found no evidence of foul play, yet the chief prosecution expert (the one with no recent clinical experience) found ‘obvious’ evidence of the babies being killed - purely by reading reports.

Recent scandals / cover ups within the NHS as a whole should make you at least a little sceptical - your faith in the NHS not allowing very sick babies to be treated in a district general hospital is touching but, I would suggest, very naive.

If you’re genuinely a paediatric nurse, I’d be making sure you keep your arse covered. Nurses and HCAs are very often the easiest targets when the shit hits the fan.

@PaterPower such a chaotic unit Lucy had time to be texting colleagues constantly 🙄most of the babies she attacked would've still been cared for on that unit after the downgrade.

Where are you getting there were all these suspicious deaths LL wasn't present for? In Panorama they said she was there for every single suspicious death in the time period they were looking into. Her being a scapegoat is just a conspiracy theory. But if she was they did a hell of a job pinning it on the nurse who just so happened to internet stalk parents and hoard hundreds of handover sheets-something they couldn't possibly have known beforehand.

The only way to make her present for all the suspicious deaths is to define suspicious deaths as the ones she was there for.
Oops, turns out a mistake has been made and she wasn’t there for that one? It wasn’t suspicious after all, cross it off the list.
You might think they did well in finding a scapegoat who didn’t throw paperwork away and FB searched parents, which no nurse has ever done before of course. I think they did very badly in finding one with absolutely nothing suspicious in her background, none of the typical history of a serial killer, to the extent that people flailing around for a motive are forced to come up with the bizarre argument that her very normality is suspicious and she killed the babies because she was ‘beige’.

The point at which the harmful act was inflicted was very much moved around according to Letby’s presence for the murder charges and perhaps more so in the case of collapses charged as attempted murder.

searching Facebook for people she’d met is so innocent. She wasn’t researching murder methods, studying serial killers or looking at sadistic pornography.

Daniela Poggiali and Lucia de Berk had much more suspicious backgrounds and they were innocent, @Firefly1987.

Go through someone’s whole life and you’ll always find something. They really didn’t find much.

Indeed.

I have yet to see an alleged serial killer who managed to be so cunning, conniving, manipulative and prolific while at the same time "stupid enough" to hand over "mountains" of dubious evidence.

Similarly the lack of people lining up to "sell their stories" to the tabloids once the trial was over. Indeed it appears a good number of her colleagues were gagged from submitting character references to support her, with the implication their jobs would be at risk if they did.

Her background reveals nothing of note.

Zero, zilch, nada in terms of abuse, trauma, mental instability, addiction - nothing to suggest she was anything other than an average young nurse living her version of her best life.

I've seen criticism of her close relationship with her parents. As an only child myself, I don't find that particularly damning.

It speaks volumes that the tabloids are occasionally falling back on "Lucy Letby is friends with other serial killers" as if she has much choice other than to rub along with her fellow prisoners in the hope she isn't shanked in the shower.

And those grasping at straws will mutter "ooh, it's always the quiet ones" completely overlooking the fact that she was basically convicted on the say so of an "expert" who fancies himself in the Southall and Meadows mould, with a strong sense of "crusade" about him, hoping for a last hurrah on his professional stage. And that his proposed mechanisms of death and injury are not supported by forensic evidence, were formulated in "ten minutes" and certainly were not proven "beyond all reasonable doubt" as the judge basically said "if you think she did one, you can extrapolate she must have done the others".

I have experience of "the system" which I've posted about before. Nobody wants to believe how it can go horribly wrong in cases based on "medical evidence" - i certainly didn't when I was given quite the rude awakening 30 years ago. But it does happen, and with a high profile case like this, the ramifications are disastrous for the justice system, plus everyone else caught up in the hoopla. Those babies parents deserve some sort of closure based in fact, not conjecture, hypothesis or opinion , and it's a long way off because of systemic failure in the NHS and the justice system.

Dr Evans had several bites of the cherry on this.

His cause of death / method of killing the babies changed when he found his initial hypotheses weren’t credible. If I recall correctly, on at least some of the babies, he changed the method three times!

And when at least one of the babies (that he initially said was murdered) was shown to have died when Letby wasn’t working, he changed his testimony / ‘evidence’ to remove them from consideration. Despite the post mortem results being near identical. His analysis of the pathology has also been called into doubt by many much more qualified (and experienced) consultants since.

A lot of the ‘evidence’ about Letby’s ‘weirdness’ had been hyped up by the red tops and daily comics. The same ones, in some cases, which have reverse-ferreted and are now reporting doubts about the conviction’s safety.

The unit was clearly chaotic (or let’s settle for very badly run). That much became very clear during her trial. Unsanitary, reliant on unqualified or under-qualified temp nurses, consultants recorded as not turning up to emergencies etc.

Plus, if it was a well run service:

a) it likely wouldn’t have been downgraded so quickly (the ‘murders’ wouldn’t have been enough for that - the CQC already had concerns and Letby hadn’t been convicted before they did it)

b) the police wouldn’t now be looking into its mismanagement (whilst desperately denying that the CPS conviction of Letby might be impacted by that).

The babies that Letby ‘murdered’ were certainly not in the categories the unit was approved to treat - that was also made very clear at trial and subsequently. It’s not something that’s in doubt.

I'm intrigued as to why Cheshire Polce employed this woman who's come forward to do what she was doing if it was just an admin role.

I'm on the fence with this. Don't have a clue either way.

It kind of feels like when they were pursuing her for murder, they took anything and everything to fit her to it. For instance, Dewi Evans identified a further ten "suspicious" baby deaths (this being the man who could identify wrongdoing within ten minutes of reading notes), but they discounted them because she wasn't there. Now, the deaths were either suspicious or they weren't. They can't be suspicious, then not suspicious because the person you're investigating wasn't there when they died. Why were they suspicious? Why wasn't that pursued? Unless he was just looking for anything to build a case on.

However, with this coroner's officer, maybe I feel that since she spoke about a case she was working on to experts (one of whom leaked to the press), when she shouldn't have been talking to anyone, it does make you wonder why she's coming forward. So, this muddies the waters further to me rather than clearing them in any way.

I'm not 100% sure it's a safe conviction, the statistics were used poorly and don't prove anything for instance. However, just because you your trial was sup par doesn't mean you're innocent.

It does mean there'll always be doubts though.

And two of the consultants need to be looked at, imo, because they seem to be part of the reason the babies received poor care.

‘Admin role’ is a lie.

The allegations against her don’t undermine her professional competence.

@GossIsAGit

What I was meaning was it's intriguing that she was an expert when she was working for them carrying out the work. But now that she's spoken up they're saying it was just admin.

Either way, it puts them in a poor light. They'd either asked an admin person to do work way above her pay grade, or she was an expert they're now trying to downgrade because she's saying things they don't like.

It very much sounds as though she was applying the very skills her job required to look into forensically suspicious deaths, but the police had made their minds up, and are now discrediting her. It's not like she has much to gain from coming forward.

I suppose some are arguing that all the professionals coming forward after Lucy Letbys trial are just after their five minutes of fame. However, that quote about all publicity being good publicity doesn't seem to apply in my opinion. I think it really is about the ethics and principles, and it's not like she doesn't have receipts.

Yes. You’re right.

Her Thirlwall evidence states she had three degrees plus further training so Cheshire police are just lying.

Her evidence:
https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/thirlwall-evidence/INQ0011616.pdf

I think any parent will know that there will be peaks and troughs of activity when you work 13 - 14 hour night shifts caring for a couple of babies each - should have been one but usually wasn't in the cases Letby's accused of. And you'll manage to snatch the occasional break.

The question is what happens when a child goes into crisis - whether you have enough skilled people on hand for resuscitation for example. That's why Chester taking intensive care babies but not staffing the ward to intensive care levels was such a problem. At least two of the babies Letby was charged with killing could have had different outcomes with faster responses from medics in emergencies. For others, there were longer term missed opportunities to avert crisis.

It's a myth that most of the children Letby's accused of killing or harming would have been on the downgraded unit. Whenever I've seen people try to back that up with data, they refer to gestational age but ignore multiple and complex pregnancies, which also exclude babies from delivery and early care at level 1 units.

Even if they had been on the downgraded unit, that unit was much better run after Letby left the ward because the hospital was alerted to unsafe conditions. For example, consultants started to do two ward rounds a day instead of two a week, staffing ratios and space between cots were improved , and the hospital hired two dedicated neonatologists instead of relying on pediatric staff looking after the ward on the side.

Those are the conditions they needed to care for the least vulnerable cohort. The more vulnerable children they were taking in 2015 and 2016 before making those changes were not safe at Chester.

Nope it's against hospital rules to search the parents of patients you've taken care of. She didn't need to research murder methods, she was a nurse. She already knows what causes collapses. I don't know much about the other two people you mentioned, could you summarise what was suspicious about their backgrounds?