New Lucy Letby details

[Mrsdoyler]

Did you see today in the news that LucyLetby originally failed her nursing training.

Reason: Lack of empathy

I watched the channel 5 documentary which called into question the validity of LL’s conviction.

Did anyone else see it? I found it somewhat compelling.

my point proven so quickly!

You were just being offensive 🤷🏼‍♀️ FWIW you’ve said nothing compelling and not once have I called her a psycho bitch, but hey if the shoe fits. My opinion is that her conviction is as safe as it can be at the moment, in the absence of any genuine new evidence (that is, credible experts formally going on the record, not just going to the newspapers for views and exposure). Her trial was watertight, every procedural hoop jumped through, to make sure there was no room for error.

They had the means to access other experts and decided not to.

You have no true knowledge of why that was

Only Myers and his team know and probably Letby too!

I have a friend who is a lecturer in nursing. She said that there have been a few people who have terrified her. She has HAD to pass them knowing that they have been let loose on the most vulnerable members of society.

1. It Can be debated that these were some of the Forensic Investigation Failures

3.1 Lack of Clear Forensic Evidence
One of the most glaring flaws in the Letby case is the absence of clear forensic evidence. Forensic science typically plays a critical role in homicide investigations, yet in this case, there was a distinct lack of direct forensic ties between Letby and the infants' deaths.

• Absence of Fingerprints or DNA: The lack of physical evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA, on medical instruments or syringes used in the alleged murders is a significant oversight. Given the meticulousness of hospital environments, it is surprising that no forensic techniques were employed to isolate Letby’s physical presence at crime scenes.
• Toxicological Analysis: Toxicology reports on the deceased infants did not conclusively indicate lethal substances. While insulin levels were reportedly high in some cases, linking these levels directly to Letby's involvement lacked precision. A more robust forensic toxicology approach could have strengthened the prosecution’s case.
• Post-Mortem Examinations: Despite several deaths occurring under suspicious circumstances, forensic pathology failed to definitively determine the cause of death in several cases. The pathology reports were often ambiguous, with many infants’ deaths attributed to natural causes or unexplained medical complications. This ambiguity created loopholes that could have been exploited by the defense.

3.2 Problems with Medical Record Interpretation
A large part of the prosecution's case rested on the interpretation of medical records, particularly regarding the infants' deteriorating conditions. However, these medical records were not always clear or uniformly interpreted, leading to several forensic challenges.

• Medical Complexity: The forensic aspect of determining causality in such cases is fraught with difficulty. Neonatal deaths can arise from a variety of complications unrelated to foul play, such as infections, preterm births, or underlying health conditions. The prosecution faced difficulty in separating natural neonatal complications from alleged criminal actions due to inconsistencies in record-keeping and interpretations.
• Forensic Inference vs. Evidence: The inference that Lucy Letby was present at all critical moments was used as a key argument. However, this inference was based more on circumstantial interpretation rather than empirical forensic evidence. Without clear, quantifiable forensic data, the prosecution’s case heavily relied on patterns rather than specific physical findings.

3.3 Time Lag in Investigation and Evidence Preservation
Another critical forensic flaw in the Letby case relates to the time taken to initiate the investigation and the impact this had on preserving key evidence.

• Delayed Response: Several of the incidents in question took place years before the investigation began, meaning that opportunities for timely forensic testing were lost. Biological evidence degrades over time, and the delay could have compromised any potential forensic tests on blood samples, medical instruments, or hospital equipment.
• Improper Evidence Collection: The early failures of the hospital administration to treat the sudden deaths as suspicious prevented the collection of evidence. In the initial stages, several deaths were written off as natural, thus no forensic teams were brought in to gather evidence immediately after the events. The failure to secure the crime scene and the instruments involved meant that crucial forensic evidence may have been lost.

This
+1

This again is nearly like the evidence of owning a house by a graveyard is proof she is gulity.

Plenty of students fail placements, or get placed on plans to improve. even under the new system with supervisors and assessors, they are 100% able to decide whether a student passes or fails. A personality clash can result in a failure for whatever they decide. They dont have to provide evidence, theres no real grading rubric, its opinion based. It was even worse on the old mentor system. It literally means nothing. I know many a student, from when i was at uni, and now qualified, who failed placements due to not gelling with an assessor.

And the drug calc exam, you have to get 100%, our uni offers 3 attempts to everyone standard. Its done on a computer and a miss click or typo is common, it happens. The drug calc exam is very different to drug cal in practice though, as for anything that requires a proper calculation, theres two of you checking it generally, theres resources to check the calculation, and its not in exam conditions. Failing it once, again, means nothing to how a student is once qualified.

@DFStrading

you are not pulling things together properly

a death that had medical professionals baffled is not going to result in a call to the police?!

a series of events did that

why don’t you read the court transcripts thoroughly then come back and comment

Yeah but that doesn’t prove that it was BA or HS who injected it ergo it’s still circumstantial. I remember HS ran a defence that one elderly lady was a heroin addict which explained the morphine.

Haven’t read all this nonsense but seriously is someone arguing that they should have dusted for prints on medic equipment when investigating a death that took place two years prior??? Really? Jesus

Yes. He’s a top KC. He’s defended in plenty of murder trials. It’s laughable that people are painting him as some incompetent bumbling fool who didn’t realise that he was allowed to call expert evidence for his client. More likely, the expert evidence was sought and did not help Lucy’s case in the slightest.

Or ‘his’ nursing degree.

Do you think of it as a job for girls?

To be honest I'm not seeing any point to the Thirlwall inquiry which to me has a very clear bias to propping up a distinctly shaky conviction. Headlining gossip and perfectly explainable without sinister background events as pointer of guilt just weakens the legal conviction further
Was there evidence of air? Well as the prosecution medical witness has already changed his evidence on one conviction who knows.
I take with a pinch of salt some of the witness evidence at the inquiry especially that which is simply hearsay, gossip and people desperately trying to cover themselves or in some instances sadly enjoying the moment of having peripheral involvement.

But that’s not what happened with LL - all of the baby deaths had natural causes attributed at the time of death and on autopsy if they had one, apart from I think maybe one that was “unknown” but not considered suspicious. Doctors were not at all baffled at the time each baby died.

It was the expert witness Dewi Evans who recategorised some of the deaths as suspicious, and that didn’t happen until after the police were involved.

I want to stress again I think there is a lot of doubt in this case and I don’t see how anyone feels so certain as some seem to, of either her guilt or her innocence. But I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about the actual process that maybe makes people think there is more certainty one way or the other than there actually is

Showing empathy is a proficiency throughout placement that needs signing off. So you can fail on this and I’ve also seen this happen and a student be made to redo third year because of it.

HS’s case 9 bodies were exhumed and traces of morphine were found, HS was the last person to see them alive and he issued their death certificate. In Kathleen Grundy’s case her will had been changed leaving a substantial sum to HS excluding her children. HS claimed she was addicted to morphine and provided prescriptions but they turned out to have been written post mortem.

Very different case in which there was hard evidence.

That’s still circumstantial evidence. “Hard evidence” isn’t a legal term. It’s for the jury to weigh up the strength of the evidence and in Lucy Letby’s case they found it compelling.

We know that they did have one expert lined up, but ultimately they decided not to call him. You have to suspect that that's because they knew he wouldn't help her case.

I haven't seen that as the main argument in favour of the verdict. Most people work on the basis of the evidence, in the same way as the jury did. Do you seriously believe the appeal failed because the judges decided in advance she was a psycho baby killer?

This claim indicates a failure to understand the scientific evidence. The evidence against LL is very, very weak. The evidence of suboptimal care and natural deaths is very strong. If the defence failed to call experts it was most certainly not because it would not have helped her case.

Myers is a KC but the solicitor was a small time local criminal solicitor with no track record of major cases with complex scientific evidence.

Myers can only represent in court the case as it has been presented to him by the solicitor. The trial strategy, however, is Myers’ responsibility - and it has left many lawyers questioning it.

How do you defend a hypothesis, look what happened to the medic that defended shaken baby syndrome she was struck off, reinstated but ruined her career. That is a lot of the reason she didn’t have an expert witnesses. How can that give a fair trial? If this was about the mob it would be classed a witness intimidation.

It's not all circumstantial, it's a combination of evidence types. Yes the evidence that shipman administered the fatal dose to Grundy is based on the circumstance he could be placed at the house at the approximate time.
But we also have the evidence that he had borrowed Grundy's typewriter which he had used to produce fake wills to his favour, that he had falsified prescription records after the event alongside conclusive evidence by post mortem that the deaths were un-natural and caused by morphine overdose.
There is also a motive, financial reward by fraudulent wills - all this conspires to put shipman firmly in the frame.

In the Letby case, saying she was seen by a cot in a timeframe near to the death is not really evidence of anything as she worked on the ward, she had every reason to be there. There is no conclusive evidence that the babies died as a result of a homicidal action rather than simply natural causes. There is no clear motive. There is no one MO, which is odd in itself, most killers find a method that works and stick with it, as shipman did. None of this in itself proves Letby innocent, but it is somewhat shaky to be proof of guilt.

We have to think we as a society are taking away freedom from the rest of a young woman's life - and we need to be really sure that we are justified in doing that, that there is no possibility that we, the people, represented by the Crown are wrong.