New Lucy Letby details

[Mrsdoyler]

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

Reason: Lack of empathy

Im not familiar with that.

Part of me thinks that she was just very incompetent and not up to the task of looking after seriously ill babies which is a very hard task.
This also shows that the ward was incompetent if they didn't have enough staff and If she wasn't well trained enough.

People who die from incompetence don't tend to do it conveniently on man-made mile stones, and shortly after one member of medical staff predicts it.

No she didn’t dispute the prosecution when they said with the backing of an expert that the babies must have been poisoned. How could she dispute it? She’s a nurse, not a medical expert in insulin tests. She maintained that if they had been poisoned she didn’t do it and didn’t know how it happened.

As it turns out, the medical expert was wrong.

The defence team called on a number of expert witnesses they just did not put them on the stand

So rest assured that they explored the insulin results with their own experts

Mostly you won’t put your own experts on the stand if you feel it could be harmful - they definitely consulted experts

I do not know who gets the final say on who takes the stand - obviously it was Letby & the janitor - everyone was taken by surprise by this at the time I think

If a lay person in a legal dispute tries to say that an expert witness is wrong, it is considered extremely arrogant and one's counsel will advise against doing so because a lay person / defendent is not generally also an expert.

One can deny wrongdoing, but to baldly state in the witness box that insulin poisoning had not occurred when it had been presented as fact by a "respected expert" would have been another nail hammered in to the coffin so to speak.

One simply does not contradict an expert witness as a lay person. One gets another expert in to do so. Why it didn't happen remains a mystery of course.

Perhaps they did not anticipate the prosecution presenting flawed evidence, deceptive/miscalculated statistics and blatantly incorrect “expert” opinions? So did not think to prepare to counter such curveballs?

Possibly the defence thought their arguments against the dodgy medical evidence would be enough to undermine the prosecution, because to be fair when an expert witness uses the phrase "the baby collapsed and died" repeated three times to "prove" their theory rather than directly answering specific questions, and another witters on about things falling on camels in the desert or whatever analogy it was, it doesn't sound terribly professional.

Unfortunately I think the lurid trial by media and statistical "evidence" overshadowed everything else.

Given Michael Halls comments about the evidence after the trial, I can't see what harm it could have done to call him as the defence witness. Unless it was a numbers game and it was felt that in the face of all the prosecutions witnesses, one lone dissenting voice would not have been seen as credible.

Still pretty baffled by the reasoning behind it all to be honest.

I wonder why no one ever defends Harold Shipman or Beverley Allitt, how do we know the tests weren't all wrong there too? No one saw them do anything? It's not really good enough evidence is it 🤔

@MistressoftheDarkSide

Her legal team had access to all of the witnesses and what they would be testifying about prior to the trial

In part this is so they can prepare their defence accordingly - and in part this is why the request to appeal was denied - why ask to bring in Prof Lees now when the defence knew that the prosecution was going to be talking about his paper at the trial?

We don’t know if it was Letby who asked that certain experts didn’t testify - but they were certainly consulted in the run up

and re prof Lee and his paper the judge subsequently concluded that his belief of a certain appearance based on one baby cant be absolute certain that is how the rash would appear in all babies

Basically even Lees doesn’t know for certain.

Like I say, I'm baffled. I'll go and check the whole Lee thing out again I think. I've read so much about this case that who said what and when in terms of the evidence gets a bit blurry, especially at this time of night....

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/R-v-Letby-Final-Judgment-20240702.pdf

this would be a excellent starting point

Harold Shipman - There was proven physical evidence of morphine overdoses in his patients that only he could have administered.

Beverly Allitt - She admitted she did it.

@HollyKnight the majority of murderers never admit their guilt -

LL did not even make an impassioned plea of innocence

I know. I was answering why no one tries to defend Beverly Allitt.

There's proven physical evidence for LL people just refuse to believe it, they say the insulin test wasn't accurate, can't prove overfeeding, can't prove the liver injury, can't prove air embolism. The fact it's now come out she overdosed a baby on morphine was just an accident or the more senior nurses fault. 40% increase in tube dislodgements at a previous placement means nothing.

Being in rooms she wasn't supposed to be seconds before babies collapsed time and time again means nothing, ad nauseum. If she confessed (I mean she already did on a post-it but we'll ignore that for a sec) people would just say poor Lucy was bullied into it by police. I mean people actually hate the consultants and Dewi Evans (not saying on here but I've certainly seen it in other places) more than the baby murderer, it's so bizarre.

Doesn’t your statement regarding how no one can be certain kind of prove the whole point? His was the only paper that discussed a rash appearing? So where is the evidence that air embolism can cause other types of rashes?

There is also the fact that Harold Shipman's patients/victims pretty much all died the same way. That can't be said with LL. There is no consistency in the causes of death of the babies she is accused of killing. And the issue is not that they can't prove there was a liver injury, it's that they can't prove what caused the injury. Same with the air embolisms. Indeed if the insulin test has been done reliably as per protocol and found to be factual, the only way that could have been caused is by someone administering it. But LL wasn't the only person on the ward and in fact wasn't even present when one of the babies collapsed. Unlike Harold Shipman who was proven to have been the only person present when some of his patients died of morphine/heroin overdoses. The two cases are not comparable. The evidence is not comparable.

Sort of on-topic but also not - I know a nurse who did actually kill a patient with a morphine overdose. She misread the junior doctor's sloppy handwriting (this is back when prescriptions were still handwritten), made up the dose by herself (you are supposed to be observed doing it), had her friend/colleague sign it as "checked by Nurse 2", then administered it. An experienced nurse would have realised that the dose was too high, but this nurse didn't and Nurse 2 didn't actually check it. The patient died. A quiet inquiry followed. The doctor who prescribed it was so distraught that she quit medicine completely. The two nurses got a bollocking and sent for training. That nurse is still working and still a shitshow 20+ years later. These are things that don't get talked about. There are more than a few incompetent "professionals" working in hospitals.

Whether LL killed these babies or not, she was clearly an incompetent nurse and it's a good thing she is no longer on any ward.

@HollyKnight im sure that kind of thing happens all the time and it’s just not reported on.

Yep. Just some of the things I've personally witnessed include; wrong bloods given, wrong drugs given, drugs not given, rashes not reported (alergic reactions), wounds not reported (the worst one ended up with an amputation), haemorrhages due to rough suctioning of trachy tubes, tubes dislodged, drains dislodged, arteries nicked, oxygen left off, patients hooked up to medical air when it should have been oxygen, charts not completed, charts completed for the wrong patients, notes written for the wrong patients, obs recorded that were never taken(!), deteriorations that weren't escalated, cardiac arrests that weren't escalated because grunting was mistaken for snoring, DNAR forms in the wrong notes resulting in people being left to die etc etc etc.

Which is why I look at the LL evidence somewhat differently, because I've pretty much seen all of those events and things happen through pure incompetence and negligence.

I wonder why? Just possibly because people use their critical faculties to assess the strengths and weaknesses of different cases.

Do you have figures on what proportion of murderers admit guilt?
Letby never invoked her right to silence in police interview and gave evidence in court unlike Beverley Allitt for example.
She was known to be calm in a crisis. She has always maintained her innocence.

I found it more worrying that the ward manager said overdosing/wrong meds etc happens frequently.

It wasn’t just lack of empathy, she struggled with maths and mixing meds/subsequent side effects.