Lucy Letby. Why do some people only read headlines?

[skyfirechesnut]

I was at work today and someone says so Lucy letby is innocent now. They have just gone with the media headlines. Instead of researching.

Sorry for the fail link but this is quite a good article below on the current state of things. The author has attended all trials and listened to appeals and conferences.

I also don't understand people who say she was scapegoated. If people follow the Thirwall enquiry this is far from the case. She was totally protected, her parents calling up, being in meetings, dictating apologies. It beggars belief.

I can somewhat understand people saying she is innocent based on medical evidence after the press conference but even that is nothing new.

You can't say my expert is better than yours.

Also people seem to think it was all Dewi Evans for the prosecution it wasn't. There was Dr Bohin, Prof Arthurs , Prof Hindnarsh and Dr Mar etc.

That is without the Doctor colleagues if you want to dispute them.

Then they new defence have changed ideas from the conference they had in December.

They are also not totally impartial.
It isn't as simple as the headlines.

Here is the article.

archive.ph/NYg7U

You're saying there's material that is disclosed to the public gallery but not in the official transcript?

To think of all the extra bletherings by D Evans we have apparently been spared

So it is your belief that there is some secret evidence of guilt that the jury heard that has been withheld from the public, even to this day.

Yes to this part

Therefore, even if it is now clear as day that all the known evidence that was used to convict Letby was utter rubbish, we are total idiots to question the conviction and we must never speak of this again, because there must be something extra that we don’t know about?

Oh dear, the second hand embarrassment runs deep here.

If evidence is restricted you don’t know it’s “utter rubbish” because you don’t know what it is.

Also as i have already said this panel is giving their opinion on a non legal platform. Until they do so through an appeal court or a select committee it’s not evidence it’s opinion

Yes. Of course! I’ve been in court from a professional standpoint, not on a case as high profile as this but high profile locally and so much couldn’t be reported. Not just in newspapers but for example written on social media, in messages etc. to do so would be conte or of court. It’s been this way for decades. It ensures a court is a public space but also protects what mustn’t be shared for whatever reason.

She murdered 14 babies for godsake. This isn't a reality show. A long and detailed trial found her guilty.

Did you not know a court is a public arena?

If evidence is restricted you don’t know it’s “other rubbish” because you don’t know what it is.

eh?

I don’t know why they bothered going through the legal route. Could have just come and asked the experts on MN and reached a verdict that way.

I really don’t know how to simplify this any more for you

You think the evidence is “utter rubbish”. But your don’t know ALL the evidence so you can’t make that statement

Have you got there yet?

It’s so weird that you genuinely believe there is substantial secret evidence of guilt that only those present in the courtroom know about.
Most odd.

so do you believe it’s never ever possible for the public to participate in a conversation about a possible miscarriage of justice? Do the public have no role in holding the courts to account? What is the point in a court being a public arena?

I thought that she had not been diagnosed as a psychopath, which made it all the more bizarre and disturbing - that there seemed no explanation?

er you misunderstood my post.

Let’s do an analogy to help you understand.

You go to a buffet. You eat a sausage roll and devilled egg and declare them to be disgusting and say this is a “disgusting buffet”. You cannot say the whole buffet was disgusting because you didn’t eat the other 20 items. You have drawn the conclusion that because the sausage roll and devilled egg weren’t tasty then the rest of the buffet can’t be either, but you’ll never really know, you’re making an assumption based on a fraction of the knowledge

Does that help?

I misunderstood the post that said “eh?”?

It’s genuinely hilarious that you didn’t know that restrictions are in place in all court cases that remain for as long as the judge sees fit.

I’ll give you an example of a recent one - Chris Kaba. His family tried to keep the restrictions about his life of crime in place but the judge overruled this deciding it’s in the public interest to know. The judge could easily have decided to keep them in place, they weren’t automatically lifted when the trial ended. indeed in many trails restrictions have been lifted decades later.

so do you believe it’s never ever possible for the public to participate in a conversation about a possible miscarriage of justice? Do the public have no role in holding the courts to account? What is the point in a court being a public arena?

What gave you that impression that I thought that? The public can and do have discussion about miscarriages of justice but very few know what they’re actually taking about. Opinions are not facts. But even so my opinion is Letby is guilty based on what I’ve heard. Most people here haven’t even read the available evidence

Oh and that’s what select committees are for BTW - so we do have a forum for discussing miscarriages of justice. But this was a press conference not a select committee

Yes I get what you are saying.

So we the public have only eaten from the public buffet of evidence.

So even if it’s clear that all the food is rotten, we cannot say that it’s a rotten buffet- and question the safety of the public catering system- indeed we would be idiots for doing so! -
because of course there must be another secret buffet that contains lots of food that isn’t rotten- it’s just perfectly nutritious and delicious of course! It’s just been withheld from us for reasons we will never know! This is obvious! And we will never find out what it is or why this food has been hidden,

How utterly stupid and ignorant we are as members of the public to be questioning the safety of our public institutions because all the food appears rotten !

The problem is that what Liz Hull has said is backed up by other contemporary detailed reports of the trial. The simple fact is that so many of these supposedly new explanations were in fact extensively canvassed at the trial and a range of experts who are very eminent in their fields carefully explained why they didn't hold water. Letby defenders love to claim that the only prosecution expert was Dewi Evans and that he got everything wrong, but it's a massive distortion of the facts.

Which ‘experts’ in the original trial were eminent and had no link to Dewi then?

It’s genuinely hilarious that you didn’t know that restrictions are in place in all court proceedings

my dear, everyone knows this. People have explained to you the nature and limitations of these restrictions and why they are there- eg names redacted to protect the identity of certain individuals in certain circumstances .
but for some reason you believe that there is substantial secret evidence that has been used to convict letby that isn’t known to the public. This is utterly absurd. But I can see you are entrenched in this weird (and dangerous) belief that is very convenient for those who want to shut down discussions about miscarriages of justice,

That simply isn't true. They were perfectly competent consultants working in a unit with results at least in line with other units of the same type until Letby turned up. The prosecution did not rely on one witness as you imply. They had evidence from a range of medical experts.

What on earth makes you think they were competent?
there was a reason all these babies died- it wasn’t murder.
There were structural issues in the hospital , yes. But there was also incompetence. Read the evidence about what was going on in the hospital at that time.
listen to the press conference.

I think any argument here that says "totally innocent!" or "100% guilty!" misses the point
To my understanding it seems the basis for appeal is that expert witness testimony has been used without the experts testifying, and they now say it was misrepresented. And that the "cluster" of deaths can also be explained by severe understaffing and poor treatment decisions made by the systems in place. When taken into account this leads to reasonable doubt, which is our benchmark for conviction.
Its not as simple as new evidence "proving innocence", it needs to show that there is reasonable doubt for the murder conviction.

and this doesnt even cover the whole issue of investigating unusual numbers of deaths with a predisposed view to finding criminal action
(see https://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/apr/07/badscience.uknews)

Nobody is disputing that there are anonymity orders and that there can be further restrictions.

But if there had been restriction orders on the Letby trials beyond the anonymity orders, which we know about, those restrictions would themselves have been published.

Letby really wasn't convicted on a fund of secret evidence.

Public sphere is an important concept here - no need to hive discussion off into select committees - or not since Stuart times let's say.