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

There is absolutely no way that there is anything particularly important or particularly damning that was restricted and didn't make it into the public domain.

No way.

Letby "turned up" in 2012. The unit started admitting sicker and smaller babies in 2015 (and stopped in 2016).

She's been convicted of murdering 7, not 14 so you clearly don't know very much about the case at all.

Yes she was found guilty, but appeals etc are all part of the justice system.

It's pretty significant that the panel was almost exclusively neonatologists (albeit not the top neonatologists in the world as you claim). Expertise in neonatology does not qualify you to say that expert paediatric radiologists, endocrinologists, forensic pathologists etc are all wrong.

Definitely no way. The fact of restriction is published. We'd know about it.

Except she was refused leave to appeal.

eh?! They are neonatologists because these babies were neonates.
On what basis are you claiming they aren’t the top in the world? They were deliberately selected to be so.

She turned up in the high-dependency and intensive care nurseries in 2015 when she qualified for that work.

McDonald has over 30 other experts working with him, and the neonatologists will be used to consulting their peers in specialist fields where necessary.

It would be normal for them to spearhead analysis and reporting though. They are clearly using and referring to existing pathologists' reports and images, and I'm sure they are perfectly capable of seeking any further guidance needed.

They were essentially volunteers and people who were available. It may well also be that Professor Shoo Lee approached those most likely to agree with him.

The use of statistical inference to point the finger at letby is utter rubbish. Every. Single. Statistician who has discussed this case has explained why.

No, she had been working on them all along. Chester only had two nurses qualified in specialism and many nights had only two or three registered nurses. Letby didn't graduate to a new space.

Yes so now they're bringing to the CRCC which is also part of the justice system.

It's particularly bad when, as is more often than not that case, the statistics draw on invented or imagined facts

No, he approached them because they are preeminent experts. It’s so pointless having these debates if you are just going to make stuff up that has no basis in anything .

So you think that some of the top neonatologists from around the world decided to lie for Shoo Lee for literally no personal gain?

True

Well you're hardly going to work with people who are unavailable, are you? And yes, they are volunteers. Legal Aid wouldn't pay the bill for those people's time.

Also I could volunteer to review all the medical evidence, I've got a lot of free time. Wouldn't be much use since I have no medical qualifications though. These aren't just random volunteers he found on the street.

... when there was an obvious alternative like saying sorry, bit busy with my top flight job right now.

It was also important / a principle that they would do this pro bono. They were explicitly not seeking to gain in any way from this (unlike Evans of course) and wanted that to be clear.
They did this out of nothing but good conscience and a sense of responsibility .

Nope, she complete a specialist training course early in 2015. That meant she became one of the few staff on the ward qualified to care for the sickest babies in the high-dependency and intensive care nurseries.

Posts on MN that begin "So you think that ..." invariably go off into major flights of fantasy like this based on nothing whatsoever.

No, I don't think they decided to lie. I think they could be mistaken. Certainly the tenor of that conference seems to have been very much "See! No-one thought of this before!" when actually the issues in question had been extensively canvassed before and during the trial and answered by at least equally eminent experts in the relevant fields, which were not necessarily neonatology.

I didn't suggest you would. I was addressing the fact that the poster was proclaiming that these were the TOP experts in the WORLD when that is not the case.

I know, but here's the thing about that ward. It's not good. They only had two staff qualified in that specialism. So rarely more than one on shift, often none.

ICU babies were meant to have one to one care. You might have three in at once. So nurses without the qualification in specialism, including Letby before she qualified, often cared for those children. The unit was tiny. The different nurses rotated around three small wards close.together. Letby wasn't new to the ICU room in 2015 - she already worked there.