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

Agree. I watched some and thought the tone was totally disrespectful, calling the babies 'it' was horrible.

So much agree with this.
I don’t understand anyone who can read some of the little bits of cross examination in which she is browbeaten and bullied until she trips up or backs down, and see a brilliant barrister extracting the truth from a devious-but-not-quite-as-clever-as-she-thinks psychopath rather than a terrified, exhausted, confused, outgunned and yes, bullied young woman.
There seems to be this prevalent idea that if she is telling the truth she will never ever get confused or contradict herself. I don’t see how anyone can believe this to be true in a case that deals with so many events, and which happened years ago in a busy, exhausting and sometimes chaotic environment.

I can’t even watch it. They’ve always turned my stomach.

I must say, when I purchased Moritz's book, with all her going on about being there to see all of Letby's evidence, I presumed she would have something substantial to say.

It is incredible that she thought all that gush about Letby looking blank, Letby looking uneasy, Letby looking subdued, Letby looking away from curious journalists could possibly mean anything. Can she really have such a limited grasp of basic, basic psychology?

I find her - I spent days doing x, we spent hours doing y - stock phrases telling. It's all about the impressions and the conversations - but where is the critical thinking?

"We spent hours talking to the consultants at the Countess of Chester Hospital – each of whom has made a long and painful journey to the point of believing that one of their colleagues was a baby killer. In the days and weeks after Letby’s conviction, they were celebrated as heroes for stopping the deaths and forcing their hospital bosses to call in the police".

I think she has a long and painful journey of her own to plot out now.

Particularly when the big “ah ha! what a liar!” moments are the “go commando” text and the pyjama saga.

Pyjama saga:

1. Why would she recall in detail what she was wearing in one of three crack of dawn arrests several years before?
2. If I answer the door at 6am I’m going to call whatever I’m wearing “pjs” because I was probably in bed. I don’t care if it’s a ball gown. Anything I wear to sleep is pjs.
3. A “blue leisure suit”? What a weird thing to call a grotty tracksuit in an attempt to make it seem more like presentable clothes.
4. He was well aware she had a diagnosis of PTSD specifically related to the arrests, so threatening to play the video repeatedly was just vile. He knew she wouldn’t want to watch it.
5. She was clearly wearing a nightie under the tracksuit anyway. You can see it.

The “go commando” text:

1. its a cringey text but she didn’t even send it.
2. it has literally no relevance whatsoever to the case and was purely used to corner, badger, humiliate, mock and degrade Letby. It’s sexual harassment. Vile.
3. she replied to the text with a 😂 which is exactly what I’d do whether or not I understood it or thought it was funny.
4. she is young enough to not have actually understood the reference, which originally came from Friends.
5. NJ clearly doesn’t realise there’s a generation or six beyond ‘leisure suits’ and being ‘sweet on’ having a place in popular parlance.
6. Even if she did know what it meant I cannot blame her at all for refusing to say “it means come to work with no knickers on” which would have transformed into the headline “Come To Work With No Knickers On” Evil Killer’s Knickerless romps in NICU of Death” in Liz Hull’s next “article”.

These two moments alone cemented for me that Nick Johnson is a vile slippery man and the cheerleaders who found this thrilling are also vile and a bit dumb. I know as a barrister in adversarial trials you often shoot below the belt but this is just horrendous stuff imo. Having been a witness for the prosecution in a lengthy and traumatic rape case this was actually very upsetting for me. How he spoke to her reminded me very much of the sneering and sexually degrading cross examination of my friend in that trial.

Imagine going home to your wife and daughters (if Nick Johnson has such) with a nice little record of your day at work sexually harassing a young woman in the press. How can he look them in the eye? Repulsive.

Fully agree. I think she really embarrassed herself here. Her job is not to mindlessly report everything fed to her by the police and prosecution as fact. She utterly failed to fact check, research, question her sources. Just basic journalistic duties utterly abandoned.

Wheb the verdicts were announced and she jumped breathlessly into the van to report as if it was the best news she had heard all year and also CONCRETE EVIDENCE of guilt, like there’s a magical transformative process in a trial. It was just so weird and tasteless. She got BBC licence fee money for all of this and didn’t fact check anything. She needs to make an apology imo.

Moritz of course summarised the whole commando saga in her book. I would have had so much more respect for her work if there had been the slightest doubt about Johnson's conduct. Is this a good way to try to elicit the truth about a crime? Could it possibly be unfair, irrelevant, bullying?

But no. We paid to have Moritz sit in the courtroom so she could tell us that at the end of this exchange, Letby looked sad and confused. And on with the show!

I wrote this review of Coffey & Moritz’s book on Amazon. (Saves me writing out my response again).

Great review. Great edit!

@Oftenaddled

Thank you for the information on the legal process.

Answer to question on LL on the stand. At the time I was looking at it as innocent until proven guilty. I did think guilty when she said I knew what I was looking for at...... about the baby with the tent, but didn't pay too much credence to this.

Agree re the commando thing. It was unnecessary. Not to prove she was a liar.

Also if she was innocent and on lots of meds. I am not sure how compus mentus she would be. With the stress. I know I wouldn't cope. So highly unlikely her brain was working. So in isolation couldn't decide either way.

I have always thought the notes were irrelevant for or against.

Totally agree.

Thanks. That’s reasonable. May I ask what you do find convincing? I’m not trying to hound you. I appreciate the rare occasions where one can discuss this case respectfully.

Yes. If I've read the legal process correctly, they could use her earlier evidence by agreement if she was mentally unfit by the time she came to a retrial.

It does worry me that Neena Modi described her as being "at risk of self harm" in her recent Guardian article, because she seems like such a careful unsensational writer.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/12/lucy-letby-case-trial-justice

I'm not at all surprised the jury convicted Letby with the suggestions they were hearing from Johnson as well as the lack of a defence expert witness. We know they weren't just witchhunters. They found her not guilty or didn't reach a verdict on some charges. It must be annoying to give months of your time to a traumatic case like this and then be told you only got part of the picture.

The whole situation is a mess.

Thanks.

That Moritz could sit through the whole trial with no concerns about NJ’s conduct: whether dodgy stats, or pj and commando gate, or snookering LL into accepting the insulin claims - suggests she was oblivious to it all. Let alone what Goss was up to.

For a trial reporter she’s remarkably insensible to the nuances of the trial.

For me the Lee conference has felt like an end to the gaslighting.

Although I have worked with critically ill adults I never assumed that treatment protocols for neonates would be similar so didn't think it would give me an advantage in understanding complex medical data relating to this case. The Lee conference has revealed that there are in fact similarities and my surprise at the incompetence he revealed relates to how poorly real everyday bread and butter issues were managed.

I can scarcely believe that a pregnant woman with ruptured membranes did not receive antibiotics. That there was a delay in giving her baby antibiotics. That a diagnosis of pneumonia in a neonate did not trigger a blood gas being taken with greater urgency. That the respiratory acidosis, later metabolic acidosis, inability to breathe independently, temperature, rising infection markers and clotting times were not seen as significant and in the trial this child was described as stable. I cannot emphasise how obvious it is that this poor child was anything but stable.

I'm having to listen in short sections because I alternate between rage and deep sadness at what has been done to these babies, their families and LL.

Not got time to give a thoughtful answer now. But I will.

Can I ask why you all think Myers didn't call Hall or anyone? He knew his stuff. So why?

The double hooded podcast is interesting.

As an aside.

One guess I might make us that we know Hall couldn't explain how the insulin babies had suspicious looking results. He would have had to admit that when he was asked. It looks as if he also hadn't spotted baby A's cause of death.

He wouldn't have been able to say air embolism was absolutely impossible, because you couldn't prove that absolutely ever. Any nurse (or anyone with access to a syringe) could be accused of doing this to anyone who died suddenly. There is no reason to believe there were air embolisms, but you can't rule out the tiny tiny possibility. You can only say other things are more likely.

So if you put him on the stand, he has to admit these things. He might not be a great communicator - Judith Moritz said he made things very technical. So there are downsides.

Myers could gamble that he had done enough to argue against the prosecution expert witnesses to stop the jury from believing them. It could have paid off but it didn't.

I don't think Hall's evidence would have been bad for Letby's general defence, because of two other decisions Myers made.

1. He asked to do the cases one by one, so you would hear both prosecution and defence for baby A before moving on to baby B etc. He wanted Hall on the stand then. He only changed his mind about putting Hall up after this request was refused.

2. When he was asking to have Evans's statements as witness set aside, he asked the judge to consider Hall's written reports as evidence of the problems with Evans, but this was not allowed.

Hall certainly had material that argued Letby wasn't a murderer. We don't know if putting him on the stand would have made that clearer to the jury or not. Myers had to make a tactical decision.

What’s that?

Nobody knows for sure why, but we do for sure know that it definitely isn’t because the prosecution’s medical evidence was too strong. Far from it. Particularly post Dr Lee’s presentation in the press conference.

Legal experts have opined that it may have been a tactical move (as @Oftenaddled says) because he would have been putting someone measured and professional up there vs the dogmatic and (frankly) maniacal Dewi Evans who will (and does) claim to be “certain” about things he cannot even remotely be “certain” about. Someone like Hall, doing what actual professionals do and allowing that there are few absolute certainties in medicine is potentially not going to seem as impressive to a lay jury as someone who insists that he is certain, even though he cannot possibly be certain and it is in fact a massive red flag that he claims to be.

Autocorrect! Jeopardy!
Double Jeopardy.

Which one?

The latest one about Letby.