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

I do think the Facebook searches aren’t really relevant, apparently she was one of those people who would look up absolutely everybody she met- friends of friends, colleagues, random people from her dance classes and so on. The parents were among hundreds of other searches for people she met.

But surely if they believe that it's a miscarriage of justice then they can and should do all possible to draw attention to the case. Whether "professional", or "unprofessional", it's legal. The public need to be aware if it is in fact the case. The outcomes for both the NHS and judiciary system will be immense!

PS, I'm not in the UK, so have no skin in the game in that regard

None of these experts conducted their reviews blind. Bohin received Evans' reports to review alongside medical case notes. The others contributed details from their specialisms with Evans playing a coordinating role. We saw this when Marinerides followed Evans' lead and found a cause of death on the wrong date.

Evans was clearly lead witness, and as such his theories are under attack. Bohin's too, for what it's worth. She did not have any more plausible explanations. The others supplied detail consistent with the Evans/ Bohin theories, but never diagnostic in itself.

Sink to their level? Dewi Evans was out doing interviews left and right straight after the court case.

surely if they still agree with him they could say so

surely if they still agree with him they could say so

@Neodymium but why would they? Until there is a process for them to take a formal part in (depending on whatever the CCRC decides) LL's convictions stand and there is no need for them to defend anything. They haven't even seen the full report of Shoo Lee's panel, nor has it been confirmed exactly what evidence the panel had seen to base this on. Blindly flinging more mud around in public is neither professional nor ethical, particularly when at the end of the day this is all about dead babies and grieving families.

And even if accusations that some of Dewi Evans's behaviour has been unprofessional are fair, is there any chance that the other prosecution experts might just be better than that?

All the non-medical evidence is irrelevant, certainly if there’s no good evidence of any murders. And even if there was, it’s all stuff that just falls well within normal behaviour when seen in context. It should never have been admitted.

There's no need for anyone to respond publicly to Shoo Lee's press conference. I agree with you on that.

However, the fact that this group hasn't responded doesn't mean there's a raft of expert views out there in support of Letby's convictions. They were all working from Evans' reports or giving supplementary supporting (or at least non confounding) evidence. If the conference was accurate in its critique of the prosecution case, that goes for them too on some points; on other points, they explained findings of fact which will likely stand but don't argue for murder.

They aren't another six more sane Evanses. They had a different role.

@skyfirechesnut

ratwhr a rude assumption but she was convicted on circumstantial evidence and that is extremely rare in the UK

there has always been questions about that and now rather compelling new challenges and questions

it deserves looking at.
its really that simple

Blindly flinging more mud around in public is neither professional nor ethical, particularly when at the end of the day this is all about dead babies and grieving families

Absolutely - it's always important to think of the parents and families

How do you think the parents of the babies who Evans 'diagnosed' as being murdered by air forced into ng tubes/'air splinting the diaphram'.feel after he changed his 'diagnosis' twice, months after the court case ended?

Their heads must be spinning

I can't speak to the specific experts, but this is an erroneous thing to say and you know that, not all doctors, let alone all experts are created equal, otherwise no one would bother with a second opinion and no doctor's treatment outcomes would differ from any other in their field.

Taking the specific example around different interpretations on insulin levels between the paediatrican and the neonatologist, it's worth noting that neonatologists do 3 years of further subspecialty neonatology training and must take rigorous clinical exams for neonatology before qualifying. I'm sure if your premie was in NICU you'd be wanting them seen by a neonatologist not a paediatrican. If their was no difference they'd all just be paediatricans. I don't know what to think about the evidence but if you're going to make a credible argument broad erroneous statements aren't the way to go about it.

Not to mention the parents didn’t even hear about the arrest until it happened.

i don’t think anyone can say that the professional review conducted (for free) by Dr shoo lee was mud slinging. Don’t forget the prosecution invited him in to this by using his work to convict her.

lets not forget as welll that his first condition to the defence was that no matter what his team found it would be publicly released. So if they found evidence of murder they would release that. He wouldn’t agree otherwise. So it’s not like he’s working for the defence. He wanted to know the truth as he was troubled that his work had been used inappropriately.

it’s not just the prosecution experts. These seems to be medical people all over coming forward to journalists ect questioning this. I have yet to see a medical person (other than Dewi Evans) agree. No medical person doctor nurse ect is writing to anyone publishing anything saying they agree. And I’m dam sure that if Liz Hull could find a single medical expert to say they agreed she would put it on the front page. The fact that she hasn’t got anyone is telling. The only people I see agreeing as non-scientific non-medical people who don’t seem to understand what is being said.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/17/campaigning-free-lucy-letby-not-right-wes-streeting

I wonder if Wes is on this thread 😂

Representative of the state:

You can campaign for justice quietly, through the proper channels

Also representative of the state:

So we'll get back to you in a decade or so then ...

Yes, this is the issue really. And I don't think there's any realistic way for it to be low profile now given how much public interest there was in the trial to begin with. I mean the police released a documentary about it and now it's meant to be hush hush and wait a decade or so?

it’s not just the prosecution experts. These seems to be medical people all over coming forward to journalists ect questioning this. I have yet to see a medical person (other than Dewi Evans) agree. No medical person doctor nurse ect is writing to anyone publishing anything saying they agree. And I’m dam sure that if Liz Hull could find a single medical expert to say they agreed she would put it on the front page. The fact that she hasn’t got anyone is telling. The only people I see agreeing as non-scientific non-medical people who don’t seem to understand what is being said.

For what it's worth, here's one neonatologist who appears to agree with the prosecution and disagree with the panel - x.com/drpaulclarke?s=21&t=nMIEPJTrX8mdRDt3kgBsag

We have to trust the justice system, not the amateur sleuths. The judge and jury heard all the evidence and made a decision, and there are appeals available if new evidence is found.

I know there have been miscarriages in the past, and probably still are, but the system we have seems pretty good and jumping on a bandwagon because the twitter sphere says so (or any other social media even MN) is daft. Leave it to the appeals court if there are any legal grounds for appeal.

No we don’t, we need to reform the CJS so that it deals better with medico-legal cases.

I think the point is that the evidence heard by judge and jury was misinterpreted/misrepresented/
misunderstood, and therefore is not sound information to form the basis of the prosecutions argument.
So it's one thing to trust that the judge/jury did the best with the information presented to them, but it shouldn't have been presented because it didn't mean what the "expert" interpreted it to mean. The author of the research paper has now come forward to clarify that the argument was flawed

There’s a lot more to this than people being swayed by the twittersphere.

When the main ‘expert’ employed by the justice system we should supposedly trust is the one acting like an amateur sleuth rather than a professional expert, to the extent that the author of one of the papers he relies on feels the need to come out and say he has been completely misrepresented, it’s clear the system is not working as it should be: it relies on the people employed as experts actually being competent in the areas they say they are expert in, and when they are not, it means the jury did not get the whole picture and through no fault of their own might have come to a dangerously wrong conclusion.

I don’t think you have been following this case! That’s okay of course - it’s not of interest to everyone.

But the key issue is that this case has highlighted potentially serious issues in the wider judicial process (including the appeals process). So just saying “it’s fine, the judicial system will take care of it” doesn’t really cut it when the judicial system itself is the problem.

Given that it points to some very serious problems in the nhs and the way it is run I am disappointed to hear about Wes Streetings lack of curiosity about this case.

I am hoping this means he’s publicly saying very little to rock the boat - he does sound more on the fence - but frantically demanding answers behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, my hope may well be unfounded.

He isn't actually engaging with (agreed) information though - he's just stirring on twitter. Nobody has claimed a baby died because they had the wrong sized ET tube. Nobody has claimed that four or five babies just died unexplained deaths. He's just trolling there.

Given that it points to some very serious problems in the nhs and the way it is run I am disappointed to hear about Wes Streetings lack of curiosity about this case.

I suspect that Wes Streeting is very well briefed on what's going on in the background here, and what the insider view is on the likely security or otherwise of these convictions.

To be fair, nobody in his position is going to start expressing doubts in a TV interview like that. He gave a safe answer. Tells us nothing about his actual view or prospect of action.