To agree with the Guardian about the Netflix coverage of the Lucy letby case?

[justwandered]

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/feb/04/the-investigation-of-lucy-letby-review-netflix?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other]]

I honestly don’t think I’ve come across a show in such poor taste before and I am no stranger to stories about murder and the like.

It crosses a huge line in terms of stripping individuals of their dignity.

I don’t plan on watching it but when I turned Netflix on the other night to put a TV show on for my children there it was - horrid and completely unnecessary.

No, you are right, it isn’t very obvious in the original paper. It is, however, clearly about pulmonary vascular embolism caused by positive pressure ventilation of neonates, not accidental or deliberate IV injection of air.

The point is the paper has been (understandably, I think) misconstrued as being about venous air emboli, when it is not. So it’s an irrelevant paper. The judges have failed to understand this.

@EyeLevelStick how would they ever find a paper that focused on accidental (something it's drilled into nurses to avoid) or deliberate injection? No paper probably exists. You can't experiment on babies. And that's the crux of the issue with this case-people asking for impossible things and saying well if you can't provide it no murders then. What is the explanation for these mysterious rashes that the staff had never seen before or since?

More likely he wanted to call Mike Hall for some and not for others (where he couldn't disagree with the prosecution) quite rightly he was told he's not allowed to do that. So they chose not to call any. If she was innocent none of this would be a problem. I don't think cost factored into it tbh.

The Zhou and Lee paper includes accidental.(not deliberate) injection of air into veins, and collects together all the published cases describing it since 1989. Zhou and Lee show that none of these cases involved the flitting pink rash on a cyanised background that has been seen in a small number of arterial embolisms

If that's the case, they should be able to use the fact that the prosecution didn't release information about baby Y (the third insulin baby) as one reason for the strategy, making that new evidence very helpful in getting back to the court of appeal.

Most likely you'd argue black was white if you thought it would bolster the "guilty" cause.

a) see Zhou and Lee paper. If you can’t read it for yourself, see Oftenaddled’s post above for a lay summary

b) are you really saying that unusual skin rashes and discolouration must indicate venous air embolism? On what basis are you saying that? Could they not equally indicate hypoxia and/or sepsis?

None of this stacks up though.

Firstly, the defence will have known that it was by no means a given that their application to change the ordering would be allowed. So in that case they decided ahead of time that if that happened they just wouldn’t call any experts? That would be crazy. Whatever the risks might have been presented by everyone already being overwhelmed (as you put it) which are debatable anyway, they wouldn’t have come anywhere close to the risks of not calling anyone. That is only assuming they had experts who could actually support her defence of course.

And sorry, but the point about the defence avoiding an increased trial length/cost by virtue of them just making their case is a complete nonsense!

It was definitely an odd thing to do, to want to call the expert throughout the trial but then at the end not call him at all.

I would imagine that if they had allowed the original request that at least some of the people who say she didn't have a fair trial would think well she did have an expert disputing at least some of it so it seems fair enough.

I wonder how the prosecution felt at the time when the defence didn't call a witness, on one hand they would have known they were most likely about to win the case but they must have also thought oh shit, will she later be able to claim inadequate defence?

Without providing any actual evidence.

Lucy is in prison on a potential unsafe conviction and you’re trying to make out she has white privilege?

Anyone trying to make this a race issue is just not that bright.

@QOrionso you presumably know the ethnicities and statures of all of her superiors?

But you're as convinced she's innocent as I am she's guilty so I could say the same thing about arguing black was white. I don't see how BM could possibly be allowed to have the defence witness after each prosecution one-it's always prosecution case followed by defence case isn't it? He must've been pretty desperate to even ask if they could do that...

What evidence do you have for any of it to be about cost?

With the public yes. People are arguing it's an unsafe conviction (in fact they've convinced themselves it is) and it makes people wonder why she has such victim status amongst the public compared to other serial killers.

Really would be interesting to know what the public perception would have been if Letby had indeed been brown skinned with a foreign name.

I'll type this slowly for you.

People have grave concerns about the way the case was constructed and investigated, and about the dodgy expert witness testimony, which has led to 14 international experts in relevant fields to conclude there was no evidence of murder in an independent review.

Regardless of Lucy Letbys gender, hair colour, or any other extraneous / irrelevant characteristic, the medical evidence needs to be re-examined, and personally, I wouldn't care if she was a three headed Martian with a penchant for whistling dixie through a nose flute in her down time.

To a point, you’re right, although its quite hard to really address because there aren’t many female murderers and the ones that do exist are almost exclusively white anyway. But there are cases which are uneasy / unsafe convictions but haven’t attracted anything like the furore this one has.

I don’t think it’s so much to do with her race as it is the crimes she’s been accused of. Female murderers are rare and the most notorious ones acted in conjunction with a ma anyway. It was always going to generate an enormous amount of publicity and press coverage and as such doubts creep in.

You might be interested to know the general feeling at Rose West’s trial was that she wouldn’t be convicted. Strange to think of now but that was the view of her barrister, as it was circumstantial evidence.

The only real equivalent case is Allitt and she was very different to Letby in all sorts of ways. There have been two other male nurses convicted of murder but both of those have had a certain amount of controversy; that said, it doesn’t look like they are getting out any time soon.

Because the evidence of murders having been committed at all is very poor, which is a concern to people who think that we should have a justice system that avoids miscarriages of justice. It’s nothing to do with Lucy Letby herself.

I just don't buy it. If this was a creepy 40 year old male nurse who was around every single death (I mean practically the minute he came on shift in some cases) and kept all the handover sheets at his house and looked up mothers on facebook whose babies had died can you honestly say none of this would matter to you? How many excuses for him do you think people would make just after two suspicious incidents, never mind 20+ ones. It's bordering on ridiculous that people can't seem to see what's right in front of them.

Being a creep =/= being a murderer.

Do you understand that rashes don’t indicate air embolism yet?

In this thought exercise, does Shoo Lee just not give a fuck that a paper of his was significantly misinterpreted during a baby multiple murder trial?

Think of the poor parents of a young woman who may very well be innocent and has been given a life sentence.

Right so if a woman is found murdered and her ex stalked her for a year beforehand you'd say he obviously didn't murder her he's just a bit creepy?

Do you understand that rashes don’t indicate air embolism yet?

Did you ever come up with an explanation for these rashes that professionals with decades of experience behind them had never seen before or since?

... and its not just Internet detectives, it's a highly experienced criminal lawyer who believe that she is innocent. Somebody who has access to all of the evidence.

Those professionals had very limited experience of the types of children who died on the ward, and even so they only identified one rash as puzzling (to them) at the time.

Shoo Lee's expert panel has come up with various explanations for the rashes, yes, different according to the condition each child died with, just as the descriptions of the rashes at the time were different too.