Lucy letby

[bloomingbonkerz]

Do you think she did it ? Watched the documentary and I’m not sure she should have been convicted

I’ve just been through nurse training. Absolutely under NO circumstances are you allowed, let alone encouraged, to take home hand over sheets with confidential medical information on them! I have no idea about doctors but nurses absolutely not. They go in the confidential waste bin at the end of shift.
If you accidentally did, then you would either burn them or shred them (she had a shredder). What you wouldn’t do is keep 600 of them in a box marked ‘keep’.

Good job she didn't keep 600 in a box marked keep then isn't it.

You know, if you're genuinely interested in the details of this case, it might be useful to look them up. Or even read the full thread.

250 sheets of paper, not case files.

I am not certain, so please do correct me if I am wrong. I think what you are suggesting is a system that the US use Jury Consultants and both defence and prosecution select the jury. From my experience as a juror you can ask to excused only for very valid reasons e.g., I could not sit on a case that involves child abuse (I have significant bias). I remember a case during jury duty those had watch a television documentary style show about airports (baggage checks) had to recuse themselves.

I usually steer clear of commenting on Lucy posts as they’re quite polarising, but I think she guilty.

There’s a misconception that reasonable doubt requires forensic evidence or CCTV evidence, but that’s just not correct. If you think of it as a jigsaw, and each piece of circumstantial evidence is a piece:

• only nurse on shift at the time of /immediately before every unexplained deaths
• deaths followed her from day to night and then stopped entirely. No deaths in over 900 babies since (and whilst the unit has been downgraded, 90% of the babies on the indictment would’ve been treated in the unit as it is now)
• over 250 handover sheets hidden in various places, including a box marked “keep”
• caught lying over small things e.g shredder
• searching parents of dead babies on Facebook for quite some time after the events
• The “confession” notes
• Her presence at the bedside of a baby who was deteriorating, whilst she was not reacting at all
• Inappropriate behaviour in the aftermath of the deaths

Those are all I can remember off the top of my head. Now, individually they may all have a plausible explanation, but when viewed in the whole, they paint a very different picture.

As an aside, she didn’t actually forward a defence. Her defence lawyer is one of the best in the industry - he would have had medical reports, witness statements and the like but Lucy had made the ultimate decision not to call any of these. She would’ve been advised a whole life tariff would be inevitable if found guilty, so why would you not use every witness possible given what was at stake.

From what I read previously, she hasn’t waived privilege so her new legal team don’t know exactly what or why decisions were made, but she cannot use any of it in the CCRC as it was available at the time of the trial.

Everything else that’s come out in the media is just noise really. I don’t think the scapegoat theory stacks up given the lengths the hospital went to support and protect her, and given they clearly didnt have much interest in the deaths then why would a consultant risk mentioning it.

Ultimately, most of us have had a negative experience of the NHS. That is something we have lived experience of. It is far more palatable to attribute this to NHS negligence than to cold blooded murder of the most vulnerable members of society by a seemingly unassuming little blonde nurse.

Sadly, had she been a different ethnicity or gender, the only outrage would be the usual suspects harping on about how much legally aided legal representation she had access to.

It was more of a light-hearted comment that they could at least try to weed out people who have extreme black and white thinking, and it would be very easy to do so with a simple questionnaire, because their black and white thinking is so obvious and extreme.

The US jury selection is fascinating, I would actually love to do that job 😅 but at the same time that can push it too far in the other direction.

But I certainly think the justice system would benefit from some changes so that they make sure they have jurors who could actually engage in critical thinking and didn't have extreme black and white thinking. I would imagine that jury rooms will become insufferable in future considering how many people now are not able to engage in discussion normally and rant and rave as a form of debate. I'm not specifically referring to this case, there's a culture of it no matter what the disagreement is now and a large amount of people just can't have a discussion at all, they pick a side and once they have made their mind up they refuse to change it even when it's clear they're wrong, they just double down.

I have always said personally that I'd never be able to sit as a juror on a rape trial, I always believe the victim but I'm such a firm believer in Blackstones ratio that it's better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent be locked up that I would really struggle if it was a case without concrete evidence, without that I couldn't find him guilty and I'd feel so much guilt that I'd let the victim down that I think it would haunt me and I would be traumatised by it!

Of course if at jury selection I mentioned blackstones ratio they'd think well good because that's what we'd want 😅 so I'd have to just tell them I have extreme bias about rape cases to get out of it.

I believe she is innocent.

@Nottodaythankyou123

Her defence lawyer is one of the best in the industry - he would have had medical reports, witness statements and the like but Lucy had made the ultimate decision not to call any of these. She would’ve been advised a whole life tariff would be inevitable if found guilty, so why would you not use every witness possible given what was at stake.

She had the final say but we don't know what advice she was given.

My mistake then @MistressoftheDarkSide, 250 is so much better. I’ll make sure I thoroughly review the case one we aren’t busy flying round hospitals after my dads pancreatic cancer diagnosis a few days ago.

it costs fuck all to be kind - I made a typo. Didn’t quite deserve a sarky comment.

Nope - either way, she was either advised to call them and declined - why would she do that? Or she was advised not to, and took that advice up. Again, if these witnesses strongly supported her case why on earth would she not want them called

We don't know and we may never know even if she ends up getting out.

There have been multiple posts on this already but I don’t think it is at all difficult to see why if you have an expert witness who operates with an academic’s level of nuance and uncertainty and you put them up against Dr ‘I could see in 10 minutes that there had definitely been murders and it was definitely Lucy Letby’ Dewi Evans it is not going to look good to a jury who aren’t used to medical research levels of complexity.

Particularly when your expert has been forced to agree with the prosecution on certain matters of fact (re the insulin) because some of the information about how and why the tests can be wrong has not yet emerged.

This is actually what worries me about the whole thing, they have never suspected anyone else? If they are convinced these babies were murdered why haven’t they investigated everyone on the ward? It’s a bit scary.

Because they convinced themselves it could only be Letby, by crossing off from the suspicious list all the ones where she wasn’t there.
Just last week a father came forward whose baby had had the mottled rash supposedly indicative of Lucy causing air embolisms (we know from Shoo Lee that that was nonsense, but anyway) and the police didn’t want to know. Because his baby was in the unit a year after Lucy left.

The supposedly suspicious circumstantial things like her texts or Facebook searches or her taking paperwork home are indeed absolutely 100% meaningless without knowing how common these things are, and did they go through everyone’s Facebook and texts? No they did not.

The whole thing is an utter travesty and my mind boggles at the stupidity of all involved.

To clarify- I mean he came forward to the police earlier, last week the press reported it, not that he only told the police last week

Thank you for your thoughtful and considered response. I am very analytical in my thought processes and feel I have to account for my opinions (often leads to over explaining) this has become more apparent to me during the reflexively process I am currently undertaking (a natural part of my personality though. I have strong beliefs that I must always be able to evidence and evaluate my decision making although very aware of my own emotional bias due to my lived experiences. I am an autistic women which may explain some of how my brain functions.

I agree with you about the Blackstones ratio it is difficult and I could not sit as a jurist on those cases or cases like them. The thought of failing a victim would haunt me. This is due to my own experiences where I have been failed by professionals (the failure of professionals has left more scars than the acts themselves).

Gosh, there sure are a lot of experts in this thread!

I can't help but find myself wondering how many of you are criminal barristers who have argued murder cases? How many of you have a single qualification in pediatric medicine?
I'm certainly not saying I have either of those either, but some of you sure do throw out a lot of opinions prettily dressed up as facts.

And like @HattieJ2 implied, a good number of you don't seem to understand the pretty basic point of law in which circumstantial evidence becomes cumulative evidence, and have clearly never followed any sort of criminal case before.
I suspect the words are too big. ;)

We don’t need to know, it may be useful for her new legal team to know I suppose.

And other people are very pleased with themselves for knowing absolutely enormous words like circumstantial and cumulative but haven’t considered the simple fact (which can be expressed in very short words indeed) that if the circumstantial evidence is weak, piling up a number of bits of equally weak circumstantial evidence doesn’t make the weak strong.

It has also escaped the notice of some people that investigating someone for a very large number of deaths greatly increases the chance of there being neutral facts (such as texts saying ‘I’m going to be back at work with a bang’) which coincide temporally with deaths and can therefore be spun into circumstantial evidence. Therefore the existence of the accumulation of weak circumstantial evidence is a function of the large number of deaths and the resources thrown at the investigation rather than guilt.

Most of us don’t have legal or medical expertise so what we have to do is make intelligent discriminations between the ‘experts’ who do know what they are talking about, like Shoo Lee, and those who don’t and who have a history of ultracrepidarianism, like Dewi Evans.

That, and just engage our actual brains.

Circumstantial evidence of course can be used legitimately. But much of the supposed evidence is spurious and has been challenged by many medically and legally qualified people under their real names in the real world.

Most of us posting on here are explaining their views, using our own scientific, medical and critical thinking backgrounds. I don’t think anyone has claimed to be an expert in neonatology or criminal law.

And on the subject of expertise, the police, who do not understand statistics, ditching the advice of Professor Jane Hutton, who does, because they thought listening to someone who knew what they were talking about wasn’t going to help them get a conviction, is one of the most shameful parts of this shocking so-called investigation.

I am so sorry you're going through that, it is a cruel disease. Ignore MN, sending support 💐x

Whether it’s 600 or 250 the point still stands. No nurse would keep 100s of them in a box in their house, it’s drummed into us about those handover sheets and the importance of destroying them.

Well, Letby clearly did. Also, many other nurses have said they have accidentally taken home handover sheets and have stored them before destroying them, so practice clearly varies.

Obviously it’s inappropriate, and possibly a disciplinary matter, but does this mean she is a murderer?

My point is that was that he was saying to her in the messages and the confidential emails he forwarded to her (between him and his colleagues) wasn't gossip - it was factual information about the killings and attempted killings.

Don't you think it's strange (and possibly an example of circumstantial evidence against her) that he provided her with information about the investigation, information she asked for?

The public inquiry was told that Dr U provided Letby with confidential information about the efforts to investigate the cause of unusual and unexpected deaths on the neonatal unit after she was removed from it in July 2016.

I'm reposting the Guardian article for anyone else @HattieJ2 who wants to read it, which covers some of the Doctor's testmony in the inquiry and the (probable) affair she had with him:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/07/doctor-secured-lucy-letby-hospital-placement-while-she-was-suspected-of