To think Lucy Letby could’ve done more to help herself if she really wasn’t guilty?

[Seymorbutts]

Just watched the new Lucy Letby documentary on Netflix. I think there’s one of C4 too, don’t know if it’s the same one? I’m leaning slightly more towards that she did it, but only about 60% sure she did it. 40% sure she didn’t do it. On this doc there’s a lot of footage of all her arrests and police interviews. What strikes me as odd IF she’s innocent, is how little she protests her innocence, how calm & composed she is. It’s the same during her arrests. I understand she must’ve been in shock when she was arrested so that could explain it. But she was interviewed for hours. Not once did she say “I didn’t do this” (unless directly asked, which she just answered with “no”) “I’m innocent”, “I could never kill a baby”. Nothing like that. Very little crying too. I know she’s supposedly very quiet and reserved and I’m sure was very scared, but I don’t think personality can account for a total lack of defending herself (or maybe she was just following the advice given by her lawyer). But still, if it was me I’d be absolutely raging, and protesting my innocence at every opportunity and giving clear, detailed reasons why I couldn’t have done it when they put it to me that I did. Or maybe she did do it and she’s a psychopath and unable to show remorse, which could explain her lack of any kind of emotion at all 🤷‍♀️ I really don’t know. If she is innocent though, I feel like the way she behaved made her look guilty. Interested to hear if people think she did it or not and why/why not…

If you get the chance listen to the podcast series ‘Was there ever a crime?’ By John Sweeney. They go into much more detail than the documentary does. I don’t know if she’s innocent or guilty but she didn’t get a fair trial, the jury weren’t told a lot of things.

This was the lady I meant yes. Thank you for posting a link to what she said. So much effort going on to downplay the whole thing from some people...

@Oftenaddled who even cares if it was an official complaint or not? Why does it matter? I thought your whole entire point was "well no one raised anything at the time"-then you're shown evidence that they did and it's "oh well that one doesn't count". She made a complaint, she knew Lucy's behaviour was very off at the time enough to tell Lucy herself and her supervisor. This is a fact. So unless you ARE going to accuse the mum of fabricating the whole thing, I really don't see why it matters whether it was an official complaint or not.

And her baby did have issues right after she made that complaint about Lucy.

What I am saying is that there's nothing to tell us that all this isn't just hindsight - all we know if that the hospital doesn't seem to have a record of a complaint. I'm happy to put that as "not formal" rather than insist that we can know either way, because we can't, and as I've told you before, I'm not in the habit of jumping to accuse people of lying just because all the facts don't align. But neither a parent being upset by a tactless remark nor a child falling sick in a neonatal care unit is a suspicious circumstance.

Basically what you have here is, mother is told the nurse who cared for her child was a murderer, mother who was previously not alarmed about her child's condition now associates it with that nurse. It is just not an event or recollection which you can view independently from the murder convictions.

Issues, yes. The baby was in a neonatal unit and an understaffed, over-capacity one at that.

But your claims of an insulin spike are bogus. You must know that, if you have really being paying attention to facts.

Nope, she made a complaint at the tine. Either you believe she did (and I do) or you don’t believe her.

You can choose to believe whatever you want, but the evidence isn’t there that a complaint was made as the hospital didn’t disclose one when asked to disclose all complaints received by the unit during the period. That’s factual.

To be quite fair to that mother, when patients say they have complained they mean they have spoken to the ward manager. Not all pieces of negative feedback make it to the official complaints statistics. So I have no reason whatsoever to doubt her account.

What is in doubt is whether careless speaking is evidence of anything more than carelessness, or whether the next day’s events were the result of deliberate harm. There’s certainly no evidence whatsoever of an “insulin spike” or this would represent a fourth baby with anomalous results. Unless there was an endogenous insulin spike.

This is an excellent read. https://conservativehome.com/2026/02/19/matthew-jeffery-law-order-and-doubt-why-the-lucy-letby-case-should-give-conservatives-pause/

I’d be interested to hear whether anyone thinks this is unreasonable, and if so why.

I don't believe I said anything about an insulin spike? That was in the article another PP linked. But I do recall the interview with the mum saying that yes. And she's a nurse herself so I think she knows what she's talking about and why whatever happened to her baby made no sense.

Fair enough - I should have said the article quoted was wrong.

If there had been an insulin spike it would either be a fourth baby with anomalous results (there isn’t one), or a baby with a natural insulin spike and therefore irrelevant.

She wasn't a nurse, she was a nurse assistant, it literally says it in the Sky News report if you actually read it.

Great article @EyeLevelStick . Not a publication I usually read but it was a really good summation of the issues here. This really jumped out to me;

*If confidence in a verdict is to remain strong, the evidential and procedural foundations should be able to withstand structured, transparent questioning. The following are not accusations. They are review questions. They are the kinds of questions a robust justice system should be able to answer clearly and calmly.
A large number of technical review questions have now emerged from clinicians, statisticians, and legal commentators. These cover incident selection, medical interpretation, insulin assay reliability, statistical clustering, expert methodology, disclosure, and governance.

Even if every conviction stands exactly as decided, institutional learning still matters. Hospitals, regulators, prosecutors, and courts should examine how evidence is gathered, interpreted, and presented in complex medical cases. Justice is strengthened when systems learn, not when they become defensive.
Questioning evidential process is not the same as disputing verdicts. It is how strong justice systems maintain legitimacy.*

Thanks again - this kind of post is why I read these threads. I appreciate the chance to think and learn something.

No, indeed. Not my usual read either! But this isn’t a left/right issue and being dogmatic isn’t my style anyway.

It's well written. And is the point many of us have made on here. There are obvious issues, many of which relate to the system, and even if they haven't meant an innocent person being convicted in this case, they could in future. That's something everyone should be concerned about, however fervent their belief in Letby's guilt is. There is a reason so many expert and professional bodies had raised concerns about matters such as expert witnesses and use of statistics in our court system, even prior to the verdicts.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15573959/research-doubts-medical-experts-Lucy-Letby-free.html

@Oftenaddled

new experts dispute the panels findings

That article is a travesty.

The "new" air embolism case the Daily Mail has come up with is a case of pulmonary vascular air embolism, like the ones that Tanswell and Lee first wrote about. Why are they talking as if that's meant to be a venous air embolism case?

That poor child has severe mottling. This can also happen in venous air embolism cases (though this isn't one). Why are they calling it Lee's sign? Having read the paper (which is just a page long), I can confirm that nobody has described of photographed it that way.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875957225001627

Liz Hull is showing that she still can't understand, or refuses to believe, that there's a difference between two types of air embolism. So she has literally picked up a case of air embolism with a non specific rash and decided it proves something. It's really quite mind boggling that she has been churning out material on the trial so long and thinks this is relevant

The neonatologist Hull interviews is also under some weird misapprehensions about Dr Lee's research.

He spends a lot of energy trying to prove that Lee has ignored evidence that air can travel from the venous system to the arterial system, when Lee has straight-out stated in both his article and press conference that air can travel from the venous system to the arterial system.

Like Liz Hull, he assumes any old rash or mottling is Lee's sign. He doesn't present a scientific argument for this. Just yes, that's Lee's sign, for descriptions of two completely different rashes. Seems we have learned nothing since 2023.

So why is this guy accusing Lee of not reading articles he has already commented on, and in one case in fact mentions specifically in his very short article? Whatever you think about Lucy Letby's guilt or innocence, he is clearly misrepresenting Lee"s work. Bizarre.

Does she have any chance of a retrial, if there isn’t new evidence as such but rather a new interpretation of the evidence?

Also can’t help wondering how her initial defence team managed to miscalculate their strategy so badly, if we assume that they went with making the prosecution prove it iyswim. What a massive error that was. Or maybe there’s more at play. I don’t know. I’m not trying to be critical of them.

I think the defence strategy was flawed but we know that some things were ruled out by the judge, so we may never know the exact reasons for how they handled it.

The amount of "mistakes" made by witnesses which have since been "corrected" to my mind screams "there's something wrong here" and should merit a very serious examination and then a retrial.

She may still be guilty of course, personally I'm not closed to that thought but there are so many things wrong with the case it's easy to see why some believe it's a stitch up.

Yes, she does. The CCRC doesn't actually have to find new evidence, and neither does the Court of Appeal. The CCRC doesn't even need new arguments. They can refer on the basis of "lurking doubt", on whatever grounds they like. The Court of Appeal can consider anything it likes so long as it explains why it considers that justified.

In practice both the CCRC and the Court of Appeal tend to point to new evidence as the simplest and cleanest way to justify things - not all of the evidence has to be new to make that work. In Lucy Letby's cases there is some 100% new evidence (items that weren't disclosed by the prosecution) but the case could be referred even without that.

I read that Lee had resubmitted the paper to the journal which was used in the trial with some amendments to make it clearer that how it was used in the trial was incorrect. I’m not sure if that will be accepted as new evidence as he hopes it will be.

The campaign group Nineteen Nurses have some interesting talks on YouTube, although the ones on appeals made me quite depressed. There’s a talk from lawyers who work on an innocence project. When they started out they were obviously focusing on freeing innocent people but haven’t had much success and in just under ten years only have 2 successes, so their remit has changed to focus on helping prisoners in other ways like presenting them with the info they’ve found and making them feel heard. Better than nothing but it made me realise how difficult it is for people to have a successful appeal. I just think of Andy Malkinsom where there was DNA evidence showing a different man was the rapist a few years after he was convicted but it took more than a decade more for his successful appeal.

Better than nothing but it made me realise how difficult it is for people to have a successful appeal.

I was thinking that then I saw this one a few days ago:

BBC:Police framed man for murder, new evidence suggests

The BBC has investigated this case over nine years, previously reporting that some witnesses had said they gave false evidence after being pressured by police. But Panorama's latest investigation reveals:
Phone records suggest Benguit had an alibi that discredited the evidence of the main witness and the police buried it
Police built their case around the testimony of a proven liar, even though they knew CCTV footage contradicted her story
Two additional witnesses say they lied in court after police pressured them
Four more people told the BBC that officers had tried to get them to give false evidence and they refused
The evidence of all the key prosecution witnesses has now been undermined or discredited
Witness testimony was crucial to the prosecution as there was no CCTV or forensic evidence linking Benguit to the crime.
...
Having served 23 years, he could now be eligible for parole if he admitted murdering Oki. But the 53-year-old told Panorama he could not confess to something he had not done.

...

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is currently considering Omar Benguit's case, after the BBC discovered CCTV evidence in 2021.

...

A Dorset Police spokesperson said that Omar Benguit had appealed twice against his conviction and that his claims of wrongful conviction had been dismissed by the Court of Appeal.

I've never heard of this case - at least don't remember it and only heard about Andy Malkinsom when he fianlly got his conviction over turned.

It's very hard, and this is part of the reason there's so much attention around this case. People know that our system doesn't reliably and promptly remedy miscarriages of justice. There's a real lack of trust.

This is why I think people who casually kick out and stir the pot with random abuse of people like Mark McDonald, Shoo Lee etc need to reflect on what they are doing.

By all means, if these people are objectively wrong or if you have informed yourself and are in a position to dispute their claims, make your point.

But piling on people who are trying to bring a potential miscarriage of justice to attention, when the odds are always stacked against a reversal? Even if I thought they were misguided I would rather let them be heard than sneer at them and sulk when they make waves. We need people to do the work they've taken on.

Excellent! So it turns out Shoo Lee was misunderstanding/misinterpreting his own work, not everyone else. Oh the irony. The house of cards is starting to fall. Hope he apologises to the families and everyone else involved for the months of speculation he caused. Despicable man.