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…

they could then convene a multidisciplinary team to find the most likely causes of death, which did not happen in Lucy Letby's case until Lee's panel was convened

It is worrying they didn’t do such a thing and seem to have left it to fundamentally one man to decide. Given issues in the past like the Sally Clark case you’d think for serious charges like murder they’d get multiple opinions separate/blind from each other to confirm others reach the same conclusion.

@Oftenaddled the pathologists that were never told to look for deliberate harm and have since said if they'd known that things would've been very different?

If in doubt, they could then convene a multidisciplinary team to find the most likely causes of death, which did not happen in Lucy Letby's case until Lee's panel was convened.

So in your mind someone could be murdered but because that's the least likely scenario, they should just pick a more likely cause of death by default?

Everything was done arse about face, it's ridiculous.

The pathologists also didn't know about a whole medical procedure that might have gone some way to explaining the liver injury.

What is your source for saying the pathologists have said they would have approached things differently, as to my knowledge, they've remained pretty tight lipped? And is it possible it was a general observation as to how the investigation should have been approached if there were suspicions of foul play?

I think only McPartland has spoken, of the pathologists. She told the Thirlwall Inquiry that she was still quite satisfied with her verdict for baby D, the only child she was questioned about, and that she couldn't go over her findings in detail anyway because the police wouldn't give her her notes and records back.

It might've been Jane Hawdon I'm thinking of. But in any case, the pathologists didn't have all the info and were only looking for natural causes.

You don't understand, I think

Air embolism and liver injury, for example, could be natural causes if death, iatrogenic (caused by medical treatment) or murder.

You start by deciding the most likely cause of death, and then you can consider whether it was natural, iatrogenic, murder.

You don't start with, was this murder or error or natural causes and then work out what happened. You start with, what's the most likely cause of death.

Hawdon was a neonatologist. Her emails to Ian Harvey show that she was aware that the consultants suspected deliberate harm but stood by her conclusions.

At the Thirlwall hearings she was asked all sorts of absurd questions and told that the pathologist had changed her mind, which wasn't true. She basically started replying to questions with, yes, if what you are saying is true I would describe x, y or z as unexpected.

Evans and the other medical witnesses may have had more medical records than the pathologists, but that's also the case for Shoo Lee's panel. That's the point: if you come to suspect your pathologists have missed something, you convene a properly qualified multidisciplinary panel.

I experienced months of bullying and accusations when I was a whistleblower in the NHS. One of the documentaries suggested she experienced something along these lines. If she did I can totally see why she is reacting how she did. It takes everything out of you.

and yet the consultants on the ward had suspicions for 12months and all they had to do was mention it. Yet they didn't.

I know that thread has moved on but
I do think that LL was far too trusting of the system to begin with and would have been helped better if she had been more cynical at the start.

Yes. Emailing the police to offer to meet them, trusting that the managers would act to support her after her complaint made them choose between her and seven consultants. Not going straight for legal representation or constructive dismissal the second they pushed her off the wards.

They are mistakes a lot of people might make of course, but less so as you get older and experience more at work

That's what they did-you just don't believe them.

Also-https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8l179yzx3o

A specialist doctor said she felt "misled" after reviewing the deaths of babies who were later found to have been murdered by nurse Lucy Letby.
Consultant neonatologist Jane Hawdon was asked by the Countess of Chester Hospital to carry out a case note review for 17 babies - 13 of whom died and four who were described as suffering "near misses".
Dr Hawdon said she had not been made aware of any suspicions about a staff member when medical director Ian Harvey instructed her in September 2016.
She told the public inquiry into the circumstances around Letby's offending that she later felt she had not been "adequately briefed" about the cases.

As a result, Dr Hawdon told the inquiry her review was "absolutely not be the level of forensic investigation that was needed".
Her report concluded that the deaths of four of Letby's victims - known as Child A, Child I, Child O and Child P - had been unexplained and unexpected.
She told the inquiry that if she had received more information about the circumstances of three other babies' collapses, she would have categorised the deaths of Child C, Child D and Child E as unexplained.

Regarding the email to the police in April 2018 about time frames, how did she know what the operation was called when it wasn’t public knowledge? The few months before her arrest were hazy to me but now I’m thinking she knew what was coming (sorry if this has been covered in the thread, I can’t recall every detail).

She says in the email she wanted to alleviate her anxieties but I’m leaning towards her wanting to appear helpful, like one of the detectives says in the Netflix documentary. Or / and she was thinking of her cats and when she’ll be separated from them for good.

How would she know, if she was guilty? The same way she would know if she was innocent.

I don't know what that way was though. Do you think people at the hospital knew the name?

Yes, I remember that BBC report. It was very selective compared with the heating it was reporting

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/transcript/12-11-2024-transcript-of-week-9-day-2/

That just shows incompetance by Harvey and arse covering by Hawdon

Which is actually a sign of innocence.
If she is guilty then she'd have been hiding things, and working out a cover story.

It's can actually be easier covering for yourself if you know you have done something because you know what happened so can manipulate things so you can hide what you know have been done.

If you're innocent then you don't have the knowledge of what you are being accused of doing so in giving the truth you may be opening yourself up to it being possible.

Before certain people on here think this is ridiculous, I can give a direct example of such things:

I witnessed person A (a young man in authority) deliberately trip person B (lady in her 80s who was visiting work) up. There was no doubt that he did it. I saw it. I was the only witness, and he led her to the place where the CCTV cameras didn't cover before doing it. There was no way he could have done it by accident.

He knew that the only person that could say he'd done it was person B and me.

Within a couple of hours he'd gone to have a conversation about something totally different with higher authority and mentioned that person B had had a fall, and she was getting so frail and unsteady, and confused. None of these were true. Thus making any testimony from her seem unreliable.
He added that he was going straight to her house to check on her, cancelling his next appointment. I know that he didn't go that day because I know where he was over the entire time. (He was at a local café with friends - I have a friend who works there and there was no time for him to have gone there first, and he had an evening meeting until late)

Having got rid of her as a witness he then told the higher authority that I was getting very negative and he was worried that I was influencing people into thinking things were deliberately wrong when they were accidents.

I know this because the higher authority came to talk to me.
She told me that she knew what he'd said about person B being confused was true because she was so confused that she hadn't remembered person A visiting even though it was just yesterday.

The higher authority said he must be telling the truth as he had no idea that I was going to say that and hadn't come just to tell them about it, and they knew he'd cancelled his next appointment...

Edited to add:
This was just the latest in a line of similar things he'd done, although this was the worst. If I'd written them all down from the beginning instead of assuming it must be not on purpose for ages then it would have been better all round. Hence me agreeing with you.
If I had reported it just to be malicious then of course I would have had all the events written nicely and dated.

Someone at the hospital must have told her (or was it announced in the media at the time?).

Well we know Harvey is incompetent-he protected Letby for months and wanted her back on the unit. How do you expect Hawdon to do her job properly if she doesn't have all the info?

Are you saying she didn't say what was quoted? Maybe you can quote instead or tell me where exactly to find in the transcript since it's quite long.

No WE don't.

No - when I say something is selective I mean that what has been quoted may be accurate in itself but isn't representative. That's why I linked to the full hearing.

As well as the full hearing, you have this correspondence with Ian Harvey at the time. It shows that once she had completed her review, Harvey told Hawdon about the consultants' suspicions. She reacted with the assumption that their professional pride was wounded, not that she would therefore change her views on standards of care and cause of death.

Hawdon to Harvey:

I perceive a combination of understandable professional pride regarding standards of care on the unit along with concern over unexpected and unexplained events, both of which are entirely reasonable reactions, but both of these should not prevent accepting and learning what could have been improved.

Unexpected collapse in an otherwise stable baby is rare and I agree that there have been more cases than would be expected, especially those for whom there is no explanation of the PM cause of death is in question. The paediatricians infer more cases that I did not study.

There were insufficient details in records, and unlikely to have been possible to record in anything but real time to determine for each whether collapse and impossible resuscitation:

a) purely out of the blue and unexplained

b) a slowly deteriorating baby eg infection, shallow breathing, but signs missed until baby collapsed and resuscitation too late or not optimal, even in a busy unit competent nursing and medical staff and systems should be in place to prevent the majority of such cases.

In some I did have concerns regarding escalation and timing. If subtle signs are missed or not escalated or responded too, in some cases alarms going off is too late. Sadly even alarms are missed or ignored on occasions, which is below an acceptable standard of care. If units are "running hot" there should be situational awareness that risk of these is greater and workforce and workload managed appropriately. So there may have been an inherent system or leadership problem before change in designation.

c) sinister cause, which seems to be the concern of paediatricians, this could range from a member of staff who for some reason was not spotting or escalating the babies in b to active harm

Hint — avoid use of term down-grade

Please let me know if you would like to talk on phone

How will you proceed?

Jane

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/evidence/inq0014376-pages-1-3-of-emails-between-ian-harvey-and-dr-hawdon-dated-14-02-2017/

This is a really good video pointing out all (well some-apparently there's A LOT) of the mistakes the "expert panel" made. Makes sense as there would have to be numerous mistakes/omissions to ever make Lucy look not guilty!

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Just goes to show why you shouldn't put all your faith in an expert to the point you think all other evidence is completely irrelevant. Shoo Lee and his panel have been well and truly debunked. But I guess he'll just keep parroting that it's everyone else just misunderstanding him.

Also had to laugh at people losing their minds over the man's huge ego naming the rash after himself.

Firefly1987

I have said all along with this that I do not know whether LL is guilty or innocent.
I have major issues with the quality of "evidence" that was used to find her guilty and send her to prison.

My issue with your youtube link is that Dr Oliver (and her dog Cindy) believe that this makes me a supporter of LL.

What I am is a supporter of justice and LL should in my opinion get a retrial due to the new evidence that has come forward.

If she gets that and what the outcome is remains to be seen.

I think it's fine to challenge Dr Shoo if you have evidence but it puts me off her straight away when she asserts that Shoo and his team have been desperate to come to the conclusion they did as they've been told to come to this conclusion - by whom? It's quite a claim to make.
She makes quite big claims throughout that I don't see backed up. Such as that Dr Shoo biased the panel and gave them false info, and told them what to find. The evidence presented for this is in the email he says that there might be a miscarriage of justice.

I never understand some of the complaints against Shoo as the same issues could be used against Dr Dewi Evans especially around issues of arrogance and making claims.