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…

Not lost, she was finding it. Conveniently it had gone ' by the time ' she did.
But guess it does highlight semantics and interpretations of this complex case.

There is no picture of the rash as Lucy couldn't find the camera.
She really is the unluckiest nurse.

These were your words @coffeeandteav . As I pointed out and your own posts have shown too, they were not accurate. Nobody made this claim. It's an invention. I accept that you may have seen somebody else claim it elsewhere, but that doesn't make it true.

You can believe what you like, but please be careful with your facts.

There's absolutely no point in protesting your innocence during an arrest - it won't change anything and the police arresting you have heard it all before from lots of guilty people.

Likewise during the protracted interviews afterwards.

Do you really think a seasoned detective interviewing a suspect would be swayed in any way by them continuing to protest their innocence? They've heard it all before and are immune to it.

Interviews are all about facts, fact finding, etc. General protestations of innocence will barely even be noticed and WILL be completely ignored. The detectives want FACTS to support your innocence, i.e. alibis, evidence of things you can claim you did or didn't do to counter whatever FACTS they think they have that they use to prove your guilt.

Her finding it doesn't mean lost. Granted I should have said 'by the time' she got it. But as I said semantics.

In that case I would say you should also have left out the part about the unluckiest nurse, since we now seem to be agreed that all she did was to go and fetch a camera when asked.

Unlucky in the fact she missed the pic which would be helpful to have now.

Surely she could have photoshopped one a couple of years after the event - just like the so called evidence.

Indeed. There was nothing suspicious in the incident.

I'd say the "unluckiness" of her not having one photograph pales in comparison to the unluckiness of all the opportunities her colleagues missed to record or investigate things later described as suspicious

It was unlucky that Dr Jayaram never described baby A's rash at the time, at the coroner's inquest, or at his first police interview.

It's unlucky he never described baby M's rash in the child's notes either.

It's unlucky that the doctors never recorded any of the "suspicious collapses" on hospital systems, even after they were reminded to do so.

It's unlucky that the treating consultant persuaded the parents of baby E that he shouldn't have a postmortem, which might have identified his cause of death.

It's unlucky that the consultants failed to record the circumstances of baby P's death accurately for the pathologist

And unlike Lucy Letby and the camera, these medics were in a position to do these things - and more - if they really thought mysterious or suspicious events were happening. This is one of the ways in which the whole story told about Chester fails to hang together in the slightest.

I find the conversation about rashes interesting.

Ds had a tendency for rashes. He had:

Purple blotches bigger than his hand
Blue spots that joined with little lines coming out
Raised spots with centre
Red pin pricks
Bumpy red rash
Red circles about 2p size
White patches with red rims
Blue bruise like large rash over his limbs
Brown dots over his face
Bumpy rash, skin colour over torso
Stripes of purple...

All before he was 2yo and all extensively looked at and proclaimed "viral rash".

So you can see how rashes can come in small children, in many different ways. These often appeared quickly in a matter of minutes, and sometimes disappeared just as fast.

I remember one as being a bit like a computer game running down his body- as one set appeared the next would disappear.

Spent many hours in the local hospital while each one was investigated. None were found to be anything other than viral.

I think people can focus in on details of the case so much that its relevance gets lost. Maybe it's me that is missing something but I fail to see what Lucy's opinion on the rashes has. If she agreed or disagreed with other nurses or doctors I don't see how that points one way or the other. Other staff members out with Lucy have conflicting recalls of various incidents - that just points to them misremembering or not remembering details from incidents which happen a while in the past. It could just be the same with Lucy. It'd be quite a risky strategy to purposefully lie about rashes as I'm not sure what it'd gain. If all others agreed on something differently you'd stand out. And being that you're the one on trial the views of the others in hospital are going to be taken as more objective.

Kept happening over and over again with her. And there was one instance of a baby being in a room that Lucy was looking after him in but he had deteriorated and she wouldn't let him be moved. Her colleague mentioned moving him to room 1 because he didn't look as well as earlier and Lucy flat out said no he should stay in room 2. Then he did go on to collapse.

So either she intentionally made that baby collapse or she just so happens to be a terrible nurse who can't see the baby is deteriorating or is willing to let him go into room 1 with more intensive care. Which begs the question what reason she has to keep the baby in room 2 at all costs and disagree with her colleague.

Usually you try and argue Lucy knows best, but not that time eh. Despite being such a super nurse and SO much more experienced than all the other staff, babies are collapsing the majority of the time around her? Even in room 2? All this is irrelevant circumstantial evidence to you of course because Shoo Lee and his world renowned panel something something...

Just catching up and saw that I was mentioned. I appreciate the vote of confidence @Firefly1987 but it’s true that I’m not a scientist and I can’t pretend to have any insight into the clinical arguments and opinions.

What I do know a lot about though is corporate and clinical governance in the NHS, and the way that trusts and hospitals operate in practice - particularly at board/exec team/divisional leadership levels. So a significant amount of the commentary from the ‘pro Letby’ side (including her new defence team) relates to areas where I do have direct professional experience, and much of it is incorrect, unrealistic or based on a complete misunderstanding of how these organisations function. This inevitably makes me question how reliable some of the other confidently expressed claims might be.

I also know a bit about the way the criminal justice system works in practice from a previous life working in criminal defence (albeit my knowledge of the actual law is pretty rusty now). Again, I have seen assertions presented as fact that are simply inaccurate, or at least seriously misrepresent how things actually work.

Ultimately, none of us should be treating untested claims as settled fact. Whatever view one takes, new arguments being advanced outside a courtroom have not yet been cross-examined or tested against opposing evidence. Until that scrutiny happens through formal legal process they remain assertions rather than findings, and it’s entirely reasonable to approach them with caution rather than certainty.

Babies weren't collapsing the majority of the time around her, of course.

If the senior nurse thought that baby should have been moved to intensive care, she could have requested it instead of leaving Lucy Letby to state an opinion.

As things stood, the intensive care nursery was full (yes, Chester had seven babies needing one to one care, and had put three of them, the triplets, in the high dependency room without that ratio). When baby O did eventually collapse children had to be moved out of nursery 1 so he could be transferred there. So before that happened, there would be obvious disadvantages to moving him.

Approaching things with caution is fine. But one can be certain, humanly speaking, when one encounters logical fallacies, scientific impossibilities, misuse of statistics and, as in the case of Oliver, misrepresentation of other people's arguments and selective representation of facts.

A cautious approach says, there are huge problems with this case as presented in court, and therefore, it should be reviewed and re-examined. Cross-examination (and of course expert scrutiny of their own reports) is what the defence experts are requesting. It's not caution when YouTubers monetize unscientific rants against them to try to smear them as incapable and unworthy. It's quite the opposite - it's dogmatic and hubristic.

The triplets, who were in room 2, should have been in room 1 with one-to-one care, but the four cots in there were full. The registrar who admitted them joked about over-filling the unit. The parents noted they were not given the level of care that they were promised. Shortly after two of them died, the hospital's management noted they should never have been admitted.

They were rare identical triplets sharing a cord with a 1 in 20 chance that at least 1 would not survive early infanthood.

When Dewi Evans first examined their cases, he alleged that both had suspicious collapses the nights before they died. Lucy Letby wasn't on shift for these events and hadn't met baby O before his first collapse. Both of these collapses were removed from the investigation along with the other suspicious events he identified with Lucy Letby not involved.

The idea that she was the only person around when babies had unexpected or unexplained collapses is simply false, as both the police investigation and hospital reviews showed. But the newborn triplets would certainly be at risk of collapse, whoever their nurse.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/26/nhs-england-maternity-cover-up-childbirth-report

Somewhat adjacent to the matter at hand perhaps?

I imagine many of us are entirely unsurprised by the contents of this report.

A cautious approach says, there are huge problems with this case as presented in court, and therefore, it should be reviewed and re-examined.

When you say there are huge problems with this case you are helping me make my point. That statement is by no means conclusively true or a view shared by all, and in fact we have a Court of Appeal judgment which explicitly say that it is not correct. I know you don’t think much of that Judgment but at least it is the result of a full and proper process.

If people were saying Letby’s new defence team believe there are problems with the case and are therefore pursuing the one remaining avenue left to her then that would be reasonable (and fair enough, if I was her and still protesting my innocence then I would absolutely be doing the same).

But instead we’ve arrived at this weird place where it is now somehow tendentious and almost the stuff of conspiracy theory to dare voice any faith in the outcome of several years worth of legal process. The full extent of which, none (I think?) of the people denouncing it so vociferously were even party to.

Cross-examination (and of course expert scrutiny of their own reports) is what the defence experts are requesting.

Maybe, but they are not just following the usual process to get to that point though are they, with their press conferences and Mark McDonald’s near constant presence in the media. Even to the extent that the CCRC were moved to publicly slap him down. So if we’re talking dogma and hubris...

I wouldn't say that the CCRC has publicly slapped anyone down. You're giving your own interpretation as a fact there.

Yes, I'm happy stating as a fact that there are huge problems with this case. That applies to issues such as:

Non-disclosure of relevant documents

Information not shared with coroner and pathologist

Expert witness submitting new reports after the event

Expert witness contradicting his sworn court testimony in the media

Presentation of a statistically based case by a prosecution team which dispensed with the services of a statistician.

You don't even need to consider the international expert panel to acknowledge that there are huge problems with this case.

"Caution" doesn't mean minimizing and downplaying problems. Caution lies in acknowledging them.

Quite! It is exactly what MM with the whole show of going to the CCRC with the media there, when he had already submitted his docs. Definitely the Redhanded women, Amanda Knox etc

It could be argued that Oliver, Clarke etc just want justice for those poor babies and families.

McDonald isn't the first person to involve the media in a miscarriage of justice campaign. I don't know why people carry on as if it's new and scandalous. We have a free press and a (mostly) open justice system in this country. Potential failings in the justice system are a legitimate matter for concen and an obvious subject for reporting.

Oliver and Clarke may want justice for the families and I am sure many people on both "sides" of the debate do. That's fine. It doesn't exempt them from the facts, which they misrepresent. (I mean the facts of the arguments they claim to be refuting, and not anything reliant on expert judgement). They are entitled, still, to broadcast their views, just like Mark McDonald.

And I and others are entitled to scrutinize their views and observe that they are undermined by their numerous misrepresentations of significant facts.

You don't have to personally approve, but there's no getting round the fact that public outcry is helpful in getting potential MOJs reversed. It's a fact that we have a system that has moved very slowly indeed in such cases in the recent past, and one could think Letby's convictions are 100% rock solid whilst still being aware of this. I presume we all remember what happened after the Post Office documentary?

I deplore the systemic problems that make this sort of activity so important, but important it is.

Just because he isn't the first doesn't make it right.
Of course we are all entitled to our opinions and scrutiny.

I think she did commit the crimes she has been found guilty of. But no defence witnesses were called apart from apparently a plumber. Why not. She comes over as a very odd person and probably should never have been a nurse. Questions were raised in her training I believe. About lack of empathy.