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…

I wish more than anything that in discussions about the case people would keep their personal opinions about LL to themselves. It isn’t relevant in the slightest. But it also means it almost becomes a trial by personality - it wouldn’t be acceptable for there to be a potential MoJ if she was cold, spiteful, cruel and rude. She could be all of those things and innocent of the crimes she’s been convicted of and it’s that everyone should focus on.

All the people claiming Lucy Letby was a scapegoat for the hospital to hide its poor maternal care - surely accusing one of its staff of 17 murders/attempted murders of babies is the absolute opposite of the hospital protecting itself as you cannot get worse publicity than this! It makes zero sense for the hospital to pursue a vendetta against Lucy Letby for no apparent reason and cause an absolute furore. How does this in any way benefit the hospital?

I don't see how her remembering or not means guilty or innocent. What does she gain by supposedly not remembering a specific case?

The apparent deliberate poisoning by insulin has been disputed. The tests used weren't of forensic quality and couldn't distinguish between natural and synthetic insulin. Further more accurate tests should have been done. Experts, including forensic toxicologist Professor Alan Wayne Jones, argue that immunoassay results can be "falsely high" due to interference from other antibodies and that the test used measures the body’s reaction to insulin rather than the substance itself.

Lucy was a nurse so I wouldn't expect her to dispute any of the findings as she's not qualified to do so. I found it strange that the police in the documentary kept saying they gave her the opportunity to explain the deaths and took it as some evidence against her that she couldn't. I would think it would look even more damning if she started rattling off explanations of how each child died given there were different conclusions reached by the coroner vs Dr Dewi Evans, both more qualified than Lucy.

Most of the deaths were deemed natural by the coroner. So it's not that they were "unexplained". She was on duty for all the deaths she was charged with. There were other unexpected collapses that occurred when she couldn't be the cause of them.

It was far more complicated than that @XelaM but in very broad terms, it isn’t the hospital as an institution people wanted to protect, it was their individual careers.

I don't understand why she claimed not to remember Baby Zoe - a baby who collapsed 3 times in one night her care and one she sent text messages about - claiming how hard the unexplained death and parents' reaction was on her. When asked at the police station and at court whether she remembered the baby she just said "no. Very weird reaction.

What people often don't realize is that there were two groups involved here: the consultants who accused Lucy Letby and the management who didn't find their accusations convincing. The consultants refused to move on with mediation or to accept the criticisms of their care in external reports without involving the police. So hospital management contacted police, since they were stuck otherwise, but made it clear that they didn't find the reports credible and were only doing this because the consultants insisted.

So when people claim there was scapegoating, they don't mean management asked for a murder in investigation because they thought it would be better for the hospital. They mean that the consultants couldn't accept criticisms of their own medical practice and argued that something Lucy Letby was doing was a more likely cause of deaths and deteriorations.

I don't tend to use the word scapegoating myself, but I think the consultants, like many people, had a hard time accepting their own failings and were keen to suggest alternative explanations.

Maybe she couldn’t remember.

Maybe she could remember but panicked.

Maybe she is a habitual liar.

None of that is important; the question is ‘was the baby in question murdered?’

If yes it is difficult to argue against it being Letby. It is fact it has been called into question whether or not she was murdered in the first place that we need to focus on. I’m not interested particularly in Letby’s behaviour; that’s the only relevant question here.

Because the documentary featured Baby Zoe's mother. Her reaction to questions about this baby, its medical notes that she signed and text messages that she sent about it and its parents (plus her looking up their facebook profiles) - makes her answer that she "doesn't remember" this baby not credible.

At court she said that she had needed to consult her medical notes to remember this baby. You had similar statements from various doctors and nurses about different children. Memories fade, and similar events get blurred.

Baby Zoe hadn't actually been in Lucy Letby's care (she was responsible for another child in the room) so it's not surprising that that was the child whose name she didn't recognize at police interview, at least 3 years after the event, with lots of trauma in between. That's very different from sending texts the next day.

Of course her behaviour and the answers she gave to questions at the police station and in court is VERY relevant and evidence of her credibility (or lack thereof).

Circumstantial evidence is still evidence. You don't have to catch the killer red-handed in order to convict them. A whole lot of circumstantial evidence makes her guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Needing to consult medical notes and not remembering at all are very different things, especially given the police weren’t exactly being particularly trustworthy.

That's how forgetting works though - you do something, you know something, and over time you forget.

Do you think the other nurses who couldn't remember babies or their care at the time were guilty too?

Obviously it's very different for baby Zoe's mother and painful for her to think of it, but not everyone involved in her child's care would remember her years later without reminders.

@XelaM
Of course her behaviour and the answers she gave to questions at the police station and in court is VERY relevant and evidence of her credibility (or lack thereof).

The issue is that the behaviour is being assessed by people who apparently know nothing about what is normal or not when it comes to memory or behaviour after traumatic events.

One thing she did which all accused at police stations are advised NOT to do is answer SOME of the questions, but say "No Comment" to other (difficult) questions. Automatically, when this interview is played to a jury, they are going to draw inferences from why she decided to only answer questions selectively.

Hadn't she already answered questions along similar lines in previous interviews or earlier in the interviews?

She had.

So many people since I've been out for shopping demonstrating how they haven't bothered looking at any videos explaining what the problem with the conviction is, so we are going round the same accusations / rebuttals again, open your minds people, watch the video I posted earlier which explains several of the points made and then you don't have to repeatedly ask MN to explain.

"testimony isn't worth anything unless they immediately realised she was a serial killer at the time and pointed her out and she was investigated right there and then" : some red-flag events get recorded at the time and others not, but if her total number of such events was significantly larger than normal, you'd expect the number of recorded ones to be larger as well. To get the "normal" you'd need to get the number of recorded events for other nurses with similar caseloads, adjusted for the numbers of hours worked and babies cared for.

I believe that Letby is guilty because I trust that the jury, who heard all of the evidence and have the most complete picture of anyone, reached that conclusion. I know miscarriages of justice do occur, and it's certainly not impossible that this is one, but the majority of those who have sought to cast doubt on the verdict seem to have emerged after the conclusion of the trial to exploit the sensationalism of the moment, and I don't trust them.

That said, I don't think it's helpful for people to make judgments about Letby's character based on things like the way she acted after her arrest etc. It's well known that shock makes people behave in strange ways. I believe she's guilty because those who heard the evidence decided so, not because I get bad vibes from watching footage of her arrest.

Oh yes that video with his opinions and not facts. Yes that will help. 🤦‍♀️

People can only emerge after the trial though - otherwise they are in contempt of court and media restrictions.

And they have emerged fairly steadily over time, when reporting restrictions weren't in place. Many have barely got any attention or seemed to want it.

But I am glad to live in a world where qualified experts take an interest when their knowledge and experience suggest there's been a miscarriage of justice.

Ordinarily I'd agree with you... except for the fact that the reason that people "emerged after the conclusion of the trial" is because unless they were involved in the trial they weren't allowed to speak up until afterwards.

We know that the jury weren't allowed to see some things - for example the defence weren't allowed to talk about any baby not part of the indictment so they couldn't talk about other deaths or collapses or the other baby that had high insulin readings so their picture that LL was always there when something bad happened wasn't a complete one. They weren't allowed to know about the critical report from the RCPCH either.

The jury were directed that they didn't need to know exactly how harm came to the babies, as long as they were convinced it was LL that had done the harm and done it deliberately. The insulin cases (where the babies didn't actually die) were probably a key feature in this because the defence also said that the readings indicated deliberate harm. There have been other experts who have investigated this since who have cast doubt on this. In my opinion, the method suggested for the delivery of this insulin stretches credibility somewhat, given that it relies on a particular second TPN bag being selected and used when it wasn't expected to be and when LL definitely wasn't there, but others have discussed this elsewhere. Occam's razor would suggest to me that these readings were just wrong. AFAIK these cases were found when the doctors searched back for anything "unusual", rather than being suspicious at the time.

Also a number of the people speaking up are experts in their fields - statistics, neonatology etc. who have nothing to gain and the part of the case they're questioning is the medical/statistical evidence and how it was presented to the jury.

There are people who are saying she's definitely innocent. I don't think I'd go that far, but I would say that there are serious question marks over the safety of the conviction, especially since all the evidence was circumstantial and the alternative explanations don't involve deliberate harm by anyone but some negligence and poor medical care in a failing and inadequately staffed department which, if we're being honest, is not exactly unknown in the NHS.

I'm no expert on serial killers, but if you were looking for a particular pattern then you wouldn't find it in these cases. There are a variety of supposed causes of harm, no escalating frequency and no earlier "trial attempts". If you were to look afresh at these cases and definitely conclude that they were all murder/attempted murder I can't see how you would conclude that they were all done by the same person.

People who say this prob haven't sat on a jury. Quite frankly, some jury's are terrifying. Out of 3 trials I sat on, one person held out on the opposite of what everyone else was saying - until she realised we would have to come back after the weekend and another felt the boy was too nice

I don't think I would be happy with a jury trial

If I was on the jury I'd have probably found her guilty too. The defence didn't dispute that the babies had been poisoned with insulin. Their strategy seemed to be to try to show that it wasn't Lucy who did it. You'd have to be really out there to suggest to your fellow jurors that you doubted there had been insulin administered to the babies when no one else was disputing that. And if someone purposefully injected insulin then why wouldn't you believe babies had been purposely harmed in other ways?

Since the trial there have been many different experts who have questioned whether there were actually any murders. Something the jurors didn't have to consider. That's one reason why I question whether the trial was fair.

People keep saying tje defence team failed to produce experts to dispute what the prosecution was saying. Maybe the issue was that they couldn't find experts who disputed the expert evidence of the prosecution. They wouldn't have just agreed about the insulin having been injected had their own expert advice not agreed with the prosecution.

On the contrary, you have a MUCH higher chance of being acquitted with a jury trial