Lucy Letby case expert witness was under fitness to practise investigation

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Wow! Pot, kettle, black? Need a new investigation?
Lucy Letby case expert witness was under fitness to practise investigation during trial | Lucy Letby | The Guardian

How would you have found out all this info, though? Raided police archives? Hacked into hospital systems?

Or got hold of a lawyer willing to coordinate expert volunteers and work with whistleblowers. That's what they did. But you get cross when he shouts anything from the rooftops, I thought?

@Oftenaddled presumably Lucy herself would know, I mean she did work there after all. It'd be unusual if she didn't get to hear about any that happened, especially if they were sudden and unusual. And given her ahem, interest in the subject. If it was happening as regularly as you say (and NOT always around Lucy) she should be able to point to at least a few and say "I wasn't there for those" right?

We actually don't know if she was there for the majority of other collapses do we? Police didn't take everything forward if the babies had congenital problems and it would be almost impossible to prove harm. Doesn't mean Lucy wasn't also there. Like I said before the more you dig the more it'll probably look worse for her.

I don't expect lawyers to be able to talk about non-indictment babies. Her parents probably could though. And even if they're not supposed to it'd be more than worth it compared to Lucy spending the rest of her life in prison.

I don't expect lawyers to be able to talk about non-indictment babies. Her parents probably could though. And even if they're not supposed to it'd be more than worth it compared to Lucy spending the rest of her life in prison.

@Firefly1987

Perhaps they would have reached that point if it weren't for the unprecedented momentum that has been building and the large amount of experts that have been speaking out since the reporting restrictions were lifted, but as it stands they don't need to because things are going through the proper channels.

I'm surprised you're surprised about this

It's been well known for ages. You had cases dropped from the famous trial chart because Lucy Letby wasn't there and not mentioned in court. You had cases dropped from the police investigation. https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-the-letby-case-isnt-closed/
You had baby Y the third insulin baby.

Why would Lucy Letby's parents need to talk about it when it has already been out there in the press for months or years?

And how could she or her counsel have raised it at trial when Goss didn't allow discussion of the construction of the case?

Lucy Letby's parents recruited a barrister, and he does most of the talking about the case in public, which seems a good arrangement for elderly and doubtless very distressed people.

I'm more interested in hearing investigative journalists and statisticians talk about non indictment cases than Lucy Letby's parents, anyway.

But what is desperately needed is all sorts of unusual collapses being brought to light when she wasn't there, not just experts saying the indictment babies weren't deliberate harm (which is almost impossible a claim anyway)

I mean as an example she was on for baby Y also! If she wasn't on shift for any of the extremely odd insulin results then yes it would be massive. But she was.

Lucy Letby was on duty during baby Y's first day shift, but not the night before when he seems to have been tested, not the night after when his glucose levels dropped dangerously again.

Almost as if she had nothing to do with his test results, you might say. Presumably, that's why she wasn't charged with harming him.

I'll watch it all tomorrow, I'm already put off by the discrediting of practically ALL the prosecution experts and the claim that "it really should be clear to anyone with an IQ above 80 that Lucy Letby is innocent" nice 😆he'll regret that statement one day. Guess it proves having a high IQ and being highly educated doesn't teach you everything.

I really don't put any stock in these statisticians when it comes to this case tbh. They have zero clue if any murders occurred and can't seem to see the wood for the trees. They're all a very similar ilk aren't they.

If they can find any suspicious incidents she wasn't on for I don't care who we ask!

It only needs to be brought to light with the CCRC, not the public.

Well, I've given you Baby Y. Try also Baby J (December 17th) removed from the prosecution's chart since Lucy Letby hadn't been on shift. But these and the other issues I've mentioned are well known. We've discussed them before. I'm sure they won't affect your beliefs, but for other people, they may be of interest.

To come back to where we started on this diversion, you keep coming back to statistics, claiming such and such a figure in isolation makes things suspicious, but you don't know anything about a background rate.

Yes, I'd prefer him to have avoided such abrasive comments too, but the data is useful all the same.

Apart from using statistics and critiquing the prosecution case, I don't find Peter Elston, Richard Gill, Jane Hutton, Hilde Wilkinson-Herbots, John O'Quigley, Philip Dawid, and Amy Wilson present particularly similarly. There's probably some overlap in what they say about the weaknesses in the prosecution case.

What would your objective criteria for a suspicious incident be? One of the aspects of this case which first raised concerns was the lack of rigour in relation to this point. As we have learned more about how the cases were selected it has become increasingly apparent that incidents initially classified as suspicious were removed when they couldn’t be tied to Letby’s presence, and others which were not at first classified as suspicious were moved into scope when they could. This has been discussed at length on this and other platforms. Articles and links to documents have been provided. Serious senior academics flagged the issue as soon as it was possible to do so but you hand wave all that away and revert to facile arguments like why aren’t her parents finding out about other incidents and shouting from the rooftops. It really isn’t surprising that people like @Thatsnotmynamee wonder if you are indeed on the wind up, given the fatuity of your contribution.

As we have learned more about how the cases were selected it has become increasingly apparent that incidents initially classified as suspicious were removed when they couldn’t be tied to Letby’s presence, and others which were not at first classified as suspicious were moved into scope when they could.

Can you say what the evidence is for this? People keep stating it as though it’s now an entirely undisputed fact, but I’m not sure I actually know what it’s based on.

And if it’s true then surely that has to mean there was some deliberate framing and/or scapegoating of Letby, which lots of the same posters are also quick to deny they are suggesting happened.

Here: according to Evans’s initial analysis<...> Letby was not in the hospital when 10 of the 28 incidents [Evans] described as “suspicious” took place but they weren't on the final chart shown in court. Or here: Letby police ignored other baby deaths on unit. Or here: Lucy Letby was not working on day Baby C was harmed, BBC investigation finds an X-ray initially described as highly suspicious was reclassified as having natural causes once it emerged that Letby wasn't there when it was taken. Or here : Letby was accused of switching off a baby's monitor, until it emerged that doctors did so.

But also, it should be on the prosecution to prove that proper blinding was used to prevent the possibility of unconscious bias. Just as, a new drug can't be approved without a randomized double-blind study where neither patients nor their doctors know who got the new drug and who got the old one or the placebo. In Letby's case, besides the post-facto relabeling of incidents, the initial selection was structurally non-blind: Letby's accusers picked cases to give the police, who then passed them to Evans.

And if it’s true then surely that has to mean there was some deliberate framing and/or scapegoating of Letby

No, just unconscious bias / confirmation bias -- exactly the things that proper blinding is designed to prevent.

What is in the CCRC's power? Can they only potentially return the cases to the Court of Appeal? And if so, would the new Appeal still be confined to follow the original trails' judge's directions etc?

Is it possible for the CCRC ever to come back with 'No Case To Answer' as per the cases of the Dutch and Italian nurses? Or is that only possible via Appeal, should the CCRC allow it to be re-submitted?

Is it possible to estimate a time line for the CCRC's finding? Or literally decades based on previous cases?

Thanks

@Dolphin37 I don't know if that source is much good. I came across it elsewhere and IIRC people were saying it's not an accurate source. Explains why people keep saying she wasn't on when baby C died if that's where they're getting their info though.

The next child Letby was convicted of murdering was “Baby C”. It is already known that Evans altered his account of his death at the trial. He had claimed in a report written a few weeks before the trial started that x-ray evidence demonstrated that Baby C had been fatally injured on 12 June, 2015, when air was injected into his stomach via a nasogastric tube.

How can he be fatally injured on 12 June when he didn't die til the early hours of the 14th? Not only that but he was removed from breathing support and had spent most of the day with his mother doing kangaroo care on the 13th before his collapse late at night! When Letby WAS on, of course. Does that sound like a dying baby before Letby came on the scene? So that whole part of the article doesn't even make sense.

I'm afraid the article isn't wrong on that point. Evans's original claim was that the fatal injury had happened on the 12th of June and the child died of that injury later, on the 14th.

The same way people sometimes die hours, days or even weeks after an accident.

Evans has admitted to getting this wrong and mistaking wind for evidence of intentional harm.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/20/my-kind-of-case-intense-focus-falls-on-lucy-letby-trial-expert-witness

I should say that Evans didn't spell out the, fatally injured one day, died the next. He did two things: he identified air on an x-ray taken on the 12th as injury inflicted by Lucy Letby (but she had never encountered the baby until the 13th). And he relied on the same x-ray as interpreted by Dr Marnerides to argue that the child had died from that inflicted injury [but on the 14th]. I think the journalist does what he can to make sense of that sequence.

He is talking about Evans's report. At the trial Evans back-pedalled. After the trial, he back-pedalled some more.

They can only send cases back to the Court of Appeal. There's more information here.

https://ccrc.gov.uk/what-we-do/

So they aren't the equivalent of the body (Dutch Supreme Court) who eventually found Lucia de Berk not guilty.

Timelines, fuck knows. They do decide most cases within a year but this is incredibly complex and there are previous known MOJs where they failed very hard at that timescale. This is such a unique case. They also sometimes don't correctly identify an MOJ on the first go either, as with Andrew Malkinson. Got absolutely eviscerated by the Justice Committee last year in the aftermath of that, and the Chief Exec had to go.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/102/justice-committee/news/206985/ccrc-leadership-unable-to-learn-from-its-own-mistakes-with-root-and-branch-reform-required-justice-committee-warns/

I can imagine the working atmosphere there at the moment is interesting.

The irony of someone claiming a source is unreliable when almost totally failing to supply any sources for claims is palpable.

@rubbishatballet re: how Letby's presence/absence was used to classify incidents, Dr. Evans said this:

"Evans said his new opinion was based on the baby’s sudden collapse and unsuccessful resuscitation on 13 June 2015, on ruling out other possible causes, and realising that Letby was on shift"

The Shift Leader’s Testimony
Nurse W is the designated shift leader on the overnight 13/14 June shift. Nurse W allocated babies to their designated nurses on the shift that night. Letby was NOT allocated Baby C or any other babies in Nursery 1. Nurse W recounts at the Thirlwall Inquiry:
A: Yes. So at the beginning of the shift, the only baby that I was concerned about was in Nursery 3. So that was not Baby C.

Doesn't sound like baby C was dying until Lucy got near him does it.

It's Dr Evans and Dr Marnerides who claimed they saw evidence of fatal harm on an x-ray dated the day before, not me!

Baby C died after a desaturation. Nurses couldn't get a chest rise when they tried to resuscitate him; the registrar couldn't intubate; and when his heart restarted after continued ventilation, his parents and doctors agreed not to return him to life support but to let him die while alleviating suffering with morphine. His nurse from the evening before couldn't have been expected to predict all this.

(That's from the agreed evidence - the expert panels have further explanations of his sudden collapse and desaturation)