Lucy Letby case expert witness was under fitness to practise investigation

[ITMA2000]

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

Are you referring to the LinkedIn exchange? Or a different email? Because if there wasn’t enough data ( or a sufficient level of statistical expertise) to safely form the conclusion, then the conclusion should not have been formed. Particularly in support of a murder conviction.

I thought he was asking a statistician to put his money where his mouth is because of all the criticism but he couldn't. It's no good when they're not doing it in good faith and just asking for more and more data because of their own bias. Like seriously why ask any of these statisticians who are obviously desperate for her to be innocent? You could never trust their analysis.

And how do you determine there isn't enough data? The statistician who is clearly biased just says "trust me bro?" They already would've covered all this at trial anyway.

It was this one, if the link works-

https://archive.ph/i9PG8

Evans did a statistical analysis and sent it to Peter Elston to look at.

It's not bias to look for the basic information you need to conduct an analysis. You can't judge the significance of somebody being at a number of events without knowing how many events there are in total and why they might be there.

It's like if I said I saw seven women pass my house wearing short dresses. That would be more or less unexpected depending how many people passed my house in total, what businesses and workplaces are on my street, and what I meant by a short dress. There would be no reason to assume a mini skirt wearing cult somewhere on my street before asking these and more questions.

The link‘s not working for me.

I’m not aware of a statistician saying ‘trust me, bro’ either. I think you might have your wires crossed as the statisticians are the ones trying to solve for bias. We have come full circle now as that is indeed the entire point 😊

You could dispute how much data is needed but not the very basics - like we need to define what we are counting and we need to know how likely it is that presence at the events we are counting is or isn't random.

That's why there's no real statistical debate on this. You have people who say statistics weren't used (wrongly). But statisticians who have spoken on the case have unanimously condemned the use of statistics. And we know Chester police dropped their professional statistician from the investigation when she pointed out they were approaching things wrong.

I certainly don't trust their version of events but either way it was the most amateur investigation in recent years.

How on earth did they ignore the extremely obvious explanation that the unit wasn't fit to care for these babies, they were understaffed and underqualified.

According to you they ruled out everything else so that it could have only been deliberate harm.

Please explain how exactly they managed to rule out that it was substandard care in a unit that was understaffed and where the staff were underqualified. A unit full of vulnerable babies, and with the consultants only doing 2 rounds a week.

As Evans stated during the correspondence-

"DE:

Most NHS trusts do not have statisticians, just the big academic centres. Their information would overlap with that of epidemiologists. Where the statisticians get into a stew is this. They state, correctly, that an increase in annual neonatal mortality from 4, 3, 3 , to 10, 5 is within statistical probability. But it’s not the numbers!! It’s the cause of the deaths – unexplained, unexpected, suspicious, etc. This is why engaging statisticians would not have helped. Presumably Defence felt the same.

But the mathematic minds think all this irrelevant and we can solve the case with stats!

But they weren't unexplained or unexpected, others have managed to explain them and considering the mistakes and how they didn't seem to realise the babies were deteriorating they weren't unexpected, they were 'unexpected' to people ignoring the obvious alright, but factually and statistically they were not unexpected.

Nobody has said we can solve the case with stats. What we have said is that we shouldn't build the case from stats. You are are the one who keeps trying to do this here.

The prosecution presented various statistical arguments during the trial. Similarly, the consultants who accused Lucy Letby did so based on their (flawed) understanding of statistics, presented the case to the police with statistical arguments, and then selected cases for Evans to scrutinise which made up a biased sample.

If Evans is commenting that many people unqualified to deal with statistics tried to do so, in the course of the investigation and prosecution, he is right.

We know that Evans's pronouncements on causes of death are widely contested too of course.

Well quite. So we agree then that using flawed statistics within the investigation and the prosecution’s case would be an issue?

So your logic is to go with the most likely explanation? Seems to me the belief in her innocence amounts to "the NHS is crap and serial killer nurses are super rare, she must be innocent" can you not see anything wrong with that line of thinking?

Please explain how exactly they managed to rule out that it was substandard care in a unit that was understaffed and where the staff were underqualified. A unit full of vulnerable babies, and with the consultants only doing 2 rounds a week.

Give it a go FF, try actually answering the question rather than deflecting as usual.

I would say we are going to have a long wait, on the basis of probability…

Not just 'go with' if what you mean is they just say 'ah they were understaffed and underqualified' and that's it.

They should have done a full investigation from that perspective and investigated medical negligence or gross negligence manslaughter or whatever options were available or passed it on to the relevant people if the normal police force don't investigate things like that, and then if the deaths/collapses were still unexplained/unexpected that's when they should look at other things.

It's absolutely nonsensical to not look into and rule out the most likely explanation first.

You said yourself in an earlier post " I'd love to know how better they find their suspect whilst avoiding the glaring problem of her being the common denominator!"

Well how can they find out what happened when ignoring the glaring problems with the unit? As I said, it's nonsensical, you don't ignore the obvious and instead focus on something that is far less likely.

So your logic is to go with the most likely explanation?

Yes? Occam dealt with this in the 14th century.

@LuisCarol so would you apply that to Beverley Allitt as well?

@Firefly1987

So seeing as you won't even attempt to answer the question are you conceding now that they didn't actually rule out the other obvious explanation?

I know nothing about Beverley Allitt.

I don't think "going with the most likely explanation" is odd.

I'm not privy to the entire police investigation! They do not know what is suspicious and what isn't as they are not in that line or work. They deferred to a medical expert who said these deaths were not natural. Nothing is good enough for some people.

Not at first no, but people are still bringing up substandard unit, understaffed yada yada-it's all been gone over and ruled out. A substandard unit doesn't mean no serial killer.

Without a full statistical analysis, how could it be ruled out?

But yet you keep saying that they ruled out every other possible explanation until they were only left with deliberate harm.

So is what you're saying that they ruled out the fact it could have been substandard care because of Dewi Evans?

Maybe someone can correct me on this but as far as I recall Dewi Evans has completely denied that there was substandard care, and all he would concede was that he did say there was substandard care for one of the babies, maybe baby D whos mother he said should have received antibiotics.

It is Dewi Evans who isn't good enough for some - many - people. If he had not misunderstood Shoo Lee's work; if he had not claimed that air in nasogastric tubes was a clinically proven murder method; if he had not come up with results so different from everyone who examined the medical records independent of him, perhaps people could take his claims to have ruled out other causes of death more seriously.

@Oftenaddled I think maybe leave it to the police and medical experts?