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

@Dolphin37 please do the same with typhoid Mary and tell me what you come up with...you might realise your theory is wrong.

It was Dr Eleri Wyn Adams, Dewi's idea. She said neither she nor any of her colleagues would review the evidence.

Raises an interesting point though. I've said before, if there does end up being a retrial the prosecution could face real practical difficulties finding anyone new who wants to touch this.

One thing Davis pointed out is also covered in the YouTube Botched Investigation film posted today. That is that, if the CPS instructed Chester Police not to engage Jane Hutton but to drop their statistical analysis, they acted illegally, because the CPS is not supposed to direct police investigations.

people trying to claim other nurses would have as many red flags as Lucy if they were investigated. We just don't know.

Exactly -- so what is the basis for thinking her number is unlikely by chance?

Mary Mallon, nicknamed Typhoid Mary, was proved to be an asymptomatic treatment resistant carrier of typhoid through medical tests.

I don't care about chance I'm looking at the evidence which proves she did it. Do people think you can do a bit of maths and magically there's no serial killer? You don't need maths you need common sense. At least you agree her numbers were higher than all the other nurses.

I missed that. If he's right, heads have got to roll.

How do you know the tests were right? What if they were like the Letby insulin tests? Seems like very weak circumstantial evidence to me!

Davis had to be brief, of course, but Jane Hutton received this information from the police in an email, so there is some paper trail.

Seems like he's starting out trying to tug at people's heartstrings with the Sally Clark case. Yet he doesn't care about what Letby did to her victims or the impact of his support of her on the families involved. He's a disgrace.

It doesn't matter whether they were right or wrong - the point is that she was sequestered as a public health risk on that basis.

Just realised there's barely anyone there listening to him! 😆good!

Doesn't matter?! You can't quarantine someone away for YEARS when the tests could've been wrong?! This is what you've been arguing on here so strongly and yet for her you don't care?

Davis pointed out that the police treated the consultants as a source of unbiased fact (I'm paraphrasing). Yet the four identified as Lucy Letby's chief accusers each had at least one red flag. Dr Brearey had perforated a child's liver. Dr V had accidentally killed a child by intubating the stomach instead of the lungs. Dr Gibbs had intubated a child through to one lung only. Dr Jayaram had sent his email saying Lucy Letby called him to child K but told the police and court she didn't.

Yet the police announced an investigation to the press two days after meeting the consultants, and it seems that they never seriously considered whether they might be looking at clinical negligence.

The point of these adjournment "debates" is to get things on the parliamentary record and into the press. Of course, they're online for anyone to watch too.

Here is what Davis suggested at the end of his speech:

“On the evidence before us, there have been clear, serious departures from statutory guidance and multiple deviations from best professional practice.

“Because of the way this is handled, the police should, and I would recommend them to provide Letby’s defence team with a whole series of documentation.

“I’ll publish a full list online because because of time, but it would include the senior investigating officers’ policy books and decision books, records of identified lines of inquiry, logs kept by functional managers, minutes of all the meetings held, from the team meetings right up to the Gold coordination meetings.

“That would at least start to demonstrate what went wrong here.

I enjoyed the fact that he spelt this out so seriously, because it has become apparent that there is at least one person leaking information from Operation Hummingbird. So the defence may well get some of this material, one way or another.

I don't know how much I can believe of any of these people. If they can't see her obvious guilt they must be leaving a hell of a lot of stuff out or getting things wrong. Dr Brearey did NOT perforate a babies liver. That's been debunked. And the baby had already collapsed at that point. Focusing on the wrong thing again (even if it was true which it isn't) rather than what caused the collapse in the first place. You all see what you want to see.

Negligence or mistakes (I believe there was an accidental death of a baby by a doctor) is not murder. What Letby did was murder.

Please provide details of the debunking of the liver perforation.

The evidence for the perforation of the liver, as I understand it, is that:

He inserted a needle into the right abdomen to try to aspirate air
The needle withdrew blood
The child's haemoglobin levels halved soon afterwards
This information was withheld from the pathologist

Nobody has suggested this explained the child's initial collapse - other natural explanations have been offered

If people find it quicker to read.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-03-26/debates/250DBCCA-C579-4ABB-8AFC-C2E8D036533A/LucyLetbyCaseConductOfCheshirePolice

I think not much is new to those who have been following the case but Davis does a good job of pulling things together.

Do people think you can do a bit of maths and magically there's no serial killer?

If it's shown that statistical arguments for there being a serial killer were flawed, then there's no safely convicted serial killer.

You don't need maths you need common sense.

Common sense works for common things. It's less good at judging the chance of one-in-a-million events. That's why so many people buy lottery tickets.

Common sense would say it's unlikely that two people in a group of 21 random strangers share a birthday; but surprisingly, it's more likely than not. Common sense would say, that if a 99% accurate test says someone has a disease, then there's a 99% chance they have it; but in fact, if only .01% of the population has the disease, then the chance is only 1%. Common sense would say that, in the Monty Hall Problem, there's no point in switching your choice (and we argued all night about it when it was given in a college probability course); but actually, switching doubles your chances of winning. Common sense would say that, to know if a drug works, you should just ask people who took it; but need double-blinded randomized placebo-controlled studies to really know.

At least you agree her numbers were higher than all the other nurses

We don't have "all the other nurses'" numbers gathered the same way as hers, so no, I don't agree. You have to compare like with like. "Her numbers" simply aren't the same kind of "numbers" as other nurses', unless all numbers were gathered blindly the same way for all and then compared for different staff.

But we don’t know that collapses were disproportionately associated with LL, because the statistical analysis hasn’t been done properly. There’s no data at all on the number of collapses in total, is there?

Common sense would say it's unlikely that two people in a group of 21 random strangers share a birthday; but surprisingly, it's more likely than not.

Sorry, it's 23, not 21.

Yes. This information has been circulating online, and in fact in the Sun, for a while. But you can see the point of adjournment debates: the story is already in a variety of papers that haven't picked up this perspective yet a couple of hours later. There's a good summary in the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/26/david-davis-says-cheshire-police-made-egregious-failures-in-lucy-letby-investigation

The hospital didn't collect data on unexpected collapses, as several staff members explained at Thirlwall.

If you were looking for any indication at all, you could take the minutes produced in summer 2016 when John Gibbs was conducting a retrospective review of the last 13 months of collapses for children who ended up transferred out only. The minutes recorded that he now had only 68 cases left to look at ... So he presumably started with a significantly higher number!

Lucy Letby was only charged with 16, so there were a lot of collapses we know nothing about. But babies B, C, I, J, N, O, P and Q at least all had collapses while she wasn't on shift