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

Do statisticians understand that even IF some of the case was based on stats it's not the majority of the case and therefore they should not be giving any indication one way or the other as to her guilt? It was a 10 month trial, no one was talking about statistics that entire time (if at all)

As for them not having enough data to provide any stats, did they want the investigation/trial to last 5 years whilst they go through all the data for every single nurse and doctor who worked there? Because that seems to be what people are saying in order to make it "fair" to Lucy.

You have this backwards as usual. It’s about seeking facts and truth, not being “fair to Lucy”.

A proper statistical analysis on the shift patterns, staffing levels, and all the deaths and collapses during the period will identify whether there was a statistically significant correlation with LL. This has not been done.

This means that all your “but she was always there” and “coincidence? I don’t think so” are supposition and assumption, not facts.

If an analysis was done and it showed that there was a significant correlation this would mean something, and would confirm thar she was “always there”. It might mean lack of competence, it might mean deliberate harm.

If the analysis shows no significant correlation this does not necessarily rule out deliberate harm, of course, but it does mean that “she was always there” would be exposed as a lie.

did they want the investigation/trial to last 5 years whilst they go through all the data for every single nurse and doctor who worked there?

They just want the stats to be sound, given the enormity of telling parents their babies have been murdered based on “she was always there”.

Do statisticians understand that even IF some of the case was based on stats it's not the majority of the case and therefore they should not be giving any indication one way or the other as to her guilt? It was a 10 month trial, no one was talking about statistics that entire time (if at all)

That was multiple sentences of incoherent shit, so no they probably don't understand whatever point you're attempting to make here.

Worth pointing out, again and again, that nobody other than the jury knows what weight they placed on the statistical information the prosecution presented during the trial. Nobody else should know either.

@Firefly1987

I do provide evidence most of the time. If I don't it's from memory and I assume we all know enough about the case on here to know what I'm referring to and that I haven't made it up. If you don't know then maybe you don't know enough about the case to comment! Why would I need to make things up when there's already more than enough evidence that she's guilty. Everything in the world is a weak fact to people who don't want to open their eyes.

"most of the time" - it needs to be ALL of the time, you can't make claims and then ignore them when challenged. Weird how you claim " I assume we all know enough about the case on here to know what I'm referring to and that I haven't made it up" and yet since my post you have had to be corrected several times and that's just today.

If another nurse had been on shift all those times, and Lucy Letby hadn't, nobody would ever have looked at her Facebook searches. Nobody would have cared about her pyjamas or shredder. She'd probably still have the handover notes.

In that sense, the case is all about statistics.

We are in too far now - it won't be overturned on a lack of statistical evidence alone, because experts have claimed to have seen signs of murder. So the medical evidence will have to be disputed. But if the initial statistical analysis wasn't correct - if the spike in deaths wasn't inexplicable, if Lucy Letby wasn't on shift for a surprising number of incidents, if she wasn't present for critical incidents, if critical incidents were moved around to ensure she was present - all of that points to how things went so wrong.

That was multiple sentences of incoherent shit, so no they probably don't understand whatever point you're attempting to make here.

That's fine. I don't think many of them understand much about the world other than statistics tbh.

Worth pointing out, again and again, that nobody other than the jury knows what weight they placed on the statistical information the prosecution presented during the trial. Nobody else should know either.

I know. Shouldn't you be telling the statisticans that?

I don't have an issue with you posting stuff, it's the comments you tend to post with them which are often along the lines of (paraphrasing, but not by that much😅 ) 'Aha you idiots, you'll be eating your words now' yet no one eats their words because you're posting stuff from Liz Hull etc and then when no one changes their mind based on Liz Hull or Susan Oliver you're back to going on about the LL fan club.

I saw that article you posted.
She claimed there was a campaign against her even before there was any rumblings that LL may be innocent, but now she seems to be blaming it on the fact she was an expert witness.
You made a big deal out of Steve Watts having one allegation made against him which he was cleared of, and one against Stephanie Davis, yet Sandi Bohin had many more complaints made against her which pre-dated the LL MOJ campaign.

@Firefly1987
Do statisticians understand that even IF some of the case was based on stats it's not the majority of the case and therefore they should not be giving any indication one way or the other as to her guilt?

If a statistician had been called during the trial they should have given the stats and not an opinion of guilt or innocence, but outside of a trial they can give their opinion if they want to.

You'd be fine with it if their opinion was that she was guilty though so no point in pretending otherwise.

The statisticians are correctly raising the alarm about the misuse of statistics as part of the prosecution case. The fact that this happened at all would be a problem even if Letby had been found not guilty of all charges. It has been an ongoing issue that the RSS have been sounding the alarm about for decades now, which no doubt you know about as you totally read the links from them I posted upthread.

Do statisticians understand that even IF some of the case was based on stats it's not the majority of the case and therefore they should not be giving any indication one way or the other as to her guilt?

Do you understand that the entire basis of the case is statistical? There wouldn’t have been a case without the so called statically relevant spike in deaths and the association of those with a specific person. Everything else has been built on trying to make the medical evidence fit that hypothesis and shore it up with so called circumstantial evidence which is actually meaningless. It’s a house of cards based on a thesis which wasn’t tested properly and doesn’t stand up when it is.

Do you understand that the entire basis of the case is statistical?

@PinkTonic no I don't at all. Unless you mean by default of her having sadly killed and harmed so many babies before she was stopped. The jury didn't sit and look at a staffing chart for 10 months. If she'd been caught early on when she should've been you'd never be able to make a statistical case for guilt or innocence anyway. So you could just take stats out the whole thing. And look at the medical and circumstantial evidence, which was 95% of the trial anyway.

"the case had nothing to do with statistics and I'm not quite sure how many ways you can tell statisticians that the case had nothing to do with statistics." Dewi Evans. Worth repeating again!

There wouldn’t have been a case without the so called statically relevant spike in deaths and the association of those with a specific person.

Well she got caught in the end because of the triplets and baby Q which weren't explainable and she was there for them-which is circumstantial evidence not stats. That unit could have expected 10 deaths a year and she'd still be in the frame because the babies collapsed suddenly and unexpectedly.

Everything else has been built on trying to make the medical evidence fit that hypothesis and shore it up with so called circumstantial evidence which is actually meaningless.

Another one who doesn't understand circumstantial evidence or how compelling it can be and how most cases are solved with circumstantial evidence.

If another nurse had been on shift all those times, and Lucy Letby hadn't, nobody would ever have looked at her Facebook searches. Nobody would have cared about her pyjamas or shredder. She'd probably still have the handover notes.
In that sense, the case is all about statistics.

if the spike in deaths wasn't inexplicable, if Lucy Letby wasn't on shift for a surprising number of incidents, if she wasn't present for critical incidents, if critical incidents were moved around to ensure she was present - all of that points to how things went so wrong.

There must be some sort of fallacy for this type of thinking. If not there ought to be. It's giving total "whataboutery" and "If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike". The reality is the reality. Lucy did it, not some other nurse and the reason she was on all the shifts and had handover sheets and facebook searches is because she did it. I don't know why this is so hard to understand.

Can I ask
Did what?
As I recall that many professional people have cast doubt on any murders...experts with no axe to grind.
How are we sure that babies were killed intentionally?

You're putting the cart before the horse there.

Lucy Letby's presence / being on shift at various times was used as proof as murder.

Now, if there was evidence of murder that didn't depend on her being there, there would have been an investigation considering a range of suspects. (After all, we know anyone could enter the unit any time, untracked, though this wasn't revealed to eye jury at the trial).

If the evidence of murder did depend on her being there - as is strongly suggested by the number of experts who found natural causes of death - then it is a statistical construction - the murders and acts of harm were defined by her presence.

It's worth remembering that the famous chart defined its entries as the events where a suspicious incident had been identified. Yet you see Evans and Bohin, at different stages in the trial, arguing that an event must have occurred because Lucy Letby was there. It's all circular.

Meanwhile, Dr Bohin told the press yesterday how she went through the medical notes checking who was where before writing her reports on which babies suffered deliberate harm. That's not a neonatologist's remit, is it?

The more we learn about how the prosecution built the case, the easier it becomes to see what went wrong.

Experts who haven't seen all the medical records. Sandie Bohin looked through thousands and thousands of pages worth of documents. How long do we think these new experts have spent on this? Especially before they did that disgraceful press conference? And yes most of them do have axes to grind.

Lets not forget the expert that Sandie Bohin replaced thought the same as Dewi Evans and Sandie Bohin for the few he looked through before he was too ill to continue. The only one on the fence was Mike Hall for the defence (but still couldn't explain some things) and he wasn't called...every other expert thought it was deliberate harm. So what does this tell you? That all British experts are incompetent? I don't think so!

There is no reason to think that the experts who have worked on the case since the trial haven't seen all the notes. Why wouldn't they? Reviewing medical notes is something they would be used to doing, and of course the defence would provide them all.

There are lots of British experts involved in writing defence reports now (at least, people working at British hospitals / institutions. Do we know anybody's passport details for sure?). There were a couple on Shoo Lee's panel.

There is really no need to see this as an attack on British expertise. Excellence isn't confined to one country.

Shoo Lee admitted this when he had no clue about some of the babies and Nick Johnson trounced him.

So, without me being provocative FF, what motivation do you think that unpaid experts - medical, statisticians, people concerned with the police procedure - would have for making work for themselves to offer opinions that would help a strangers defence? What's in it for them? They are opening themselves up for argument/ online abuse/ ridicule if they are wrong...
My take on it is that it isn't personal to LL, but because they are of the opinion that the investigation and trials were not carried out correctly, but, FF I am interested if you think differently.

You are talking about Lee's appearance at Lucy Letby's first application to appeal in April 2024, where Ben Myers sought to establish that Lee's research had been misused by the prosecution through cross examination. Lee had not been asked to scrutinise the medical records at that point.

After this event, he formed the panel which scrutinized all of the children's records and reported in February 2025. These are medical reviews. He did not undertake medical reviews for the application to appeal.

It's not for me to know their motivations but I'd say Shoo Lee is angry he wasn't given sufficient credit for them using his paper. Even though it's been explained to him multiple times that they didn't just use the rashes to diagnose AE, he still doesn't get it.

The statisticians are angry no one wanted their opinion.

And the people talking out against the police clearly have grudges against them as we were talking about just a couple pages back. Everyone else just jumped on the bandwagon but they've had the wool pulled over their eyes...

Ah I see Thanks for explaining it FF
I must have missed the links re the above.. particularly re Shoo Lee and the statisticians being angry
Can anyone repost them?

You're being led up the garden path here.

Nothing he has said has shown that he was angry at not being credited.

He came forward as he was concerned, because his paper had been used to convict someone incorrectly. They had incorrectly interpreted his research, making it's use as evidence completely invalid.

It would be extraordinary if Shoo Lee wanted more credit for the use of his paper. He got credit for it. Evans named the authors and actually went into a little panegyrics about what a fortunately excellent paper it was, back at the original trial when he was misinterpreting it. Academics put their papers out there to be used - why would Lee mind that?

Obviously, he minded that they got it wrong, when that risked convicting an innocent woman.

It is mad what fantasies people weave around him, with their efforts to invent a sinister motivation.

Richard Gill has certainly come across as angry sometimes, but that can't really be his motivation to be involved in the case, since he could hardly have got angry about his warnings going unheeded before making those warnings. And there are a good half dozen statisticians working for the defence anyway, not including Gill. They're not a hive mind.