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

It's interesting, because people have said the same about the problem of getting defence experts for a long time too, sometimes associating it with Waney Squiers who had trouble with the GMC after working as defence expert.

It is a badly regulated system and reforms suggested long ago by the law commission have never gone through. This is bad for the experts as well as the defendants and victims. It's in everyone's interest that experts should be competent, impartial, and seen to have these qualities.

The idea that panels of expert witnesses would work for the court rather than prosecution or defence is one possibility. But I suspect you can't fix the expert witness system without also fixing the appeal system. The law needs a more efficient way to correct scientific error (and thereby to incentivise accuracy over obduracy in its witnesses).

The Lucy Letby case is in part a symptom of problems with the expert witness system. Perhaps it is also bringing such problems further toward breaking point. That might not be a bad thing in the longer term.

I am sorry to hear that Dr Bohin is still working as an expert witness because she was very sloppy in her statements in her recent interview and really showed no understanding of normal scientific processes. She showed similar tendencies at the trial. I would not like to have her involved in my case, for defence or prosecution, regardless of whatever issues are or aren't between her and those Guernsey families.

(Oh I misread. It's Liz Hull who did a case last week, not Dr Bohin. I hope that Dr Bohin has a happy retirement and finds useful and remunerative work if that's what she wants, but I don't think she should be an expert witness)

I don't understand how Liz Hull makes so many basic mistakes. She is welcome to her opinions, but she is terribly shaky in facts for someone who spends so much time on this case.

I would rather have Dr Bohin working on my case than the clueless statisticians who think Lucy didn't do it. I don't think they'd be much help to me at all (unless I really was guilty then they couldn't hurt!)

Well Liz Hull has spoken so now this will be repeated ad nauseam on all of these threads.

I’m sure however that we will continue to see in the news reports of trials that experts will still be continuing to give evidence no problem

but we’ll still never hear the end of “But Liz said…”

Honestly, I don't think it's a bad thing if Lucy Letby's case makes some expert witnesses more reluctant to testify.

Dr Svilena Dimitrova, who is on the defence's UK based panel, has stated that having read the prosecution reports, she believes that the authors simply never anticipated that they would be made public or scrutinised outside a courtroom. She believes they would have been much more rigorous if they had anticipated the scrutiny of their peers.

I've never seen any criticism of Kenny's, Stavros's, Arthur's or Kinsey's work - I've seen doubts about conclusions for Arthur and Kinsey, but nothing negative about their approach or their rigour. It seems possible to be an expert, even on Lucy Letby's case, without attracting criticism if you stay within the limits of your expertise, present your evidence consistently and accurately, and respect the fundamentals of science. Bohin, Evans, and to a lesser extent but on key points, Hindmarsh and Marnerides, failed to do this

Well this is what I'm thinking too, they're not going to be afraid of testifying for straightforward cases which make up the majority, but some will be more cautious about testifying about less straightforward cases as they well should be. That is not a bad thing.

Excellent point that I'd forgotten, that people had said it was difficult to get defence experts.

Sandi Bohin said on that podcast that her plan was to continue doing medico-legal work but she's not going to be able to do that now because who would want to take on someone as an expert with all of the baggage attributed to her.

She also said while she did the reports for the other charges for the CPS that if the case went forward she wouldn't have stood up again in court, because she did them a long time ago and it took the CPS a long time to decide and in the meantime the juggernaut took over and so she decided she didn't want to continue and reluctantly bowed out.

So I don't think she will be working as an expert witness anymore, and she doesn't believe anyone will want her to either.

Thank you. I would presume that if she retires without resolving whatever complaint the Guernsey families have made to the GMC, she won't be able to act as an expert witness. But that's not about Lucy Letby.

I'm not sure how that works, she said

"I was due to retire later this year and my plan was to do maybe some locum work, do some volunteering, and carry on doing medico legal work, which you can do after you've retired for a few years while you're still credible and current in your thinking.

But I'm not going to be able to do any of that now.

Who would take on someone as an expert with all the baggage that has been attributed to me?

No one."

So she's definitely trying to make it sound like it's just because her reputation has been ruined so no one will want to hire her, and of course Liz Hull has definitely played up at that angle, but you're probably right that there's that aspect to it as well that she actually wouldn't be allowed to be an expert witness, but of course that didn't get mentioned.

Honestly the system for experts is broken and has been for years. Previously it has been the defence having problems getting experts, partly because they get paid less and partly because there is professional risk in contradicting the police / NHS but also because there isn't the same steady stream of work as there would be from the police / CPS.

Really we need a better way to deal with the evidence for these complex medical cases. What they did in the Netherlands, and what Phil Hammond suggests here, is that they have a multidisciplinary team come in when there is a spike in deaths and gather evidence which can then be passed to the police if needed. Could be a natural variation, under resourcing, incompetance, negligance, malfeasance or a combination of the above. Standalone retired experts and the police are not in a good position to tell the difference.

We would save a lot more lives that way. Even those most convinced of Letby's guilt must realise that most deaths in the NHS are caused by under resourcing, systemic problems and negligance rather than serial killers.

She certainly is shaky on the facts. Sometimes it’s literally unbelievable that an educated person such as her could have such incredibly poor comprehension and be so easily confused on so many salient points.

You see it as her getting confused, I see it as her calling Mark Mcdonald to account. Just because he claims she doesn't understand something doesn't make it true. If you trust the likes of MM over Liz Hull I don't know what to tell ya! She knows the case far better than any of us here and refuses to just swallow MM's BS like all of you. Of course that makes her public enemy number one 😆

And Lucy HAS only recently waived privilege but big mouth Mark somehow forgot to let us all know?

And she's still on the right side of this case no matter how "confused" and "shaky on the facts" she supposedly is!

She was getting confused with MM, and definitely was not holding him to account. He was trying to nicely let her off the hook for not understanding privilege properly but she still didn't understand him and then put the info out that he couldn't talk to Myers.

I also heard one episode where she talked to the statistician and she did not have a clue and was completely out of her depth talking with her.

She's not public enemy number one, she's embarrassing herself, no one and I repeat no one is concerned about Liz Hull I can assure you.

She's only recently waived privilege to the CCRC, which is something entirely different to allowing MM to speak to BM, which you and LH still don't understand.

You understand that it wasn’t necessary to waive privilege for the new barrister to speak to the previous one don’t you? This is where Hull keeps confusing her audience.

And why do we all need to know?

Liz Hull didn't realise venous and pulmonary arterial air embolism were different, three years into her reporting on the case. She wrote to the CCRC with an example of a child with what she called Lee's sign after exactly the incident that Lee had said could cause his sign.

She mixed up the bacterium infecting child I with another, this weekend, and agreed with Dr Bohin that the prosecution had covered that angle - but it was a different illness. She is constantly misrepresenting what "waiving privilege" means.

I think she needs to slow down and take in that detail of the case. She's not making sense these days.

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?

The key thing is to do it blindly, with no way for knowledge of a suspect to influence selection of cases or incidents. If they do a more cursory review that's fine, as long as it's done the same way for all staff's cases. What's not valid is to compare focused reviews of one nurse's cases with less-focused reviews of other nurses' cases: any differences in findings could be due to the differences in the degree of focus. The only way to ensure equal focus is to do a properly blinded review.

Why are you still going on about waiving privilege? Surely you must know by now that LL didn’t need to waive privilege for her old and legal team to share information? They needed LL’s permission, certainly, but that is not “waiving privilege”.

Are you actually Liz Hull?

Letby's barrister had the opportunity to seek permission to inform the jury of the investigations into Hindmarsh but didn't. Presumably he didn't think it would impact on the jury's view of Hindmarsh's evidence (which seems incredible, but there must be a reason for that decision). Or perhaps he thought it unlikely the order would be granted, in which case it suggests the investigation into Hindmarsh was so unrelated to his work for the prosecution that the judge wouldn't consider it sufficiently relevant to be disclosed.

Lots of Letby's legal team's decisions are confusing to me - like why they didn't call experts of their own? I've always thought that was a mad decision (unless the reality is that they couldn't get supportive experts, which tells its own story). Perhaps they felt their safest route was simply to attack the credibility or conclusions of the prosecution's experts, but if that was so, why not seek to have the investigation into Hindmarsh disclosed?

I can never really land on how I feel about this case. I generally trust the decisions of jurors who have sat through all evidence and arguments, but it's indisputable that miscarriages of justice do occur. I think the approach taken by Letby's team could be a case of legal advisors making the wrong call, or it could be a team doing their best in circumstances where the evidence is against them. I find Letby's behaviour around the families (keeping records, repeatedly looking people up online, the reports from colleagues of a kind of vicarious preying on intense emotion) to be highly suspect, but I'm wary of armchair psychology. It's a very uncomfortable one to sit with.

I understand that. But Lucy/her barrister isn't likely to give up that info voluntarily if she's guilty and it makes her look bad is she? And MM probably knows better than to ask! Which I'll bet is why he's been so cagey about it all and trying to turn it back around on Liz Hull that she "just doesn't understand" the same way no one understands Shoo Lee's work, apparently.

Because Mark Mcdonald has been strangely silent about it all. You DO realise if she's guilty she's hardly going to tell him "Oh yeah we didn't call any witnesses because I'm guilty as fuck and they would've harmed my case"? voluntarily don't you?

<slightly off topic>

Did anyone watch Hunting the Silver Killer on ITV tonight ? - looks like Cheshire Police at their finest again.

The article says that disclosure would have been opposed. The issue here is that Hindmarsh didn’t voluntarily disclose the fitness to practise investigation, which he should have done.

There’s been quite a lot of discussion about the lack of defence witnesses. One of the reasons is likely to be that Hall would have not been able to say with 100% certainty that the deaths were definitely not murder, so up against Evans’s absolute certainty that they were this would not have done LL any good. But nobody knows for sure, and I agree it seems strange.

You are right to avoid armchair psychology. Being a bit odd doesn’t indicate murder.

So you think MM took the case blind ??

The reason he was 'cagey' was because she was asking him questions that he wouldn't be allowed to answer anyway.
He could have just said I can't answer that because it's protected by client/attorney privilege but then she would have spun that another way, 'aha he knows, but he just won't tell us, it must be bad'.