To think that Lucy Letby will get a new trial?

[NameChangeMay2026]

The previous thread on Letby is almost full. Posting here for traffic.

If we have any lawyers here, what do you think the likelihood is of Letby getting a new trial? I'm a layperson, but I'm going to guess that she will get one. It seems that many, many rebuttals have appeared since her conviction.

YABU - she will not get a new trial. The case is settled.
YANBU - the new evidence/discussion is compelling and she will probably get a re-trial.

I've been mainly convinced of her guilt, but I have started reading the free Private Eye series on the case by Phil Hammond. Now I don't know what to think. Here's the series, if anyone wants to read it. https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/lucy-letby

That's not a very sensible comment

I think she is guilty, but the trial clearly has some issues. No idea what the mechanics of appealing are.

Expert analysis of the confession notes as reported by the Times at archive.ph/tSFcI

Why would she? I didn't rock up after annual leave, asking for a death tally. If there were long term patients who had disappeared from their usual bed space, that might be remarked upon, but the answer would likely have been 'transferred to x hospital', 'gone to rehab', 'gone to the ward', etc. You would only have been told about a death if it was a patient you were caring for before annual leave, or if the case was particularly difficult and other staff would still be struggling emotionally.

When she wrote that note she had already been accused and she was writing down what they were saying about her.

It’s not like a secret diary where she’d written what she’d been doing and her innermost thoughts, it was a bit of paper with accusations being made about her, and her countering that she was innocent.

As previously said, the job has a lot of responsibility and she may have thought that they were accusing her because she wasn’t good enough.

Seriously?
The panel of international experts.
The utterly duscredited exoert witness
And the fact that her "defence " team entirely neglected to defend her.

I would like to see her get a new trial but I don’t think she’ll get one.

There's no evidence that it was what others were saying about her. People are just inventing things now. Which they shouldn't need to do if the note doesn't mean anything.

Yes. The Ibiza thing is over-cooked anyway.

There were deaths on the unit on average once every four weeks during the indictment period. The Ibiza week was one of 41 out of 52 weeks when there was no death on the unit. No deaths was more frequent than not. It wasn't some shocking departure from the norm.

Collapses - it's the other way around. There were more collapses than the unit counted, literally. Consultants and others have made this clear at Thirlwall. There was well over one a week on average during the indictment period, but there is no reason to think a random nurse Lucy Letby was texting would necessarily be tracking them.

It is likely she'd have been told about a death without asking, while collapses really weren't unusual enough for her to be texting to ask about them.

Please dont presume to speak for everyones opinions.
If the evidence in any trial was that weak and the evidence so flawed, I would have a problem with it irrespective of the skin color of the accused.

@montysmaw ok so how are we seeing things so differently re the evidence then?

Firefly is putting a great argument against the prosecution.

They are desperate for everyone to agree with them that she is a "baby killer" and should not have a retrial.
Yet the best they can come up with us rehashing "evidence" from the trial that has been discredited ( and on previous threads explained over and over again to them), accusing people of defending "a baby killer" and now trying to accuse people of racism.

If there was definitive evidence that the conviction was sound, they would be shouting it from the rooftops.

This shows that even someone who really wants her to be guilty, cannot find anything that shows beyond reasonable doubt that she did it.

Weirdly Amanda Knox mentions this on a podcast she made about Letby and says she herself (whilst knowing rationally she hadn't murdered Meridith) started thinking she must have done something bad to deserve what was happening to her. Bloody good job she didn't write that down or maybe she would still be in jail now.

@Oftenaddled I’ve really respected all of your replies here. Intelligent and logical compared to many others that are gushing in desperation. Thank you

The increase, then? I don't mean to downplay it, just to say that the number of deaths increased when the hospital started caring for more vulnerable babies for longer

You'd expect this. It's not only that these children are more likely to die. It's also that they will take time and attention from other children, so there will be a ripple effect. And the fact that the hospital did this without increasing staffing or expert resource (like hiring a neonatologist) meant the effect would be stronger still.

We know that at least five of the seven deaths Lucy Letby is accused of causing are in children who were affected by staff absence, delay, pressure or engagement elsewhere - that's on the accounts of the doctors and consultants themselves. In a more appropriately staffed unit, these children had a higher chance of surviving.

There are limits to what we know about the functioning of the unit and about its intake, so I don't think it's possible to say, this increase could account for so many more deaths exactly, but not more. But to answer your question, if we are looking for a reason for an increased death rate, the fact that there were more vulnerable babies on the unit at this time is a sensible starting point.

The biggest miscarriage of justice of our time, that poor girl.

Ok show me a news article which shows the same pattern of patients dying to this extent at other units.

https://news.sky.com/story/shrewsbury-maternity-scandal-the-babies-who-died-in-the-uks-worst-hospital-childbirth-scandal-12576727

An overview at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c994x95yygyo

Because there was no statistical analysis of numbers, birth weight, vulnerability etc at the trial, people have tended to just look at the raw numbers and draw conclusions. But David Spiegelhalter's evidence to the Thirlwall Inquiry demonstrated that there was a spike which merited an internal inquiry, but that it fell within the range of results to be expected nationally:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpdxn4x5477o

My 22 year old son died in an accident in 2022 while he was hundreds of miles away visiting family and I went through a time where I wrote all my feelings down and that included things like it’s my fault he is dead and I killed him, my thoughts being that I wasn’t there to protect him or save him so therefore it’s my fault.

It’s a good job I was nowhere near the place at the time because according to some people it’s a clear admission of guilt.

You do get clusters, as well. If people get ill at the same time, their illness can take a similar course and they deteriorate at a similar time. My first nursing placement was on a stroke ward and over the course of four days, 3 patients died in my bay. On day four, my foot was run over by a bed wheel and I had to go to get it x-rayed. The radiographer was away from the department, and she came rushing back saying 'sorry, I had to go to a ward and do an emergency x-ray but the patient died.' I said 'oh, which ward?' 'X ward'. 'Was it B Bay?' It was. 4 patients in 4 days. Nobody had 'done' anything. They had just deteriorated at the same time.

At the same time that the hospital saw an increase in neonatal deaths, it saw an increase in stillbirths - again suggesting a more vulnerable cohort, failings in care, the effect of random distribution, or some combination of these things

thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/thirlwall-evidence/INQ0107145.pdf

I am so sorry for your loss and can relate to those feelings of guilt and responsibility. And that’s without anyone else accusing us.

The Lucy Letby case is an extremely disturbing one because it has shown how it is possible for things to be manipulated and twisted to prove someone’s guilt. In this case, things seem to have snowballed out of control very quickly and all of the points at which someone should have been raising concerns instead escalated things.

The behaviour towards Letby by the consultants, by the police, by the prosecution lawyer, the judge and the press has been repugnant.

This isn’t the same type of thing.