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

For anyone interested in the misuse of statistics in this case, Profess Spiegelhalter’s evidence to Thirlwall is a good start as mentioned above. Also do look at the various online interviews with Professor Jane Hutton, an eminent médical statistician who was engaged as an expert witness for the prosecution, then dropped on advice from the CPS.

I think you would ask if your unit had been experiencing the incredibly high rates of deaths and collapses, if you were innocent.

But you didn't write "I killed him on purpose," did you?

I am extremely sorry for your devastating loss. 💐💐💐

The article should not have quoted the Peter Sullivan case and his "confession" notes, because he had learning difficulties whereas Letby does not. Therefore it's not a useful comparison.

I can see that people can write down some weird ramblings due to distress. But writing that she killed them "on purpose" is really hard to get past.

I also think that experts like the one quoted can sometimes be educated out of common sense. They can look at something like those notes and "academicise" them due to all their training, when the truth might possibly be staring at them between the eyes.

The other thing I would say is that it's quite possible for her to have had a shambles of a trial yet also be guilty.

I do think she should get a re-trial though, now that experts have come forward in her defence. How maddening that that didn't happen during the trial.

Why not? Chester had a rise in stillbirths and neonatal deaths, like the cases above. We haven't seen much focus on the rise in stillbirths: only on events that can be associated with Lucy Letby.

But if you want to stick to neonatal deaths only, have a look at this article and graph by John O'Quigley, which compares neonatal deaths only. Chester was a poor performer in 2015 and 2016, but sadly, there have been worse without any accusations of murder

https://archive.is/S13QQ

The last paragraph you have written here - before the last 2 which you edited while I was writing this - could equally apply to the thought processes of Dewi Evans and his proposed mechanisms of murder. In no way do the many of his hypotheses meet the threshold of beyond reasonable doubt, in terms of feasibility.

Look up the size and position of a neonates liver and tell us how Lucy Letby managed to inflict injury similar in force to a car crash without it being noticed and without leaving external signs. Also look up the sorry saga of the botched needle aspiration.

Look up the diameter of a neonates NG tube and tell us how likely it is that Lucy Letby was repeatedly able to force huge volumes of air and liquid into their stomachs without detection on a small and busy ward.

Look up the various descriptions of the nebulous rashes / mottling / discolourations that are "so indicative" of AE yet their significance was only seized upon years down the line, and tell us if you think it's at all worrying that the possibility of accidental medically induced AE wasn't part of the differential diagnosis by all the highly qualified and experienced consultants at the time of the collapses.

This case was brought to court without a solid foundation of medical evidence, and relied heavily on dubious circumstantial evidence that was twisted to fit a hypothesis.

If anyone thinks this case should stand as presented, we should all hope to God that we never find ourselves in the dock due to the "gut feelings" of someone with their own agenda. That isn't a justice system, it's a farce.

I have taught nurses.

A lot would feel it was on purpose because they didn't speak up in public about how poor their wards are/were.
Nurses cover a lot up which really should have been spoken out in public.

I don't agree. But they could check other doctors and nurses texts etc to see if they asked, if it was an important clue. Though texts are only a tiny bit of people's communication anyway. How would you know she didn't ask in person, on the phone etc, if it was important?

As far as I can see nobody has ever investigated whether she asked these questions or not, so if you thought that was important, you would need to start by finding that out.

False confessions aren't rare or a matter of academic invention. It's easy to say, common sense tells us this, that or the other, but trauma and extreme stress stop people from behaving rationally. We can try to work out what this looks like, scientifically, or we can just make assumptions. If we are putting people on trial for murder I believe we have a responsibility to dig into the science and not to go with gut feeling or brush aside scientific evidence

Your first para - not a fair comparison, because the medical evidence deals with material data, things that can actually be seen on tests etc. The confession expert is dealing in academic theory.

Your second para - the baby responded to the alleged liver injury shortly after it allegedly happened, by having a collapse. It's not like he/she was lying there for days or weeks afterwards, in which case you'd expect external signs like a bruise to form. Or maybe not. I don't know if a bruised liver causes skin bruising. Regardless, the baby's immediate distress was the external sign you're looking for, IF such an injury occurred. This was Baby O, who apparently may have received this liver injury from a doctor's needle while he was trying to save the baby. But why Baby O collapsed in the first place was never decided.

Your third para - if any premie was injured by air or liquid, you do not need "huge amounts." You only need amounts that are huge relative to the baby's size, which isn't much.

Your fourth para - I'm not aware of the timeline and which doctors were aware of what AE signs at which times.

Your fifth para - possibly, possibly not. Given that a large group of experts cannot agree on the meaning of the medical evidence, I don't see how laypeople like us can know what any of it means.

Your sixth para - agree.

True.

This case, overall....I know she had a crap trial and I do think she deserves a new one. But there is an awful lot of smoke, once you look at the whole picture of all the weird things she did.

@NameChangeMay2026 you keep saying it is hard to get past: it isn’t. Obviously for you, it is: you have taken it absolutely literally and numerous explanations aren’t going to make it make sense to you.

But the fact you can’t get past it doesn’t mean others can’t. Honestly, I was surprised that so much was made of it. I assumed she was guilty due to the insulin - it looked damning to me - but the notes were actually the thing that made me doubt her guilt, rather than convinced me of it.

So we could chew it over forever. You can only take it one way and that’s absolutely literally. It’s interesting that another famous miscarriage of justice was based almost in entirety on literal interpretation of a single sentence.

Re. your last sentence - which famous miscarriage of justice?

Edit: It's specifically the "on purpose" part that I find hard to get past.

Derek Bentley’s ‘let him have it.’

I a worried I’ll sound incredibly condescending here but people under huge amounts of stress say all sorts they don’t mean. Those notes should be completely disregarded. They are contradictory, disturbed and disturbing and panicked. They do not tally with a cold, cruel and calculated approach.

The flip side to the MN ‘if someone tells you who they are’ is that if someone tells you who you are, you believe it.

Once again you focus in on one part of the circumstantial evidence and refuse to analyse the medical.

Put the words " they say" in front of
" I killed them on purpose"
" I'm evil '
" It's all my fault "
And any other negative phrases
Then the rebuttal
" I didn't do it" " I'm innocent "
That's one way the notes could have been written
I'm not sure of her guilt or innocence, but I am sure that all of the information I have read means that the evidence presented at trial was dubious and in fact there may not have been any murders at all ( Dr Lee's panel), in which case there has been a miscarriage of justice.

The point being made is that under trauma people have these terrible feelings and thoughts of guilt. Also when being accused of things they didn't do.

Some people write this stuff down. Often they seem to be encouraged to do so by therapists. Probably therapists should stop suggesting this if courts are going to take this stuff as hard evidence.

Why do you take that 'confession' as being so important but not the protestations of innocence on the same piece of paper?

Surely it doesn't have much value as evidence other than to suggest she might have been having a breakdown in her mental health at this point.

For me the really important point is that none of the babies seem to have been murdered and so Letby could be screaming aloud I am an evil witch please burn me and I would still think her innocent and conclude she had finally lost her mind under the strain.

Private Eye, if you finish reading it, is good at explaining the scientific evidence. Or you can watch Shoo Lee's press conference directly which is actually quite accessible even to those without a medical background. It is hard not to have doubt in the conviction when you have people like Neena Modi (professor of neonatology at Imperial) saying the babies died from natural causes and poor medical care.

However the Amanda Knox podcast might also be interesting to you. As well going through the facts of the case she discusses the psychology of being accused drawing both on her own experiences and those of others who have experienced a miscarraige of justice.

About the medical: A large group of medical experts cannot agree on the medical evidence, so what hope does a layperson like me have of making sense of it? I'm not refusing to analyse the medical; I cannot analyse the medical, and I know my limitations. So I'm focusing on the parts that don't take a medical degree and years of training to understand. Maybe you're a doctor, but I'm not.

Here's a fascinating (and alarming) article on false confessions. They are disturbingly easy to elicit. It's not a direct comparison with Lucy Letby's case. But it's a good reminder that our minds are complex and vulnerable to false accusations

https://archive.is/2384B

There could well have been a miscarriage of justice, which is why I hope she gets a re-trial.

I hope she's not just exonerated, because her life after getting out would be so bad. It would be better for her to be cleared by a jury (if they were to decide that that's an appropriate verdict).

I will read more of the PE stuff. Agree with your point re. Modi etc.

I think I'll just have to agree to disagree about the possible significance of the notes. I'm not saying they are definitive, I'm saying that they are very suspicious. But none of us really knows.

I think her conviction will be quashed.

I think it will take a long time. Because of the nature of the case and the polarisation of viewpoints obviously there are going to be a lot of people out there angry that it did not go to a retrial.

But as someone else has pointed out, it's actually going to be really hard to come up with expert witnesses for the prosecution in a retrial. Who as a medical professional is going to want to risk their career and go up against all the other experts in the field ?

It's obviously a massive hot potato which basically puts the entire justice system under the spotlight.

I think the jury system is hopelessly ill-suited to cases with significant amounts of technical/medical evidence. We should move to a system of judges with specific training to decide these cases.

That's amazing; thank you. That study shows how Letby might have false recall.

But on the study itself: WTF?????? Seventy percent of people who were told they had assaulted someone ended up admitting to the assault, even though the accusations were false? I cannot imagine admitting to an assault that I had not committed. That is just wild.

I completely agree. The fact is that most people are not bright enough to serve on juries. I have long thought that juries should be made up of impartial lawyers and judges.