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

Re. the New Yorker article - fyi, the author read seven thousand relevant documents during the course of their research, such as court transcripts, police records, etc. It's really worth a read.

And the reporter also had access to hospital records that were leaked to her.

Not only this, but the jury can’t listen again to the evidence - it’s a one time thing.

If I’m undertaking an investigation I have all the available evidence in front of me, and can go back to ask for clarification, and I only investigate incidents within my field where I’m often the SME.

This just isn’t the court process. It’s absolutely not fit for complex cases with multiple counts.

The idea that the court process is by definition more rigorous than an expert review is laughable.

The court transcripts are in the public domain. I’m an ordinary member of the public who’s interest in this case is entirely based on the fact that I and my family are a. reliant on the NHS should we require medical care, and b. subject to the justice system in this country. It is beyond belief that any reasonably intelligent adult could have read the court transcripts and subsequent reports from credible experts and still conclude that there is nothing to see here. Unless they have another agenda of course. You are the ones who are starting to look weirdly over invested.

Absolutely all of this. That’s not to denigrate the jury - every one of them may have been an ideal diligent, intelligent juror - but anyone unfamiliar with the subject matter would struggle to make sense of it.

You only have to read the snippets of court transcript (plenty on Reddit), where it’s obvious neither the barristers nor the judge really understand the terminology, to be able to see how the jury would be bogged down with the medical evidence.

And how is a lay jury supposed to be able to judge the credibility of Evans’s outlandish claims?

The adversarial system is a ridiculous way to identify whether a death was a murder or natural causes/medical negligence.

Have you been up all night reading OP?

I feel as though I am watching myself from 18 months ago, going from “of course she’s guilty - look at the insulin evidence” to “what on earth has happened here???” over the course of a weekend.

That was pretty much what happened to me @SnakesAndArrows .

The whole thing seemed odd. I’m not bothered in the slightest by Facebook searches and notes but insulin can’t be argued with, except it seems it can.

Yes, I presumed that the test used was the “proper” test at the Guildford lab, not the immunoassay, and had had no idea that poisoning had not been suspected (despite the immunoassay results) at the time. I assumed that the insulin test was a smoking gun that had set all the rest in train at the time. How wrong I was.

But of course I only changed my mind because I suddenly realised that Letby was blond, or something 🙄.

I didn’t take any notice of the trial at the time, just noted the reporting of the verdict on the news. Then my sister mentioned that ‘some people’ were questioning things and I sort of rolled my eyes. Then I found out that she’d been convicted of murder and sentenced to a whole life order for forcing air into a baby’s stomach via the nasogastric tube, at which point I thought WTAF and sat up and took notice. Even if at the beginning the insulin stuff was difficult to explain, there was already the fact that the test was not suitable for forensic use and the incredible fantasy they had to weave about how she could have done it.

Potential miscarriages of justice should worry everyone - and this shouldn’t depend on the demographic of the person convicted

However, I am not concerned that this is a miscarriage of justice because of how she looked, but because multiple independent and very experienced clinicians and statisticians, have raised concerns about the evidence presented in court. I have not previously seen similar happen so publicly, and for someone who has been convicted of being a serial killer of babies

I find it bizarre that people would not be concerned about any court case, if multiple very experienced clinicians/experts in their field, stated that the evidence in any trial was inaccurate or nonsensical

Exactly- weird test results are really common in medicine and always have to be rechecked. And the same machine produced a similar result a few weeks later as well, but not used as LL was not there

Fully agree also, and I'm one of those who does advocate for specialist juries in matter where the evidence is going to require previous training in order to properly assess. Even if it didn't lead to an MOJ here, there's clear potential for it to. We need change.

Also the case has implications for our health care. Most spikes in deaths in hospitals were always going to be caused by some combination of chance, systemic issues or negligence. This case shows that we have no proper way of imvestigating these things. Imagine how many lives could be saved if we did?

Characterising objections to the conviction as frivolous is disingenuous.

However where I have some sympathy for the argument that it is wrong to discuss the case, is where the details of how a particular baby died are discussed. It can feel distasteful and disrespectful to me and I can only imagine how distressed a parent would be to read the discussion. Strangers analysing the deaths of their poor babies.

But these details were an essential part of the case against Lucy. A case which is keeping an innocent woman in jail and pointing to dreadful problems in our health and justice system.

So I blame the consultants, police, cps and judge instead of those campaigning against this wrongful conviction. Had they done their jobs properly from the start there would have been no crimimal case to be discussed.

Actually, if instead of wasting time trying to blame a nurse the consultants had recognised the unit couldn't cope and stopped admiting such sick babies earlier, some of the babies would not even have died in the first place.

Yes. The judge and counsel were formal and pedantic and verbose, which is easy to mistake for intellectual rigour, especially if you are understandably lulled into a stupor by it all. But they were also frequently weak on detail and quick to handwave flaws in their reasoning. More than once, the judge took it upon himself to do a bit of judgesplaining, got it wrong, and had to be tactfully corrected by counsel.

Counsel went in for wordplay and burying the lede - maybe there are studies that show this is effective, but in such a sprawling case I suspect it undermined clarity.

All in all, it was no way to try to communicate scientific information.

Dewi Evans was easily the best communicator of the major players, and while this shouldn't have mattered, it probably did.

Of course communication is incredibly important, couldn't be otherwise. This is what I was alluding to upthread when I said being the best in your field doesn't necessarily translate to being a good court performer.

A genuine world beater might easily still be overly verbose, arsey, have a manner about them that juries and/or judges don't like, could be incapable of explaining something simply and convincingly for a lay audience... these things all matter a lot because of the way we run our system.

Reading through the Private Eye special reports. Something is puzzling me. In part 7 they refer to 'the back stairs argument' in which they say the swipe card entry data was wrong, but also that there was a back stairs entry to the ward that didn't track use, and that "staff used it all the time and would often come and go even when not on duty"
They go to say that a clever murderer would use this route and commit all their murders when not on shift. They then ask "Did the police know about the unmonitored point of entry? Did they tell the defence? Did Letby know about the back stairs?"

For me there's a whole lot of weirdness and even more questions there. Who told the story about the back stairs and staff coming and going there all the time? Which staff? Is that person saying LL was one of those staff or not? Why the hell are staff coming in and out when not on shift, given it's all so stressful and short staffed - you'd think they'd be keen either to get away, or to be paid for it if they were at work? What has LL said when asked about this, as surely her new legal team have done?

I can see that the police, if they wanted to fit LL up, wouldn't mention it. But someone did. Yet it's presented as something lots of staff knew about and used regularly, but where we don't know if LL knew about it and used it, even though she did tons of shifts and was one of the most present, hard working staff on the ward. Is it credible she didn't know of its existence? And if she did, since this would help her defence, why didn't the defence team mention it?

I think the swipe data was used mostly in a positive sense, to say that Lucy Letby could have been in a certain place at a certain time. So the door with the code pad didn't really change that if the times were close, assuming she didn't enter the unit and then charge out again by the back stairs.

I also don't think anyone seriously believes somebody else was sneaking in killing children. The defence was taking the line that the children died naturally, not trying to find another culprit.

So the back stairs is a bit of a hitch for the prosecution, but not much. Getting one of the unit swipe entry doors wrong was more of a serious problem - it means that Lucy Letby or other witnesses were sometimes leaving the unit when the prosecution said they had entered, so their actions no longer lined up with the medical notes the way the prosecution claimed.

But in general the use of the swipe data entry was so vague it barely mattered. In two cases, baby K and baby N, it undermines the prosecution claims significantly. But Lucy Letby and her defence didn't know they'd reversed the swipe data

But mostly, it was just telling us that Lucy Letby was mostly on the unit when she was on shift - it doesn't tell us which room she was in or whether or not she was alone etc at a given moment. It seems to have become part of the narrative about the police doing terribly difficult and important detective work, but it never actually proved much in a positive sense anyway.

Yes, I think everyone knew about the other entrance with the code. The door swipe system intended to keep out anyone who wasn't supposed to be on the ward, not to act as an unofficial clocking in/out system or a record of who was on the ward at any particular time.

If 2 people arrived together then one could "tailgate" and it was known that it was possible to enter or leave the ward without leaving a trace on the door system.

They never actually considered that anyone else could have been a murderer, so the door swipe data was only really used in the "positive" sense that if LL's card was swiped it would definitely indicate her presence somewhere on the ward. There's no particular defence argument against that. If they'd picked incidents where she wasn't on duty/swipe data indicated she was there and said that she must have used the other entrance then the defence could have pushed back saying so could anyone else.

Maybe a truly devious serial killer would only pick times when they were not on duty and use the code door to enter and leave?

Re. your para. about the parents: Given that no one is being forced to read this thread, I feel such concerns are performative.

Anyone who didn't follow the trial at the time won't have a good grasp of all the evidence against her. You've come at it from a miscarriage of justice perspective and looking for anything to validate that. It's always people saying they only started caring when they heard it might be a MOJ. That's not being open-minded.

On my thread about the Brighton sisters, someone said that same thing. But Brighton is my town, and I want to know how such a tragedy happened to guests of ours.

I'm very tired of people trying to shut down discussion of current affairs under the guise of being holier-than-thou. Maybe we shouldn't discuss anything but the weather, in case the given issue affects someone, somewhere, who might be forced to read it!!!

That doesn't make sense to me. What information was available during the trial that isn't available now?

Plenty of information is available now that wasn't available during the trial. I often wonder how the jury feels with all of the new evidence and details that have come out since.

Nonsense, there's a lot more information out now than was out when the trial was ongoing.
These days there are full transcripts etc being posted, whereas during the trial that was not the case at all.

Exactly.
People say that the jury are allowed to ask questions so they think that it's fair.
But without medical knowledge then you wouldn't have a clue what to ask so you wouldn't know what medical information was missing or anything like that.

I know that during deliberation they did ask the judge a question about the insulin, and the judge came back and said that the information hadn't been given in trial so therefore wasn't in evidence so they weren't able to find out basically.

Agree with this. My DS has been suffering with pain, exhaustion and malaise and researching lots of different ways to try and deal with it. One of the methods he found and was contemplating trying was this extreme ‘journaling’ where you write all sorts of things down to get them out of your head even if they’re not true. He said things like wanting to kill your whole family, as an example. I was horrified and said why would you write that?! And he was adamant it wasn’t a real thing, it’s a way of getting negative feelings out of your body to allow it to heal. Sounds fucking nuts to me and I did point out that if anything happened to me or DD he’d be in the firing line for it with journal entries like that! Luckily he decided on some other protocols instead, but I’d never heard of it until the LL case and to see it being considered by someone I know to be the softest and kindest young man ever, just demonstrates that it’s not reliable testimony to anything.

The rest of the evidence seems very circumstantial at best, and smacks of the Amanda Knox trial where she was essentially found guilty of not being emotional enough.