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

@Barbie222 you make a good point re people wanting to see a neat ending but I am looking at it from the other side. It would have been a completed story that the villain was locked away for life after committing such heinous crimes. We could rest easy knowing that it was unlikely to happen again. But
The additional information that has surfaced re inaccurate insulin tests, faulty door swipe data, cherry picked cases to align with when the accused was on duty and most shocking for me is that an eminent panel of experts have proclaimed that there were in fact NO murders has shaken my faith in the justice system.
This case has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt for a lot of commentators.
NHS units are still inadequate and people and children are not recovering as they should.
I feel very uneasy that a young woman may be locked up for life on this basis
I do not know if she is innocent or not. I do however feel very strongly that she did not get a fair trial and that should worry society as a whole.

@Piglet89 the blind faith in this evil woman being innocent is really breath-taking. How are people so sure they're right?

I'd want someone like Ben Myers to defend me if I ever needed it. And better to have faith in him than a bunch of chancers coming out of the woodwork long after the trial.

I tend to think the people who are like guilty, no ifs no buts are in the neat ending category also. Possibly because I don't rule out the possibility of a retrial that collapses- there may never be a clean ending to this.

There were. But of course it was impossible for her defence to argue this point and challenge the chart adequately when the judge had prevented them from discussing other deaths or the construction of the case. It's obvious from reading the cross-examinations that Myers went to huge pains to understand the medical evidence and to challenge Evans and the others.

So she can't be guilty unless she killed every single baby that died on the unit?
Maybe Shipman wasn't guilty, I mean some old people died naturally in his care-he should've just pointed that out and gotten off.

I think people who are alarmed about this case are perfectly capable of dealing with uncertainty and the lack of a tidy ending. There are a lot of cases In unsure about. Sion Jenkins? Jeremy Bamber? I don't know.

If you see someone tending the same way on every case, it seems reasonable to draw conclusions, but if they are expressing alarm about one case, I don't think it's necessary to pathologise that.

Re the unexpected insulin results, we know that the three from Chester would have been ignored if not for the investigation - they lay unnoticed in the files for about three years. People assume occasional errors or irregularities in test results.

And the data on premature neonates is limited. That's because they literally don't have enough blood for ethical sampling from research purposes. The prematurity is an important aspect too. Neonatal specialists have pointed out constantly throughout this case that they're not just extra small babies - organs and systems are still developing. It's simply an area, like many others in medicine, where we are developing a full picture rather than working with certainties.

@Firefly1987
What is your take on the findings from the panel led by Dr Shoo Lee that the deaths could all be explained as natural causes? What do you think his motivation is to get involved?
Genuine question

Did we not go over this last night? Chase and Shannon (who keeps getting left out) aren't working alone. The defence has endocrinologists and various other doctors as well. They have written about the children's medical symptoms and conditions.

They are:

Dr Neil Aiton MBBS MD MRCPI FRCPCH
Dr Adel Ismail, PhD FRCPath
Professor Matthew Johil PhD
Professor Alan Wayne Jones BSc, PhD, DSc
Professor Charles Stanley MD
Dr Richard Taylor MBBS FRCPC
Dr Hilde Wilkinson-Herbots MSc, PhD

That's two neonatologists (Aiton and Taylor), two endocrinologists (Ismail and Stanley), a forensic chemist and toxicologist (Johil and Jones) and a statistician (Wilkinson-Herbots)

Their qualifications and experience are listed in the summary linked from: https://lucyletbyinnocence.com/shoo-lee/Summary%20of%20Joint%20Expert%20Witness%20Insulin%20Report%20on%20Babies%20F%20and%20L.pdf

The main points of their report are listed there too, and as you can see if you follow the link, this includes their conclusions from their examination of the children's medical notes.

I don’t think that they got together and decided to scapegoat her in the way that I think you mean (my apologies if not) - as in, well, my fellow consultants, we’d better come up with an alternative explanation for this shitshow of a ward, hadn’t we? Anyone got any suggestions? Murderer? Hmm, maybe, but who … Lucy letby? Surely no one would … let’s look at this a bit closer … maybe …’

I don’t think that happened and I doubt anyone believes that’s the case.

But people do deflect when threatened themselves. Some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I started a new role teaching extremely vulnerable children and had been in it for a good six months when it emerged the school hadn’t sent off for my DBS. I have still no idea how it happened but once I’d had that panicked phone call I suddenly was nitpicked at about this and about that and it became a very unhappy situation. One of the strangest things about it was that I was given minutes to a meeting I’d purportedly attended with one of my senior managers but it was totally fictitious. In it, he apparently discussed with me about my over familiarity and giving gifts to children (I gave all the children in my little group a chocolate at Christmas but the way it was worded honestly made it sound like I’d given them iTunes vouchers and the like!) and I’d ‘agreed’ it was inappropriate’. But who would have believed me insisting that the meeting had never even happened when it was minuted and typed up?

I won’t go into everything because I realise that it probably isn’t relevant, but it did make me realise how easy it is to twist things and to make innocuous things appear sinister. I also did have a meeting (real, not invented) which was presented as ‘hey, would you mind popping into X’s office?’ and it was more like an ambush, with several different people demanding to know various things about me and of course in hindsight I should have walked out and said we’ll continue this when I have union representation but I was so shocked and taken aback that I just sat there completely stunned.

Do I think that there was a conspiracy? Well, yes and no. I think someone fucked up royally by not sending off for my DBS and tried to convince others that it was somehow my fault. The conclusion they reached was that I was hiding something (I wasn’t) and after that there was a lot of arse covering and a lot of twisting of my actions to fit with their narrative that I was a shifty sort. So another example (outs self) before I got married my initials were HRH; my dad thought it was funny. (Dad; it wasn’t and it isn’t.) But I’ve never been known as the H name, so say my name is Harriet Rose Hunter but I’ve always been called Rose, and I had my workplace demanding to know ‘why I changed my name.’ I didn’t; I’ve been called rose since birth. But can you imagine explaining your dads stupid sense of humour circa 1980 in a cold and hostile meeting in 2014?

So I’m sorry, I know that was a hell of a ramble, but I’m including that to explain I do know how these things happen.

One of the many tragedies of this case is I strongly suspect if LL had not gone ahead with a grievance; if she’d quietly resigned and gone to work in another hospital, she’d be sat at home now, probably with a husband and children. Almost like a normal person living a normal life.

The problem is that you can be well-intentioned without being accurate. It is obvious from the sources uploaded to Thirlwall, for example, that Dr Brearey believed he understood statistics, but didn't. Anyone who has studied statistics will see that. Since he was satisfied with explanations of the early deaths (the first five of seven) until he decided there was a statistical anomaly, that's rather significant.

Similarly, you can be well intentioned without being a neonatologist - always worth remembering that none of Chester's consultants were neonatologists. They were paediatricians who worked part-time in a small neonatal unit. In the same way, people could have malign intentions and still be right. The only sensible course is to look to the science.

I don’t think it’s sensible given the array of evidence presented and also importantly the evidence we might not be aware of to feel 100% one way or the other. There’s a comfort in being completely sure but I don’t think it’s wise to be like that.
I’m not one of the people standing outside the courthouse with a placard saying she’s innocent.

While to be a consultant you have to be above average intelligence it doesn’t mean you’re infallible. Intelligent people join cults, get caught up in romance scams, and do a lot of things that you might not expect such a person to do. Intelligence isn’t a protector against confirmation bias or joining a witch hunt - or whatever you’d label the phenomenon that would lead to this happening were she innocent.

I’ve not seen anything that shows these consultants independently arrived at the conclusion that Lucy was responsible. It would be very difficult to maintain total objectivity in that environment. They work closely together, debrief regularly, and discuss the ward daily. A single suspicion voiced by one person can easily become the framework for everyone else. Once that happens, collective confirmation bias could take over.

Actually as I understand it, the babies symptoms weren’t aligned with the insulin results, which is probably why the tests were just assumed to be unimportant at the time and no further testing was done.
The test results were unearthed as a result of trawling through records looking for ‘suspicious’ events after the fact.

My take is it's predictable in a case of this magnitude that there would be some contrarians. It's incredibly difficult to rule out deliberate harm so the fact he came back with this big press conference and announced there were no murders-I mean how convenient. They were only ever going to come to that conclusion it's literally what they set out to do. I have no idea why he wants his name associated with defending the worst serial killer of babies in the UK's history. I'm sure his motivation will become clear at some point.

No... but I'd be a lot happier if they could point to each incident and say "this one's definitely deliberate, this one's not" and explain the differences. And show that they'd done that independently of the shift data.

If they identified something as deliberate or even probably deliberate and then found out that LL wasn't there, that incident should have gone on the shift chart. Like the xray in the baby C case which was taken before LL was on duty, either it was suspicious and should be considered deliberate harm, or it wasn't and she shouldn't have been accused.

We've discussed Harold Shipman before. He tried to profit from the deaths by changing a will, he'd been caught forging prescriptions for his own use and had to go to rehab, they found morphine in the exhumed bodies etc. etc. Direct evidence.

As will many people’s presumably

I’ve had a bad feeling about this case from the start. I followed the trial and throughout felt that what was being put forward by the prosecution made no sense. I believe that she’s a scape goat for a myriad of failures at that hospital and on that unit. I hope that she’s given a new trial soon an and vindicated. Nothing will bring the last ten years of her life back, but a new identity and a huge amount of compensation will go some way towards helping her find peace.

What Evans and Bohin suggested was that they had demonstrated deliberate harm by ruling out natural causes.

Lee and his panel (rightly) approached the problem by asking whether natural causes had indeed been ruled out. Like the pathologists who examined the children's bodies, the coroner, the hospital's initial internal reviews (headed by Steve Brearey!), the 2016-17 review by an external neonatologist and pathologist, and the 2024-5 review by UK neonatologists, they found that there were plausible natural causes.

You are setting a problem (rule out deliberate harm) which is not the legal test and which Evans, Bohin, Johnson etc never claimed was relevant (because we could go around applying it merrily to most deaths). The problem is whether we can rule out natural causes, and those who declared they could rule them out in favour of half-understood science and actual invention bear enormous responsibility for this debacle

Sadly, if Lucy Letby is released tomorrow (or any time before 2030), the maximum compensation she can be paid is 650,000. Since she's lost her house, going on for seven years' earnings and pension, her savings, her registered nurse status, her opportunities to progress along the NHS salary scale; and since it's likely she's been rendered incapable of working in the profession she trained for, if at all, it's hard to see how a maximum of 65000 to 90000 a year will meet the case at all. But that's our system.

No... but I'd be a lot happier if they could point to each incident and say "this one's definitely deliberate, this one's not" and explain the differences. And show that they'd done that independently of the shift data.

Well I'm sure we'd all be a lot happier with that but how long would that take? The babies in the trial already took 10 months.

We've discussed Harold Shipman before. He tried to profit from the deaths by changing a will, he'd been caught forging prescriptions for his own use and had to go to rehab, they found morphine in the exhumed bodies etc. etc. Direct evidence.

Changing a will is far from murder and he only did that for his last victim IIRC. Rebecca Leighton stole drugs from her hospital-she was innocent. Only the morphine results were direct evidence and you could say the test results were wrong or he didn't give them it. See how you can do that for any serial killer?

My heart bleeds.

If any qualified experts have come forward to dispute the forensic testing in Harold Shipman's case, I've yet to hear of them.

For the Lucy Letby case, it's obvious that many qualified experts, some working with Shoo Lee, some independent, are positing plausible natural causes of death and deterioration, based on their considerable professional expertise

https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php/Lucy_Letby:_those_experts_in_full

There's a big difference between, "anyone can dispute anything" and "dozens of qualified experts are wrong to agree with the original findings that causes of death were natural rather than fantastical".

You must have missed my earlier reply. Can you name any of these endocrinologists?

Changing a will in your favour is a provable criminal act.
Forging prescriptions is a provable criminal act.
Nobody else was treating the patients he killed.

Changing a will in your favour (when you're a doctor and not a relative and so wouldn't be expected to be a beneficiary) and then the person unexpectedly dies? Definitely suspicious when you've been caught doing other related crimes.

Correctly distinguishing deliberate acts of harm from negligence or natural events is absolutely key.

Don't know his name but the one they interviewed in the Panorama doc.

Prof. Keith Frayn told The Times that the results were "very clear" and unlikely to be explained by analytical error.

There's two for you.

No that’s not a ramble. It’s interesting and frightening. Sorry you had to go through that.