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

257 handover sheets in various bags. Collected over the years she worked there. Of which 21 related to the babies in question and 4 of the babies weren't mentioned at all. Not exactly great as "tropies".

2287 Facebook searches where 31 related to the parents of the babies. Media reports don't mention the numbers but only "many" searches.

Of course we don't know if other nurses took handover sheets home in pockets or searched Facebook because nobody else was investigated.

So ask yourself why they went to all that trouble over one nurse then. The managers didn't even care about the excess deaths. And a serial killer isn't going to attack 100% healthy patients-well not until she's done it enough she's gotten arrogant. It's like saying oh well these babies were sick so lets not bother doing anything about a potential serial killer! Thank god the doctors actually cared enough to stick to their guns.

I see. So LL murdered all of them, but the other cases had even less evidence of her harming the babies than the ones that came to court - which was - none. Is that right?

I'm referring to the children for whom charges weren't brought.

For the rest, it seems clear when you track events through the Thirlwall documentation that the consultants accepted that the deaths had natural explanations until one noticed a statistical correlation, and others panicked and grasped for an explanation after the death of the two triplets.

Managers obviously cared about excess deaths. They closed the intensive care unit and refused - despite pressure from the consultants - to relax admission standards or to support reopening it

You not accepting it as factual doesn't mean she isn't.

And you accepting the verdict doesn't mean that she is.

I don't know if she murdered more babies, I would strongly suspect so.

Certainly more than enough evidence for a jury to find her guilty on most charges and a judge to put her away on 14 WLOs-then another one on top.

ConvictionS. 7 for murder, 8 for attempted murder, is that correct? It seems like quite an ask to me to go from 15 life sentences, two attempts at appeal against those denied, to 'no case to answer, quash the convictions'. Yet that's being talked about as a natural and obvious thing to happen.

Given what was put forward at trial I think it's safe to assume that if they could have come up with some far fetched theory to say that LL did it then they would have.

Everyone can hold their own view of course but it's a long standing convention of news reporting that once someone is convicted of a crime, they can be referred to in the terms used for someone who has committed such a crime, without controversy. LL is a murderer in the eyes of the law. It's not outlandish or a whimsical individual choice to call her one.

I think initially most who thought the verdict could be unsafe thought there should have been a retrial, but so much has come out since then that it seems impossible that the CPS could put a case together, so to me it seems that even if a retrial is ordered it will not go ahead.

There's a domino effect.

In his summing up, the judge told the jury that if they found deliberate harm in any cases, they could take that into account in reaching a decision on other cases. They did not need to know how any injury or death was caused.

The jury was also told that the results of the insulin tests on babies F and L could only mean deliberate harm.

The first verdict the jury reached was on babies F and L.

This means that their guilty verdict on babies A, B, C, D, E, G, I, M, N, O and P can be considered to have depended to some extent on their verdict on babies F and L.

At the retrial, they were told that they could take the other verdicts into account re baby K.

Since that instruction re babies F and L now looks very shaky, that conviction is shaky likewise, and that undermines the rest of them.

Meanwhile, the evidence for all of the murder methods proposed has proved skewed or non existent under scrutiny since the trial. So the probability is that, after a long time, the whole thing will collapse like the house of cards it is

I didn't claim it was outlandish or a whimsical individual choice to call her one. I said it wasn't 'literally' factual that she is one.

I'm not sure what would happen if the CCRC decided that the insulin evidence was no longer sufficient or the air embolus but not some of the other causes. If they retried (or quashed if the CPS no longer wanted to prosecute) some cases but left the others then she's still in jail and some of the parents are then left in limbo. Presumably that'd make everyone unhappy.

I guess that's the issue with such diverse methods of harm. Too much milk vs liver injury isn't linked at all, so presumably each case has to be taken completely independently. If they were consistent or even all poisonings say then you could link them for conviction or quashing conviction if new evidence comes to light. Or you could point out the places where you think the jury was misled in each case.

The CCRC appeal is based on the argument that there were no murders so therefore no case to answer. If they're convinced by that then the whole thing unravels.

A legal judgement is generally accepted as factual unless or until overturned. That carries weight, like it or not.What makes something literally factual for you? Do you have to have personally witnessed it?

It's hard to imagine how some of the cases could possibly stand alone.

Imagine charging a nurse with attempted murder because someone found a note in his files two years after he was discharged, saying that he had been screaming for an unknown span of time when some nurse, not necessarily this one, was looking after him, an incident not remarkable enough for anyone on duty to remember?

Go big or go home. Will be interesting. Will the CCRC also have to rule on whether the cases are considered separately or as interdependent? I know very little about how they work.

There was about 9 or 10 air embolus charges and then the 2 insulin cases, if they fall they all fall I think.
If not it would just lead to another CCRC submission which would no doubt lead to the rest being quashed eventually anyway because the other cases wouldn't stand alone.

They think she should be handled with kid gloves even now. It's a crazy case how the public have reacted to her. Totally unheard of. She's getting exactly what she wanted, it's the poor Lucy show on an international scale. They're even offended on her behalf at her being called a baby killer.

One thing a lot of people don't know about the whole debacle is that the expert witnesses weren't even agreed on what happened to the children, and in some cases didn't even attempt to specify it. The jury wasn't asked to determine it. The Court of Appeal tidied things up by deciding on a cause in each case, but quite how they decided this or read the jury's mind - something they are usually loath to do - remains to be guessed at ...

It's possible they went to all that trouble over one nurse because they put two and two together and made five, and then saw confirmation bias everywhere. They were operating in an under-staffed, under-resourced, cramped unit and were losing lots of babies, at a time when neonatal deaths across England had risen for the first time in 100 years, for all those reasons. Stress can inhibit higher thinking and give you tunnel vision. A consultant on the hospital board said that while there was a rise in deaths, it was within statistical variance. You do sometimes get clusters of things.

What do you make of the fact that pathologists carried out post-mortems on six of the babies at the time and did not notice any signs of foul play?

Also, what do you make of LL's internet history being thoroughly searched and there being no mention of research about how to cause death, nothing about insulin or air embolism?

"A fact is a verifiable, objective piece of information or an occurrence in reality that can be proven true with evidence. It is distinct from opinions, beliefs, or subjective feelings"

I don't have to have personally witnessed it no. I just need to trust the source. For example, water boiling at 100 degrees, I've seen it boil alright but I never checked that the temp is 100 degrees but I trust the sources that say that it's a fact.

I wouldn't automatically consider a conviction to be literally a fact because then in say cases such as Amanda Knox it was literally a fact she was a murderer and then literally a fact that she didn't commit the crime.

It's totally unheard of for a reason. The entire case was a sham and an embarrassment and couldn't have been any more amateur. People have been stunned and appalled at just how amateur it was and the quality of the 'evidence' put forward.

If a retrial is ordered, it has to go ahead, doesn't it?

No. The CPS can choose to offer no evidence and then it's dropped.