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

The CPS has to decide whether the prosecution can make a good case. If they can't, there's no retrial

I know. It's wild.

I mean, presumably they would make the same case they made last time?

If only LL had called a bunch of defence experts, we may not be here now. She may not be in prison. Not having any defence was SO WEIRD, in the light of all the defenders she's had since. Where were all those people during the trial?

No Dr Evans or Dr Bohin for the prosecution though. And presumably at least some of Dr Shoo Lee's panel for the defence?

Dewi Evans is retired, Sandi Bohin said she wouldn't take the stand again, there's problems with other witnesses etc and they know that this time if they do take the stand that the defence have plenty to pick them apart with....so they would struggle to get any experts etc to put a case together.

The pathologists didn't know to look for foul play. I think one of the managers had deliberately kept the fact there had been suspicions over a nurse quiet. If it'd been done forensically it would've been much more detailed.

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?

Are you forgetting she was a nurse? She learnt it all on the job. Do people seriously think she needed to research this? She'd done a course that covered the dangers of air embolism 2 weeks before baby A.

So the managers closed the intensive care unit and refused to re-open it? What a great way to hide the fact they were harbouring a serial killer nurse. If they re-opened it and didn't have the same "clusters" of deaths it'd be abundantly obviously it was all down to Letby. They didn't want that getting out.

Neena Modi, former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, was so alarmed that she contacted Lucy Letby's defence team during the trial but never heard back. I presume they would not have been able to justify taking on a new expert at that point.

Svilena Dimitrova said that she and her contacts kept assuming there was more to come out and waiting for it, wondering if the reporting was wrong, but then realized something was seriously wrong when prosecution witnesses started talking nonsense again after the trial was over, on TV.

They are both working for the defence now. They couldn't speak out in the press during the trial because they would have been in contempt of court. Then that was shut down again shortly after when the CPS announced a retrial

Or Hindmarsh - he was under a fitness to practice investigation at the last trial and he’s removed himself from the medical register.

No, that doesn't work. Those managers had all left by mid 2018.

The unit still hasn't been reopened, eight years on.

Pathologists wouldn't need to "know there had been foul play" to spot deaths by air embolism, overfeeding, air in stomach, blunt trauma. They are all things that could happen by accident in the course of medical care or resuscitation.

That is an internet myth about Lucy Letby taking a course two weeks before (or at any time before) the deaths began, dealing with air embolism.

You'll look in vain for a source on it.

Her basic training, like any nurse's, would have told her to be aware of air embolism risks. That isn't something that would come up for the first time three years into her graduate practice.

Dr Bohin acted as expert witness for the cases that were recently turned down by the CPS, and expressed surprise that they were rejected, like the Cheshire Police.

With such an unrealistic take on the evidence, she's unlikely to be much use in any future case.

Yes and in regard to those second set of cases she did the reports but said that she wouldn't have taken the stand.

It is absolutely the basic job of pathologists to carry out post mortems in unexpected deaths looking for any and every possible cause. That's the whole point of the exercise.....

Yes. And it can't be repeated often enough, it seems - Evans and Bohin claimed to have eliminated any natural causes in order to reach their conclusions. The pathologists found specific natural causes in five out of six cases, so they clearly wouldn't have been able to find murder just because a suspect was identified.

(In the sixth case, the cause was unascertained with the possibility of natural causes or effects of medical procedure. In the seventh there was no postmortem, because consultants advised that the (natural) cause was so clear that there was nothing to learn from the procedure).

The new Netflix documentary says that she took a course on how to administer medication via long lines, and that one of the babies (or the first baby, I can't remember) collapsed shortly after she took that course.

@Oftenaddled
So if I'm understanding correctly - pathologists whose expertise is finding the cause of death didn't find any evidence of wilful injury or harm.
Dewi Evans, without examining the babies did find evidence of wilful injury or harm.....
What am I missing here?
How can anyone still be 100% certain of her guilt just looking at these two statements.. never mind all of the other anomalies

Yes - she took this course, but there has never been any evidence to suggest it covered air embolisms.

No, but I'm saying perhaps that's where the rumour came from.

Yes. Three pathologists examined the bodies of six of the babies between them. None of them appeared at the trial. For some reason only one of them appeared at the Thirlwall Inquiry. Dr McPartland said that she was hampered in her responses by the fact that the police wouldn't give her back her notes, but she defended her finding that baby D had died of pneumonia, explaining that the lungs were more severely damaged than the Chester medics realized and that she frequently saw infant deaths with a "fluctuating course", i.e. making a partial recovery and then deteriorating again.

That was the only case she was asked about in detail at the Thirlwall Inquiry.

McPartland later reviewed the other pathologists' findings. That was after Lucy Letby was removed from the ward and she said that, if she had known there was suspected murder, she would not have undertaken the work and would have recommended involving the police and a forensic review. It certainly makes sense to involve the police if you have grounds to suspect murder. However, the coroner she worked under has pointed out that a under his jurisdiction, a forensic post-mortem would be the same process as another: the difference would have been that a police officer would observe.

So it is hard to believe that knowing there was a murder suspect would make the natural causes of death those pathologists found disappear.

I think that's very likely, yes!

I seem to remember hearing that very early on, way before the netflix documentary.

we all judge things by what we would do

We can't know what we would do (let alone what others might do) in a situation so far away from our experience. Have you ever been falsely accused of serial baby murder (or something as bad), by people you've trusted and looked up to and who were your life? It's like speculating what you'd do if abducted by aliens.

I've once been falsely accused of something much less bad, by a person I trusted wholly, and got moments when I felt I must be guilty, even though I rationally knew I wasn't. To accept that people I trusted could do this to me was to accept that my whole worldview and understanding of myself and those around me was wrong. It was almost easier for my brain to think, in some moments, that I wasn't accused falsely. If you've never been gaslit, you don't know how that feels, or what fleeting thoughts you might get.