AIBU to suggest the Letby trial shows madness of UK legal system

[Neversofaraway]

The babies had post mortem exams, death certificates written and say the cause of death was natural causes.
12 amateurs in the jury say the babies were murdered.
Then, inquests into deaths are started.
What will happen if the inquests decide it was natural causes after all? No wonder the inquests are delayed.
Shouldn't the inquests be done before a murder trial? If there is concern shouldn't the cause of death be established before a trial and not expect a jury to decide on such tricky matters when even the doctors are struggling?

And this is why inquests are sometimes reported as "opened and adjourned".

An inquest can't make a finding of murder, only a criminal court can give that verdict.

The nearest verdict to murder that an inquest can give is "unlawfully killed", which can be murder or manslaughter.

I worry about the jury system in general. The police attacked at the airport-how much clearer evidence could you get, yet the trial collapsed! And while anyone could of course be prejudiced, just looking at social media makes me concerned-the type of people who judge all people with a particular skin colour/age/sex to be "bad" etc-they are to decide whether someone spends their life in prison?
But then, would having a certain minimum qualification for a juror be fair?

From the dealings I have had with multiple health and related professionals who witness life and death in all their unpredictability, they must all be psychopaths then. Sometimes, despite best efforts, people do not survive intense medical intervention, and sometimes there is no clear cut reason . Those who deal with that regularly often develop a sort of pragmatism as a self defence mechanism.

When my father died after three weeks of quite intense hospital care, during which he'd signed a tenancy agreement in his hospital bed for sheltered accomodation after a year long battle with a very unsympathetic council, I had to notify the woman who'd brought the paperwork. I had my phone on speaker and her breezy response, heard by a friend, was "Oh, I didn't think he had long when I came" which left me gobsmacked. I posted about it on here and was told I was being over sensitive to have found it distressing. The friend in question is a HCP herself, and while she felt it was inappropriate, such attitudes are apparently not uncommon in seasoned veterans of the system.

Lucy Letbys text seems more ruminant than heartless to me.

If I had a pound for the number of pragmatic (occasionally crass) things said directly to my face in similar vein after multiple close bereavements over the last few years I'd be a very rich woman. And when I've carped on the subject I've been met with numerous versions of "they meant well" and "they just feel awkward".

Texts between colleagues are bound to be less guarded.

It doesn't solve all the problems with the jury system, but one suggestion academics in law have made in response to problems they see with Lucy Letby's case is that, in complex cases, there should be a pre-trial hearing with scientific experts to hand. At this hearing, judges could ask the questions needed to test the science the expert witnesses propose to present, to check it's in line with the published research and to ask how certain the key claims are. That seems sensible.

(The full article is at nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/nilq/article/view/1327/1077)

Why wouldn’t an innocent nurse send these text messages? If she didn’t cause the deaths, it’d be normal for her to wonder what did.

They make sure the experts explain things in a way the jury will understand. I think it would be worse to have medical professionals only due to inherent bias. You've got to have the common man to look at the entirety of the case not just high-brow intellectuals overly focused on the medical evidence.

Saying it's "meant to be" and just fate? Would you be happy with her talking like that about the loss of your family member-and this was a baby. A baby is meant to die is it?

For crying out loud. This case hinges on disputed medical evidence before anything else..... you seem to want it to be ignored in favour of character assassination and gut feelings. I hope to God you never end up on a jury in a complicated case and end up fixated on the defendants guilt because their eyes are too close together and they seem nervous. Or not. Or whatever spurious circumstantial issue takes your fancy.

@MistressoftheDarkSide The jury got it right, one day you'll see that and support them in their verdict. Until then you'll have to stay mad and claim it was all just "vibes" that got her sent down.

It's hard to say the babies couldn't have been healed: this seems most likely to have applied to baby C (3)) - the consultant who delivered him wasn't surprised that he died days later because of the obstetric history, but he also suffered an ineffective resuscitation. With baby E (5) - the consultant in charge of him advised parents that no post-mortem was needed, and the consultants generally told the police they wouldn't have found his death surprising in isolation, but a blood transfusion was delayed after he deteriorated.

Baby O (15)'s condition (rupture of liver hematoma) is often fatal, even if poor treatment may have exacerbated the problem. Baby D (4)'s lungs were damaged, but medics did decide to take her off ventilation because she cried, which may have exacerbated things.

Baby A (1) had two possible causes of death, and one (a blood clot to the brain) seems likely to have been due partly to failings on care. Baby P (16) had delays to his treatment and poor medical care, for a condition that wouldn't necessarily be fatal. Baby I (9)'s death is the only one that the medics on Shoo Lee's panel explicitly said might have been avoidable, since she wasn't adequately investigated or treated for respiratory problems.

I'm sure they are familiar to many people reading this, but one page summaries on Lee's panels findings for each child are spread across the two press releases linked at https://lucyletbyinnocence.com/#shoolee

It's impossible to know, of course, how each child's condition might have developed with better medical care, but as the panel says, there seem to have been failures both to recognise the children's conditions and to treat them appropriately.

How do you know with such certainty the "jury got it right" ? Were you on the NICU and witnessed all the multiple alleged harms in real time? Because if your assertion is based on the trial, the experts and all the subsequently revealed failings of those things, I have a bridge to sell you.

Do you agree that if there’s no medical evidence of murder then none of the other evidence means anything?

Demonstrably not, since one expert here explained some evidence incorrectly. Because this is another one of the structural problems this case brought to light, which is that not building multiple sources of scientific expertise into the process means you can end up with an unchallenged, genuinely and honestly wrong expert who doesn't know what they don't know and nobody else does either.

That said, although most of the things you say here are hatstand, it doesn't have to be an expert jury. We could still keep the existing jury system and do the expert evidence differently instead.

That's very much what's still in dispute isn't it? And no I don't agree with that. She overdosed a baby with morphine barely months into her nursing career-this is a fact. I bet you couldn't find many falsely accused nurses who had done that.

I think that could be an inappropriate comment-depends on the way it was said. If like you say it was "breezy" then yes-insensitive at the least. Sorry you had that experience. That's why I have no problem believing the worst of the worst was attracted to that type of job. Vulnerable patients, can't speak out or tell anyone they've been harmed-it's a predators dream.

Based on the video alone, can't say I have much problem with the outcome of the Manchester Airport related proceedings.

She made an error when in training and under supervision. The supervising nurse was accountable for the error.

It’s unpalatable and inexcusable, but medicines errors are incredibly common - many millions of clinically significant errors occur every year in England alone.

There aren't very many falsely accused, nurses, fortunately, so probably not.

There are many many medication errors on the NHS every year though - an estimated 237 million in 2017, for example https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/major-reports/cqc-insight-14-medicines-safety-nhs-trusts

So I would guess that most nurses would have made a number of errors over the years. That might be with morphine (a very common reported error) or something else.

In Lucy Letby's case this was, as you say, early in her career and she was working with a senior nurse. They set the delivery speed wrong, but fortunately this was spotted before any harm was done.

@Oftenaddled tell me, who set the delivery speed? Hmm

Fuck me

Who was responsible for checking, hmm?

@SnakesAndArrows so Lucy then...yes the other nurse was so devastated she almost quit. What did Lucy do? Complained she lost drug privileges and said it had been escalated more than it needed to be. She didn't even show any self-reflection on giving a baby antibiotics they didn't need. There is a complete lack of being able to admit when she's wrong-you won't find it anywhere because she has zero guilt or regret.

I think you’re right. I don’t work in a medical setting, but do work in a job where we deal with people in very difficult and distressing situations and sometimes people we are dealing with die. People who do these challenging jobs deal with this in different ways, including dark humour at times. Messages between colleagues in the same line of work are bound to be unguarded and might seem inappropriate to a person on the outside.

As I said - errors are common. We have very little information either on the incident itself or on either nurse's reaction. (What is "nearly" quitting, really, when you think about it? Just hearsay). .Of course you can make something of it if that's what you want to do, but it clearly wasn't a suspicious incident from the hospital's point of view