Lucy Letby thread

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Starting this as don’t think we have a new one.

She didn't have two failed appeals, as far as I know? I thought she had her appeals refused on the basis that Lee's research was freely available at the time, therefore, not new evidence.

Gaining permission to appeal doesn't rely on whether the appeals court thinks you might be innocent; it has to abide by very strict criteria around new evidence, and what constitutes new evidence available at the time is not new, even if it wasn't presented at the time. There's also a way to appeal if you had a poor defence, but again it has to follow a strict criteria.

It was my understanding that this was why Lee wrote his new paper, so that it could be considered as "new".

The CCRC also has very strict criteria, but slightly different from the appeals courts. I think they only need to prove they have new and compelling evidence that was not presented at the time, whether it was available or not.

I could be totally wrong, btw. I'm not a lawyer, that's just my understanding from the bits I've read around this case.

There's actually no "new evidence" rule around grounds for appeal - there's no problem with producing something that wasn't part of an appeal case in a subsequent request for review. So that won't make any difference.

Why weren't the experts involved? Well, it's worth noting that Lucy Letby hasn't lost two appeals. She's been refused permission to appeal twice, once for the initial convictions, a second time for baby K.

Shoo Lee, one of the better-known experts, was involved in the first application to appeal. Myers used him in a limited way, to critique the prosecution's reliance on his work, and not to make the argument for inadequate care. That fits with the fact that an appeal is about how the case was conducted, not a more general critique.

It's not clear at what stage all of the experts became involved, though at least one, Neena Modi, had contacted the defence during the first trial and didn't hear back. Again, I suspect that this was because introducing a new expert witness to reinforce the opinion of existing witnesses would not have been acceptable to the court or an accepted strategy for appeal.

It's unlikely that either Lee or Modi could have cleared up the insulin cases entirely, since this relies on chemical engineering. So swapping them in for existing experts would have been both impossible because of court proceedings and potentially ineffective.

The Court of Appeal determined, wrongly by my reading of their judgement, that Lee's evidence would not have been relevant even if he admitted. But this is not the evidence he has since produced for the CCRC, which is broader.

The full case review by numerous international experts is not something legal aid would have covered, and it would be difficult to argue that it bears on the conduct of either of the original trials. So the exercise could only really be undertaken pro bono, after a verdict, which is how things have happened. The court of appeal has not considered these experts' reviews of the children's death, but this does not prevent the court from considering them in the future if there is a referral from the CCRC

Given that the consultants were only in twice a week they weren't around that much.

It's in the transcripts for baby O. https://www.reddit.com/r/lucyletby/comments/1r8bw7z/the_death_of_child_o_as_experienced_at_the/

Mel Taylor suggested Child O be moved to nursery 1, based on her gut feeling. Lucy Letby declined this suggestion
“I can’t remember the reasoning behind it. Sometimes it can be just a gut instinct. Sometimes they (the baby) can present very slight things.
“I remember saying it out loud to Lucy.
“I asked whether she felt we should move him into nursery one. She said ‘no’. She felt it was OK and wanted to keep him in nursery two and wanted to keep the brothers together.
“I guess it’s a joint decision. Lucy was the one looking after him. She knew him and was with him all day.”
“With hindsight, I wish I had been a bit firmer. I remember being put out that she was quite insistent. I think because I felt she was undermining my decision.
“She said ‘no’. Quite plainly ‘no, I don’t feel like he should be moved’.

There was the above as well which I forgot about. Either way Letby's to blame for not listening to Mel Taylor. Not the doctors who it seems are actually the ones being made scapegoats here for all the poor care. Why was she so keen to keep the baby in with her?

Father OPR described Child O like this: "It was like ET's stomach, like a big pot belly, which went down and then there was another point where you could see all his veins. They were bright, bright blue, all of them, and they were going different colours and his actual body looked like he had really, really bad prickly heat and that got worse and then it went down again. It was literally like you could see something oozing through his veins." Letby says she didn’t see anything like that.
Mum OPR said her baby was 'changing colour' with 'prominent veins.' She says she later saw that in Child P. Letby says she didn't see that herself.

The consultants asked questions, and they got answers: that the unit was not safe and that poor care had probably or possibly affected the outcome in the case of the majority of deaths they seen in that period. They also got an explanation as to Lucy Letby's presence at most of these deaths, from her manager who allocated shifts.

Asking questions is fine. Refusing to accept the answers when they reflect badly on you is not that unusual. Collaborating to select events to "pique" police interest, events which you never recorded as unusual or investigated at the time, is less usual. But we all make mistakes, and I can understand how the consultants may have been anxious and confused enough to make these mistakes. If the police had investigated properly, which would have meant considering all options and not treating the consultants as fellow detectives, I'm sure the matter would have been settled long ago.

Sorry I should have been super clear when I said 2 failed appeals. I assumed that it was obvious.

Lee being used in a limited way either backfired then or there was another reason. I don’t understand if his paper was used he was never called as a witness. Or used properly.

@Oftenaddled right and they just so happened to pick the woman who was the face of the unit not long before. Sounds believable. The managers had their heads in the sand like certain other people. It's why they're now facing potential charges. It should've been the managers listening to the doctors not the managers coming up with BS explanations because one of them favours LL as she was always willing to work to indulge her psychopathy.

The managers asked the RCPCH to come in and investigate the unit and told them about the concerns raised about Letby.

The RCPCH found that the deaths were caused by unsafe conditions, poor staffing levels, and inexperienced consultants who were not spending enough time on the ward. They had no concerns about Letby.

Can you explain why the RCPCH sided with Letby and the managers, given that they'd never met them before?

It wouldn't be usual to call people as witnesses because their papers were used in a trial. You publish a paper and it's for public use. You'd hope that expert witnesses would be referring to dozens of papers and there is no way that legal aid would pay to bring all the authors in. It shouldn't have been necessary. Evans's interpretation was very obviously wrong and Myers rightly raised the issues in cross examination. We know Michael Hall had spotted them and presumably advised him.

It's an enormous stroke of luck for the defence that Lee was still alive and engaged with his work, as well as being willing to get involved, and to do so free of charge. But that doesn't mean they could immediately sub him in as a new general expert for the court of appeal and get him to review all of the cases. It's very doubtful that the court would have allowed this.

Do you have a source for that? I know one of the times the Letby suspicions were purposely kept quiet by one of the managers.

If they were going to pick a nurse, Lucy Letby was the obvious one. I don't think they "picked" a nurse - that's your language. But she was the obvious candidate for a statistical misunderstanding. They overestimated their understanding of statistics. It's not unusual. The manner of their misunderstanding led them to Lucy Letby.

You are arguing against points nobody is making here

@Oftenaddled so you admit she was there for by far the most collapses then.

It's mentioned in the RCPCH report; there are notes of an RCPCH meeting where the consultants "war gamed" ideas of how the children might have been killed; and the RCPCH reviews met with Lucy Letby because of the accusations, and described the meeting in their report.

I did think this and looked to see if they were prevented from calling him part way through a trial and funnily enough the appeal judge said that he should have been called and was available to be called. Therefore he couldn’t be used as a witness for an appeal.

Collapses, no. They're not well enough defined to make this judgement. See on this point the testimony of John Gibbs, who explained that there were too many collapses to review, or of the hospital's health and safety manager who said that if all collapses in an NNU were datixed, that would be its own industry. See the ten collapses that Evans originally labelled suspicious which weren't during Lucy Letby's shifts. They were all dropped from the police investigation.

Deaths (a much smaller dataset) in a particular, cherry-picked period, yes, which is why the consultants, with their limited understanding of statistics became suspicious and started reclassifying deaths they had initially accepted as explained and natural as suspicious. There's no sign that they considered the existence of the lottery effect. But probably more important in Lucy Letby's case is the fact that she was one of only two ICU specialist junior nurses, willing to swap shifts and work overtime, working at a small hospital unit where risk of death was sometimes negligible, sometimes elevated.

Nobody is trying to say she wasn't on shift for a high proportion of deaths. But people are disputing the significance of that fact.

We don’t know how many collapses there were, so it’s impossible to say how many were on LL’s shifts.

I don't think the judge meant that he should have been called because it was his paper. He meant that he should have been called earlier if the intention was to use his evidence directly, as Myers wanted to do at appeal.

He was available in the sense that he was alive and in full possession of his senses, but that's a pretty low threshold. In practice I doubt many internationally rated experts would agree to work at legal aid rates in a foreign court on a question that really shouldn't have needed their evidence. The legal aid association could pretty reasonably have asked why they needed Lee when Hall read his paper the same (correct) way anyway, so there's no guarantee he would have been funded anyway. I don't believe that courts take this kind of practicality into account.

Anyway, no court has heard his panel's evidence yet, but I hope they will soon.

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/The-Royal-College-of-Paediatrics-and-Child-Health-RCPCH-Opening-Statement.pdf

I have seen the report itself buried deep in Thirlwall documents if you wanna go digging for it, but the above is a summary.

There was a difference of opinion there between Mel Taylor and Lucy Letby. Mel Taylor could have gone to the shift lead if she thought it was significant. But there were four children in the intensive care nursery - capacity + 1 - so moving the baby was disruptive, when it happened.

It's unlikely this affected the outcome. He recovered from the first deterioration. However, the registrar on duty and consultant on duty both left the ward, against requirements, when he was established in the ICU ward, and it was 38 minutes before a consultant came to treat him at his next deterioration. That should have been five. There was a delay in treating this child, but that wasn't down to Lucy Letby.

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/evidence/inq0018008-pages-9-and-10-of-document-titled-level-2-root-cause-analysis-investigation-report-relating-to-child-o-dated-23-06-2016/

Thanks. It literally says though "COCH did not provide adequate information to the reviewers in advance of the review about the concerns which had been raised about Lucy Letby by the paediatricians or sought to minimise it"

It says in advance, yes, that's because they told them when they got there, which, if you read it, the reviewers were a bit taken aback by this, because criminal investigations are not within the scope of their role, and considered cancelling the review, but ultimately went ahead with it.

That's the submission to Thirlwall a decade later, grovelling according to the Thirlwall narrative.

What information has the paediatricians given the managers that they didn't give the RCPCH? But I agree that it was improper not to raise this sooner. Still, the consultants were invited to speak directly to the RCPCH team, and did so.

Oh yes of course, it’s highly far fetched to think that maybe they just made the wrong assumption and just ran with it while ignoring all the very obvious issues in the hospital and with the care.

It’s not as if almost everything that has come out since then seems to back up that theory completely or anything……not at all

@kkloo of course it's far-fetched! Ridiculously so. How would all seven of them agree it was all down to LL? And how would they possibly think the police would be on board? And how would none of them speak out once they realised they had made a mistake?

Too many people like the managers were relying on their own terrible judgement and not listening to what these doctors were saying. It's clearly still going on now. The question is why? Why don't you believe them?

Well, if the reason to believe them is that they are Drs, which appears to be the crux of your argument, one of the reasons I don't believe them is that they specialise in paediatrics and Drs who specialise in neonates are saying they are wrong.

Why do you believe the pediatricians over the neonatologists?