Lucy Letby thread

[Words]

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

I keep coming back to the lack of serial killers in the other hospitals.

Dewi will have to look into them!

'just his kind of case'.

No
fingerprints on a gun used as a murder weapon is forensic evidence 🥴 not circumstantial evidence.

Finger prints on a gun are forensic evidence but in the UK (and USA) it falls under circumstantial evidence.

Are you sure?
Fingerprints at a crime scene or on objects at the crime scene unaffected by the murder (ie a lamp in situ) are circumstantial evidence, but fingerprints on the murder weapon itself are usually considered to be forensic evidence.

Circumstantial= evidence that links a suspect to the place and possibly the time of the murder. So recent fingerprints on a door handle or lamp or crockery or whatever in the room where a murder happened.

Forensic= evidence that links a suspect to the act of murder itself through traces on the victim or the weapon(s) used or other items/surfaces affected by the act of murder.

this seems to corroborate that fingerprints on a gun ( murder weapon) are forensic evidence.
https://www.forensic-access.co.uk/

Do we really need to nitpick over this?

I only made the point because you said "They only had the weakest form of evidence, circumstantial" which normally gets jumped on by those convinced she is guilty so I was just pointing out that sometimes circumstantial can be extremely strong, and in the Lucy Letby case it wasn't at all, it was really weak.

I wouldn't trust that source, where's it from? I mean where did the New Yorker get it from.

I find it hard to believe he hadn't heard a thing about the case-especially since it's what his speciality was. He should've been told they were using his paper-although IIRC he was told about it and he just ignored it at the time?

It's really not unusual to use academic papers without telling the author. If you think about it, Hall, Evans, Bohin etc presumably used dozens of papers between them. It's not usual to check at all - academics put them out there for general use

Lee said that he saw a short article with the verdict in the Canadian press, thought what a sad case, and moved on.

He was contacted by Ben Myers after that, in an email. He was busy with his harvest when the first email came in and didn't grasp its significance - that's the information he missed. But he got a second email before the appeal case was submitted, read it, and responded. So that delay didn't prevent him from offering his expertise at the first request to appeal.

It's perfectly normal that he wouldn't have known about the first trial unless he was reading the British press for some reason. It wasn't big news at all in Canada

It is both forensic and circumstantial evidence.

At the risk of repeating.

It would prove forensically that a person had held the gun, but not that they fired it, or that they were there at the crime scene.

To prove that the person was the murderer, they would have to link the gun to the bullet, the person to a fired gun and that the person was actually there at the time.

Even then a range of defences would be available other than murder. Self defence, accident or person shot themselves and suspect stupidly picked up the gun. Which is where we get into the realms of strength of circumstantial evidence in the absence of confession - credible motive such as money worries and life insurance for example.

There is zero credible forensic evidence tying Lucy Letby to her alleged crimes.

I don't know if the New Yorker was first to compile it for this comparison, but the data is from MMBRACE UK: https://www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/mbrrace-uk

If you or anyone wants to double check it, you can use this blog post to guide you: once you tap on the first bar chart to guess Chester's position, you can download the numbers for each of 2014 and 2015 with link to the source data:
triedbystats.com/

She searched some of the parents on the DAY their babies died-how does she think they're doing? That can only be wanting to relish their grief.

31 out of 2,287 searches were for the families of babies who died. What that says is she is nosy and bored. And probably needs a hobby. It is not evidence of murder.

Thanks, I think that's one for the stats whizzes to double check I'm sure it'll make sense to them!

It is added to everything else we know.

Which is what? What do we know that doesn't have an equally, if not more plausible, explanation than killer nurse?

In an NICU, babies die especially if raw sewage is dripping from the ceiling and the tap water is contaminated with a killer bacteria.

Conspiracy nonsense that doesn't engage with any of the actual evidence. Just listening to the daily mail podcast again to refresh my memory. Baby A-was doing incredibly well until LL came on shift. His death had a real impact on Dr Harkness, one of his first neonatal deaths and he took time off. See that-one of the first deaths for a doctor, who I'm sure had worked there a hell of a lot longer than Letby.

So upset by it he took time off. Despite this being a "regular occurrence" apparently. And this was not a young female nurse just starting out in her career who would be devastated. When did Letby take any time off? She just wanted more dying babies. When did she show any upset about any of these baby deaths? Instead she could barely contain her excitement about it.

When did she show any upset about any of these baby deaths? Instead she could barely contain her excitement about it.

She wrote, “We tried our best and it wasn't enough.”

You complain that the other poster doesn't engage with the 'actual evidence' and then you compare her to Dr Harkness as if it's supposed to be proof of something.

The triplets mother said that LL was visibly upset when her babies died and that she was crying.too. But of course I know what you're going to snap back about that because you're so obvious.

Firefly1987

You don't trust the new yorker but you trust the daily mail podcast!
Wasn't it these two journolists that were in the pocket of the police?

It's not clear how much neonatal experience Dr Harkness had. He had trained as a paediatrician with rotations including neonatal. He was a paediatric registrar at Chester from 2014, so a year before baby A's death. So it's not surprising that baby A was one of his first deaths.

There was a fear, including on his own part, that his placement of the baby's line had contributed to the death. He described that at court but said he had changed his mind over the years. I would imagine this contributed to his taking time off. I'm glad he was given the support he needed but I think it would be unusual for a doctor to take time off after a death normally. I wouldn't say his reaction makes the death more likely to be a murder. Of course it was a tragedy however it happened.

Genuinely, where have you picked up the idea that the author of a paper 'should' be told it's being used?

@Firefly1987 I haven't read that Lee was aware his paper was being used. It doesn't work like that. Research papers are published in various online libraries, to which readers or their employers then buy a subscription. Anyone with a subscription can read any paper. The author would be inundated if they were notified every time their paper was used.

Regardless, even if he was aware his paper was being used in a court case, it would be fair for him to assume that in a case related to neonates, the paper was being used by a neonatologist who was able to understand it and apply it correctly.

We also cannot hold Letby or her defence team accountable for what Lee did or didn't know. It doesn't matter why he wasn't at court to ensure his research was used correctly. It only matters that he wasn't there and the paper was not used correctly.

I would also imagine that if Shoo Lee had awareness of the situation at all, he probably thought what so many of us did - "Goodness, how awful. Must be a very strong case to have made it to court, the authorities must know what they're doing, especially after all those high profile MOJs dependent on badly fudged medical evidence and statistics. After all, lessons will have been learned!"

But here we are....