Lucy Letby

[kkloo]

New thread as the last one has filled up.

Yep and I don't think 'we might be her last hope' is even particularly emotive anyway when the story is that she's a convicted baby killer. Emotive enough to get them to take a look at it and invest some time into it when asked, sure, but would it make them see things that weren't there and then ignore evidence of deliberate harm? No it wouldn't be.

He's asking each of them to give up thousands of pounds worth of opportunity costs to do this for nothing. Paid neonatalogists expert witnesses in the UK advertise at about 250 an hour. Even defence funded get 70 an hour (with ceiling on hours). These people would have a much broader range of paid consultancies available to them at higher rates still.

So what are his options for writing to them? I think it might be fun to review a random murder case? I think she might be innocent but not to worry, I've seen how well the Court of Appeal works? Obviously, he has to tell them there may be a problem and to explain why they, as complete strangers to the case with many other pressing concerns, are needed to solve it.

But I agree with @MistressoftheDarkSide . Publish all the correspondence. Lee's and Evans's and Bohin's. Why not? Let's see the parts of the email Liz Hull didn't show us.

Mark McDonald told Letby that if she agreed to have the experts look at the case notes, they might decide she was guilty. They were going to work through the cases and try and work out what happened. Letby readily agreed. That tells me she’s not a murderer. Why would a murderer risk neonatal experts uncovering her crimes?

The notes were written after she had been removed from the neonatal unit. She didn't initially know why she'd been removed to a non-clinical area (Moston Lodge at the rear of the hospital site) or that it was a direct result of the finger of suspicion pointing at her.

Well she's serving a whole life sentence so, even if she knew she was guilty, there would be nothing to lose.

Not really. She risked losing sympathy from guards and other prisoners, the full support of her parents, her legal team, and any chance of the CCRC reviewing her case and sending it back to the CoA.

It's a risky move for someone who is guilty.

Lucy Letby found out from her union that she was being accused of harming babies within about a month of being renoved from the ward, so the period when she didn't know that there was a direct finger of suspicion pointing at her was really very short. This was three years before she was arrested and the notes were found.

A month or so after the union letter, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health told her more about the accusations. It's never been claimed that the notes came from that first month or two.

She knew that she was being called Nurse death and that consultants were talking about murder. That is in the grievance reports. She submitted the grievance within months of being put off the ward.

It was almost three years after her union contacted her that she was first arrested and her house was searched. Two years after she was moved that the police opened the investigation, and by then she had had formal confirmation that the consultants had accused her. So there was a lot of time for her to worry and to write notes trying to clear her head and responding to the pressure of these accusations.

"After" is really very misleading there, isn't it?

Well she's serving a whole life sentence so, even if she knew she was guilty, there would be nothing to lose.

She’d lose the chance to ask other experts who would not insist on publishing whatever they find.

Why would she lose the support of her parents? They’ve stood by her having been found guilty twice, plus her case being thrown out by the court of appeal. And you realise lawyers don’t really work like that right?

At least if the panel had found her guilty it would have secured her place in the special cushy unit she’s in, as she’s there on the basis of the level of media and public interest in her case. Important to keep people talking about her for that reason alone.

In what way is the word after misleading. She saw Kathryn de Berger, the occupational health doctor, after she'd been removed from the neonatal unit as part of her counselling. If Kathryn told her to write down her thoughts it was logically after she'd been removed from the unit. They wouldn't have been written beforehand as she hadn't needed counselling.

Pro bono legal teams tend to take cases because they believe their clients are innocent. There was certainly a risk of losing Mark McDonald's services, and of deterring any future offers. Most CCRC clients have no legal representation. It's not like the taxi rank system for the criminal courts, where your advocate has no choice of cases and may or may not want to represent you.

Perhaps I misunderstood you - I'm sorry about that. I thought that you were implying that Lucy Letby wrote the notes before she knew she was being accused.

She's in a secure unit because she's convicted of killing children. These prisoners are kept away from others because of the risk and difficulty of managing them in the general prison population.

Lucy was removed from the ward in early July 2016 and was first arrested on 3 July 2018 so it was not three years later at all.

She knew from around September 2016 why she'd been removed from the unit.

She also knew of the investigations taking place before the police were called in (spring of 2017).

She also worked very closely with Hayley Griffiths (nee Cooper) who was the nursing union rep.

You are quite right - I thought of 2015 instead of 16 briefly and calculated from there.

But I am not sure what point you are making? To reiterate mine, it was only for a couple of months after being taken off the unit that Lucy Letby did not know she was being accused by the consultants of deliberately harming babies. So there was plenty of time - almost two years - for her to write notes showing she was aware of this before she was arrested and had her house searched, wasn't there?

Yes, it is obvious a number of people gave her information - in her position I would certainly have wanted any I could get. And it's clear that she had colleagues who thought she was being victimized

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being open to the possibility of wrongful conviction when there is concern about the quality of the data used to “prove” guilt.

The scientific method is designed to try to counteract personal bias if followed correctly. Ultimately, good scientists allow the scientific data to speak for itself. The downside is experts like Prof Hall, refusing to speculate beyond the data and saying “I don’t know”. Which is entirely as it should be scientifically, but problematic in an adversarial legal system when he agrees to defer to the expertise of another witness (Hindmarsh) who has no such scruple.

My original comment was in relation to someone else stating the notes were written when she was on the unit. I was pointing out they were written after she'd been removed from the unit and became aware of the accusations. I'm not making any particular point of which day, week or month.

Obviously, I don't know if she would have lost the support of her parents. I assume Letby would have an idea; however, regarding them standing by her up to now, it's fairly easy to discount most of the evidence against her to date, especially if you know her and know how she deals with trauma.

The medical evidence is 90% fiction, and the circumstantial evidence is nonsense.

Opinions, including that of her parents, might have changed had a scientifically sound case against her come to light. As it is, there is no scientifically sound medical evidence against her, so we can only guess as to what might have happened had Lee's panel gone the other way.

Thanks - I did misunderstand it then. Sorry again.

Since people (and the CPS) keep stressing that she had "two trials", it's worth noting that the second trial wasn't deciding whether she's a serial baby killer. It took that as a given, and was deciding whether she tried to kill one more. Only one jury considered whether she is a killer at all. And the second jury knew they're deciding a purely academic question with no practical effect, so they did not much worry about convicting wrongly. That's very far from two independent tests of evidence.

Even Jayaram said that he'd have thought nothing of the Baby K incident "without what happened before or since", so, again, the second trial was very much predicated on the first. (And even the first jury that convicted on other charges couldn't decide on this one).

That's before recalling that the second trial proceeded without disclosing Jayaram's key email to the defense, where he contradicted his central claim at trial. How anyone can find the second trial result trustworthy in light of that, I'm at a loss to understand. (I think it also impacted the first trial, since some jurors likely wanted to convict on Baby K and were instructed to use their confidence in one charge to help decide others.)

I very much suspect that part of the reasoning behind the second trial was to shut down potential controversial questions being asked and to divert the public by way of sensationalism. I mean it shows a single minded determination to nail her on as many charges as possible. I still can't get over the "find her guilty if you feel she did it, it doesn't matter how, but obviously she's done all this other terrible stuff, so sticking it to her one more time by any means is justice!" From the judge !

What about the baby screaming with blood on its mouth and the mother witnessing it. What on earth did LL do with the tube to cause that.

Yes, maybe the odd thing here and there...but all of it?

No I didnt know any of that.