Lucy Letby

[kkloo]

New thread as the last one has filled up.

Blood around the mouth usually means either the throat and mouth are bleeding, or a person has vomited up some blood.

For this baby, here is what Shoo Lee's panel concluded:

"Baby 5 was at high risk because he was preterm, had twin-twin transfusion with oligohydramnios, and his antenatal ultrasound showed reversed end diastolic flow and dilated small bowel loops. This meant blood was being sucked out of the fetus at the end of each cardiac cycle, and the intestines were likely damaged before birth. The 2 episodes of massive gastrointestinal haemorrhage were most likely due to in-utero hypoxia causing stomach or small intestinal ulceration, and erosion into an intestinal blood vessel; or to a vascular abnormality like Dieulafoy’s lesion, which can cause life- threatening hemorrhage. His 25% blood volume loss was likely an underestimate because more was likely lost in the intestines. Emergency transfusion with group O negative blood should have been immediately given earlier during resuscitation. Since 20% blood loss causes shock, and Baby 5 lost much more, this was fatal.

...

"CONCLUSIONS

1. Baby 5 died from massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage due to either intrauterine hypoxia causing stomach or intestinal ulceration or a congenital vascular lesion.
2. Emergency blood transfusion should have been given much earlier.
3. There was no evidence of air embolism
4. Post-mortem should have been requested"

It's also worth remembering that Lucy Letby called a doctor to examine him, and the doctor did not see any bleeding to the throat etc. Blood around the mouth isn't an uncommon symptom, though it needs urgent investigation.

You could be an extremely odd person and still not a murderer. The handover notes were unusual. I'm not sure the Facebook searches are. I know plenty of people who were all over Facebook all the time back around 2015. The notes to herself were a response to a very rare situation that few of us, I'm glad to say, will ever have to cope with.

I don't know if I agree that the handover notes were unusual. On the face of it, having that many could be unusual, but knowing how easy it is to forget what bits of paper you have in your pocket and how many handover notes/scribbles you might collect over a shift, if you've not gotten into the habit of emptying your pockets before you leave work and you're a bit crap at dealing with paperwork admin (which is most of us) I can see how it could happen.

I'm only on top of paperwork in the summer when the endlessly growing shrubs the former tenant helpfully planted are acting like they're on steroids and I use paperwork for kindling in the garden incinerator. Over winter, when nothing is growing, things get shoved into drawers until I physically cannot fit anything else in, by which time it is usually summer again.

It was unprofessional of her to keep them so long, but being unprofessional is not evidence of murder.

True. They are maybe the only other information that has been used against her that I wouldn't expect to apply even to other nurses on her unit. Just the number and the fact that they had been retained for years, since 2012 in some cases. But really I have no idea how unusual they are

I have never thought they mattered, unusual or not. It is weird how the prosecution managed to make it look suspicious that she hadn't shredded or got rid of them, a year into a police investigation which she knew had been prompted by accusations against her. It would surely have been more suspicious if they'd arrived to arrest her and found her frantically stoking a bonfire.

She obviously didn't think there was anything suspicious in keeping them.

Yes that does sound quite convincing

But she would still have her actual legal team to support her though. There are plenty of things you continue to need your lawyers for even once you know you’re going to be in prison for the rest of your life.

I don’t think Mark McDonald has even been formally instructed has he?

What are you comparing it to, to conclude that it's "too much"? If the comparison is "what I know about random people around me", that's not the right baseline. The baseline is, what would be found in comparably exhaustive police investigation, where they even dig up your garden. The police boasted about the huge amounts of material they gathered, but the more you gather, the higher the chance of finding something arguably odd - and the less significant it is as a fraction of the whole.

What do people think is the meaning behind taking the handover notes Home, assuming that you think it makes her look guilty? Why is that?

At the time of her convictions, and pre the expert panel report, there was pretty strong consensus that the scientific case was sound - on the basis of the insulin cases, even if nothing else.

So if her parents were still supporting her then, I’m really not sure it would make much difference if some random international experts had decided they agreed with the science she was convicted on. Presumably she would have kept protesting her innocence anyway, and I suspect Mark M would have just keep looking for more experts until he found some that said what he wanted them to.

That she would still have something does not mean she would lose nothing, so it's not correct that "she had nothing to lose". If a panel of this breadth and caliber declared her guilty, she'd lose the support of many people who supported her till that point.

No - she would lose access to her legal team once convicted. She could (and did) choose to hire the same team after conviction for appeal application, and for her retrial. These payments depended on legal aid.

Once you are convicted, your legal representative's duty to you ceases after you and their only obligation is to safeguard the paperwork and respond to any requests from the CCRC etc.

Prisoners don't typically have legal teams. They have the right to hire one like anyone else, but they will normally have exhausted their resources at that point. Myers was never working de bono and had no further duties to Lucy Letby whether or not McDonald had volunteered.

That is true, but anyway, she had her original legal team until the end of her application to appeal re baby K, but not afterwards. We aren't all paying out in taxation to give everyone in prison a permanent lawyer.

You can apply for legal aid for help with a CCRC application, but that doesn't mean you will get it: there are stringent tests and the agency concerned will try to find cheaper ways to get expert opinion, limit hours etc.

At the time of her conviction, there were reporting restrictions. As soon as these were lifted, experts started voicing their concerns. Just because concerns couldn't be publicly reported, it doesn't mean there were none.

Lee was the latest in a long line of experts who spoke about their concerns.

Sarrita Adams of Science on Trial was one of the first to publish concerns, followed by the New Yorker. Lee was late to the party, if anything.

They tried to make out that they were ghoulish souvenirs or trophies. This even though only a tiny fraction were anything to do with the babies she was accused of harming, and there weren’t notes relating to all of the babies, and that they were stuffed in various bags including a bin bag. It’s interesting that in the last documentary it was said that they were filed in chronological order, which is untrue, so even the police couldn’t make them meaningful without lying.

I've never seen anything to suggest that Mark McDonald isn't instructed. Why would he not be?

Edited to add: I know he was not due to represent Lucy Letby at the inquest and I believe he has said he would not appear in court at an eventual retrial, because he is not a KC. But that wouldn't mean he hasn't been instructed.

There were at least a couple of people who tried to come forward during the trial I understand.

Yes. Phil Hammond has written about this the first of his Private Eye columns. He has already starting hearing from anxious experts and was preparing to write up their concerns when reporting restrictions were imposed, as were journalists at both that Telegraph and the Guardian

There has literally never been a consensus that the science of this trial was correct. There has been court reporting on the prosecution case. And then rising public concern about the court verdict

Interesting to revisit Hammond back when restrictions were lifted: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/lucy-letby.pdf

Yes - Neena Modi who is on Lee's panel, former president of the Royal College of Pediatric and Child Health. Richard Gill for statistics. Of course, it's all but impossible for a defence team to use new expert witnesses at that point.

Give Lee a break :) It was autumn! He was off driving his combine harvester on the Canadian prairies!

She has been represented by a number of different firms, so I didn’t mean literally the same team who conducted her defence at trial. There are various things which affect prisoners with long/life sentences and which they are entitled to legal aid for.

I was just thinking about all the breathless headline reporting that went on during the trial. As I've said before I only really started poking around pist conviction when certain phrases piqued my interest.

For example the whole caught redhanded by Ravi scenario. Then it transpires he caught her "doing nothing" in a scenario where a few seconds of that for assessment isn't unusual. The nuance was absolutely lost behind the sensationalist headlines.

Then the "smoking gun" insulin. An absolute slam dunk. If one was writing a novel with this plot, I can imagine one's editor having this sort of conversation with an author:

A - "And then she poisoned two babies with insulin. No getting round that one!"

E - "So they discovered that at post mortem?"

A - "Er, no. Both those babies survived."

E - "They caught her doing it?? How did she stay on after that point??"

A - "Well, it wasn't until they were looking at old test results that they realised"

B - "And they had records to show missing insulin? Or something like that?"

A - "Um, well, no. They weren't sure how she'd done it. But they knew it had to be her because of all the other babies collapsing and dying when she was working. Although, one of the insulin babies kept showing signs of insulin poisoning after she'd gone home. So, there's this really cool expert - I'm thinking like House crossed with Poirot when we go to Netflix - who reckons it must have been put in the feeding bags, and she poisoned an extra one before she went home to throw everybody off"

E - "Riiiight..... so they had the proof in the feeding bags?"

A - "Well no, it was yonks later they come up with that theory..."

E - "And this all culminates in a big courtroom drama?"

A - "Yes, and she's convicted on all counts and goes to prison forever and ever and ever... "

E - ( gently guiding A out of the office). "I think you need to go and talk to a legal expert or two about plausibility....."

Be ause honestly this is all so "truth stranger than fiction" it does my head in. I try and imagine how this has all unfolded in real type scenarios and I just can't. But here we are. And I shouldn't be nearly as shocked or surprised as I am given I've been under the wheels if the juggernaut to a lesser degree myself.

Why do people even focus on this, the main focus should be on the cause of death, medical interventions, and was there ever even any evidence of foul play. The fact that the maternity and birth notes were not made available even when requested is more significant than handover sheets.

So you mean she would still have the option to pay for legal representation or to apply for free legal aid?

Free legal aid for the CCRC is not in a good way.

I understand that she had exhausted her resources, since she also had legal aid for her trial. So it's unlikely she could pay for it. And it's not automatically granted by the CCRC - it's case by case, and item by item, not just a means test.

So jeopardising her pro bono representation and a clutch of expensive experts willing to work for nothing would have been an expensive choice. Their findings, of course could also have deterred other experts and lawyers from offering future aid

As @PinkTonic said, it was suggested that these are "mementos of crime". If I recall correctly, this was not explicitly claimed at trial, but was hypothesized by some journalists and then picked up by the Court of Appeal. The hypothesis raises the obvious question, "what were the handover sheets unrelated to the trial cases mementos of?" The answer from Dewi Evans, and at least two commenters here, has been that she must have committed 250 other crimes without leaving enough evidence to charge her. Given the low evidence threshold for what they did charge, that seems quite implausible.

It's also worth noting that she did have exactly one handover sheet which she clearly treasured and kept separately as a memento: the one from her first-ever shift as a nurse. So we happen to know exactly how her 'handover sheet mementos' look like when they're actual mementos, and it's not in random bags in a pile with non-meaningful sheets.

Another suggestion has been that her rule-breaking with regard to the sheets means she's a rule-breaker in general, and is more likely to break rules against serial baby murder. In regards to that, I think it matters that the practical chance of actual harm coming from this particular instance of rule-breaking was low. It would involve someone reading the sheets in her home (which she shared either with nobody or with her parents) and using the info to the babies' detriment, and I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario in which that would happen. So it's like crossing the street on red light when you don't see cars coming, which many people do. Willingness to break rules when the chance of harm reasonably looks low, is a far cry from breaking the prohibition on serial baby murder. If she was given to rule-breaking that was likely to cause even accidental harm (nevermind purposed harm), I think that would have come up when they examined her patient-facing nursing practice - yet they found no issues.

The third suggestion has been that, since she broke nursing rules with the handover sheets, she deserved to be removed from nursing, so the trial has accomplished some good even if she didn't kill babies, and was therefore worth it. I'll just leave that one with no comment.

But would you really repeatedly bring home
notes and just let them pile up. Surely by about the fourth time the fact you'd brought home more notes would remind you to dispose of the ones you'd already got.
Also didnt some of the parents say she was always hovvering around .