Lucy Letby

[kkloo]

New thread as the last one has filled up.

And here Hammond goes through the other prosecution experts and how Evans's change of opinion has left them exposed: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/lucy-letby-31.pdf

There’s a bit more than her being weird and an outsider.

This latest article is nonsense, it was accepted that these babies needed extra care due to the births, hence the fact they were in that unit in the first place. The main point is they were all stable until she got near them.

@rubbishatballet Have you got a source for this admission by the prosecution?

In a signed statement to Channel 5 on August 3, 2024 Dewi Evans stated that none of the CoCH babies died as a result of air or fluid injected into their stomachs via a nasogastric tube, they mast have died instead by air injected into a vein.

do you mean the judgment of Jackson LJ? The CoA judgment addresses this - the criticisms were based on a false premise

Ah, was it a report or was it a letter. Evans has since referred to the document in question as a report and confirmed when pressed that it was a report. When asked about what Judge Jackson had said he replied “well I disagree with him”.

He’s written some interesting letters hasn’t he? Particularly the one he wrote to the GPs in the Robbie Powell case where he assured them they could have done no more for the child, despite their proven negligence, neglect, falsification of medical records, public abuse of the bereaved parents…

Their stability has been greatly exaggerated.

(Though of course, you can be stable and in a very poor condition, until you're not stable any more. Stable doesn't mean, only going to get better from here, unfortunately)

I have always felt she’s innocent but I have to be careful because I always think the best of people so I’d make a bad judge.

I'm just better at interpreting the mountains of evidence rather than shrugging it all off.

You are certainly better at coming up with ‘interpretations’ - none of them remotely demonstrate that LL is guilty though.

Interestingly, your thought processes and desperate attempts to make the facts fit your conclusion may be giving us a real time demonstration of the workings of the police/medical investigation. I see no objectivity in your posts - you have determined that she is guilty and will stick to that regardless of the facts. A bit like Dewi Evans who set himself up as judge and jury.

Responding to the Guardian’s questions about Baby C, Evans stood by his opinions, and wrote in an email: “Lucy Letby murdered Baby C. Get that into your head.”

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/20/my-kind-of-case-intense-focus-falls-on-lucy-letby-trial-expert-witness

For anyone interested in reading this kind of material, here is a journal report on three cases of subcapsular hematoma of the liver in newborn babies. One was delivered by Caesarian section with a difficult extraction. The article explains both the mechanism and the evidence for these children remaining relatively stable before a rapid deterioration.

www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/19/5684

This is the cause of death found for the child Dr Philip Bennett discussed on Radio 4 at post-mortem (2016), external review (2017) and by Shoo Lee's panel in 2025. The post-mortem for his triplet also found a subcapsular hematoma of the liver, though this wasn't supposed to be his cause of death.

The article also shows that treatment includes urgent blood transfusion. It's not clear why Chester never gave Child O a blood transfusion, even after they tested and found his hemoglobin levels had dropped. But it is known that the consultant and registrar on duty at the neonatal unit went AWOL and did not attend his collapse in the required five minutes - it was over half an hour before another consultant came to help. That had other failings are outlined in the hospital's own 2017 review.

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/thirlwall-evidence/INQ0018008_09-10.pdf

If you look at the recently uploaded transcripts of Dr Evans's cross examination on this case, you can see him trying to justify ignoring the child's deterioration for the hours before Lucy Letby came on shift. I'd love to know if anyone finds his reasoning acceptable

https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/s/ag6nburVOq

TLDR: a stable baby can become unstable. Chester managed resuscitations badly, so a deterioration could become fatal where perhaps it might not have otherwise. As with "suspicious" collapses, Evans was extremely flexible with his definition of stability.

You’ve completely lost me with this. Have you actually read the CoA judgment?

The way science is applied to the facts of a case should absolutely be tested in court. And I’m surprised that those crying miscarriage of justice here don’t consider that to be quite an important principle.

Because famously, scientists have never disagreed about anything, or been driven by ego, or craven with ambition, or bitter from previous criticism, or ever displayed any other traits which mean if unchallenged they could end up either consciously or unconsciously serving themselves over the integrity of the justice process (tldr they are human). Sure.

Or If you do believe that, I don’t think you can have known or worked with many senior scientists or academics. I have worked with many, and rats fighting in a sack is the phrase that springs to mind in the case of many of them. And yes, including (especially!) those who were pre-eminent in their fields, or if we must, ‘world-leading’.

If that is your position, then surely you must be even more concerned than the rest of us that some of the "science" aka theories relied upon by the prosecution hasn"t been tested anywhere by anybody and has now been rowed back on by the original experts / theorists. I really don't see how you can say this conviction is scientifically sound on that basis.

Yes, that was the first thing that occurred to me, tbh.

Not ‘oh Dewi Evans says so, so it must be correct’ - rather ‘let’s rigorously test this amongst a range of experts.’

But do you really think ALL 14 experts as well as external experts (including Chase and Shannon) fit that criteria? Each case was independently reviewed by two experts (independently of each other), if they disagreed a third reviewed the case and a consensus was reached.

These experts are putting their professional reputations on the line. However egotistical, ambitious or bitter they may be, this is an astonishing level of agreement. Or do you think it’s a conspiracy? They have nothing to gain and a lot to lose if they are wrong.

By that same logic, we should be even more troubled that the original case rested so heavily on Dr Evans. He’s a single expert whose interpretation went untested by a second independent reviewer before trial, and who had already been flagged to the trial judge as having given ‘worthless’ evidence in an unrelated case.

If they were stable why were they intubated and in nicu?

Genuine question - what are your qualifications for making these sorts of clinical judgements from this material? Are you a neonatologist?

Either way, I find it quite odd that you’re asking random, and presumably mainly unqualified, mumsnetters to also make clinical judgements as if that might mean anything. It does somewhat undermine the points you’ve been making about the importance of scientific rigour.

Honestly, I feel like we’re at the point now where some of the posters on this thread genuinely believe they are more knowledgeable about neonatal medicine than Dewi Evans. Talk about having stepped through the looking glass.

At least those of us looking at medical research are attempting to learn something rather than claiming to be psychic and "know" she did it like some regular commenters.

Also, when an expert states as fact that something is impossible, but there is evidence to the contrary, why shouldn't it be offered up for comparison?

Sure, the application of scientific principles to a case are tested in court, in the sense that the jury returns a verdict after hearing these principles and their relevance explained.

That is why there must be grave concerns when the expert advice given in court departs so far from scientific consensus. We are not looking at a case only of experts disagreeing, egos clashing, academics with low stakes and high drama. We are not looking at a case where both groups have put their arguments up for scientific validation in their own fields, and still disagree.

I'd agree with the argument to get judges a better understanding of scientific principles and to hold preliminary hearings to check things like settled science, peer review, consensus, alternatives, strength of references. But as things stand, there is really no sense in claiming that a court verdicts validates the science or the experts who produced it. When you look at the lack of rigour and the intellectual isolation of the scientific explanations presented in the court, that's clear

Well that’s exactly my point, at this stage we just don’t know do we. All we know is what the experts have chosen to put out there, explicitly on behalf of Letby.

I don’t think it is so much that people think they are better qualified as they are stating that others who are better qualified have raised doubts about Dewi Evans, both in terms of his evidence and in terms of his level of expertise.

Because Lee felt his own paper had been misused to help convict someone, and correcting that isn’t ego, it’s rigour. The whole point of publishing their findings is so everyone can check the science themselves rather than take his word for it.

I'm not asking people to work beyond their competence to read and analyse published information. Some may wish to do so and may understand more or less of it depending on their skillset. Whether they make clinical judgements or simply observe some facts about the condition under discussion is up to them. I've told you before that I don't discuss my qualifications on these (or other) threads. Anyone could claim anything - it's not useful.

I've no idea how good Dewi Evans's clinical judgement actually is. How would I know that? But I know that he has been unable to defend his key clinical judgements in this case with reference to established scientific principles or observations - this, he himself has admitted.

Honestly, I feel like we’re at the point now where some of the posters on this thread genuinely believe they are more knowledgeable about neonatal medicine than Dewi Evans. Talk about having stepped through the looking glass.

Frankly because he was a paediatrician and not a neonatologist, that might actually be the case.

I used to work for the Perinatal Trials Service when it was part of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit.

Well presumably that will also get tested as part of the CCRC process won’t it. But she has 15 whole life orders, and I don’t think even you are suggesting that every bit of scientific evidence offered by the prosecution were completely untested and wrong (or are you?), so no, I’m not that concerned.

Why would every bit of scientific evidence have to be overturned, though?

If you look at the transcripts, lots is consensus. And then you have points where prosecution experts make claims based on a few principles shared across the cases that, increasingly, appear unsound. Certainly I expect that those assertions will not survive comparison with a properly scientific approach.

That is exactly what is being suggested.

The statistics used in court were wrong.
The evidence given on venous air embolism was wrong and based on Evans's misinterpretation of Lee's paper.
The insulin evidence was partly wrong and partly based on an untested theory.
The evidence given on air down the NG tube was a work of fiction; there is no other way to put it, really. It's not that it is wrong; it is that it is laughably wrong and also based on an untested theory.