Lucy Letby

[kkloo]

New thread as the last one has filled up.

Where is the evidence that it happened?

The blood around Baby E's mouth was caused by a massive internal hemorrhage; why do we need to find another reason? We have a reason.

Also, no parent suspected Letby of deliberately hurting their child until after the police told them she had; none of the nurses who worked with her day after day thought she was guilty; only the consultants, who saw her at most twice a week, thought she was guilty, and that was only after they reviewed the nursing rota with a view to finding a murderer. None of them thought anything of Letby until then.

That doesnt necessarily make her innocent. It just possibly makes her an especially clever killer..Serial murderers arent generally known for taking out an ad in the paper announcing what they've done. And the consultants might well have been having doubts long before they voiced them. How do you know. It's the sort of thing people keep quiet about because they dont want to rock the boat..Most ppl want an easy time at work.

Where. Is. The. Evidence?

How many other serial killers do you know of who have 0 forensic evidence against them?

Of course it’s a possibility. But the legal test isn’t “within the bounds of possibility”, it’s “beyond reasonable doubt”.

And where there are other more plausible explanations, and no other supporting evidence other than “she was a bit weird in comparison to what I think a nurse should be like and worked a lot of shifts”, it is not beyond reasonable doubt, surely?

The blood around Baby E's mouth was caused by a massive internal hemorrhage; why do we need to find another reason? We have a reason.

Exactly. The Occam’s Razor principle says that the simplest explanation should be preferred, or as doctors are frequently told, when you hear hooves, think horses rather than zebras.

But now you are agreeing we don't have evidence anyone saw anything suspicious at the time. So we are back, at best, in the no evidence either way territory. We can't be expected to take people's possible unspoken thoughts as evidence.

If the consultants thought there was anything suspicious or particularly mysterious about the deaths, their clear duty was to tell the coroner. They were the ones who filled in the forms before the autopsies.

If they thought there was anything suspicious about the deteriorations, it was their job to flag that at the time. Again, nothing.

Imagine being accused of murder because someone claimed they had silently suspected you, but had done nothing about it while there was a body or a blood sample or equipment to check. How would you be able to defend yourself?

I think this is what gets me - if Lucy Letby or A N Other nurse hadn't existed in terms of "being there" where would we be now? Watching another scandal around poor care at COCH in the NICU unfold in the public domain? Would the conclusion have been drawn that a far more sophisticated serial killer was operating under the cover of a shoddily run unit? Would everyone who ever participated in the care of the babies be investigated until the culprit was found?

One thing I ponder is whether technology is sophisticated enough to render virtual reconstructions based on all the available evidence of shifts, locations, events etc. Things like feasibility on alleged time frames for forcing enough air into an NG tube to cause collapse etc.

Thrre are several accounts of babies collapsing when others were in the room in closer proximity to a baby when it happened.

You'd have thought that out of all the suspicious events, at least one would have included something along the lines of "I saw Lucy Letby doing (something - seemed to be part of routine care) but thought nothing of it, but then the baby crashed seconds later". Other than dodgy Ravi and baby K, given the number of people around during all these incidents, how come nobody noticed a thing? Even in hindsight?

No, you’re right, it doesn’t.

But could all nurses prove 100% that they are not guilty of murdering the patients who die on their watch with no witnesses present?

I have said upthread that I think there is reasonable doubt. Definitely. What I've been questionjng is the way ppl who believe she is innocent don't seem to be willing to engage with even the possibility that some things about the case are extremely iffy. I think LL must be the world's unluckiest woman to be innocent and have SO MANY things about her seem shady. What are the chances.

She was convicted on 15 counts. That’s a lot for a jury to get wrong.

It's just not a good idea to make not being able to 100% rule something out a legal standard. We've created systems to avoid doing that, because of all the negative consequences. As others have pointed out, we'd have no clinicians. They'd all either be in prison or have fled the job.

It is, but we've seen worse. The Birmingham Six each got 21 counts of murder, for example.

The jury was told by the judge that:

a) they did not need to be sure how any murder or injury had happened
b) if they considered her guilty of any charges, they could weigh that against her as increasing the likelihood that she is responsible for other charges

Then during the deliberations, he answered a different question of theirs with the statement that there was indubitable proof that two children had been poisoned with insulin.

These were the first charges returned, the insulin cases. It's an easy inference that the jury was influenced by the insulin statement and the chain of logic recommended to them. (It's since been shown that the prosecution witness on insulin withheld information showing that the insulin test results did not always mean poisoning.

It's also possible to infer that the jury was influenced by methods claimed. They found guilt on every "collapse" where air embolism is supposed to have been used. This was before the defence started to work with Dr Shoo Lee who explained that his paper has been misinterpreted. The found guilt on the insulin charges. Otherwise they were clearly quite sceptical about the "collapses".

So: one conviction influenced another, and the vast majority were linked to one of two causes: air embolism (symptoms discredited) or air in NG tube (symptoms and methods discredited). It's not hard to understand how the jury found guilt in so many cases, but also to see how the cases crumple once you challenge their foundation. That's why (for better or for worse) I would never expect to see a retrial. I expect this conviction to be quashed, eventually, at the Court of Appeal.

Maybe ppl lean on that too heavily. Maybe standards are too low. Look at all the scandals we've had recently in UK, where ppl pass the buck, keep quiet, cover up etc etc.

What things are shady, though?

Also, unlucky, yes, but the reason "so many" things can, possibly, if you tilt your head and squint really hard while ignoring the blindingly obvious, be attributed to Letby is because of how shoddy the entire investigation was.

It started from a place of Letby being guilty and worked backwards, making the evidence fit the case.

A cleaner on the ward could have been fitted up just as easily, or the IT tech, the postie...

I think I've mentioned it on another thread, but I was watching a true crime documentary set in my dad's home town a while back, scrolling the comments while I was watching. I knew everyone thought the suspect's LL was involved, and he looked dodgy AF in his interview. When his interview came on, I agreed; he even looked like a murderer. Everything about him was suspect. He was the kind of man you'd cross the street to avoid.

I texted my dad to ask him if he'd heard of this bloke and whether there was any local knowledge on him/the crime. Turns out, the LL was my godfather, my dad's bestmate when they were young, and not only did I not think he was dodgy when I wasn't viewing him through the lens of being a rapist and a murderer, I actually loved him.

If there’s reasonable doubt she shouldn’t have been convicted. I agree that there is reasonable doubt on the medical evidence (to put it mildly), and therefore none of the “iffy” business warrants discussion. It’s all gossip and heresay or more far fetched hypotheses. I thought the description of a pile of broken crockery was accurate, but I can’t remember who said it. However high you pile it, it can’t hold water.

It would drive standards down because people wouldn't want to be HCPs any more, especially not in areas where you're most likely to encounter lots of death.

Oh God, the "unlucky" argument boils my piss no end.

I'm "unlucky"

My DF was a nuclear test veteran, which likely has an impact on genetics and may have impacted me and my son. Can't get it proven because the DOD doesn't recognise it as a legitimate concern, so am blocked from investigating further.

I was accused of child abuse of my son when he was 6 weeks old (5 weeks prem) and fought tooth and nail to prevent forced adoption for 18 months. That centred around medical controversy too, hence my interest in this case.

My 14 year marriage to my DCs step father easn't great and concluded with me suffering a drug induced psychotic break for which I was sectioned. Am stable and have been for 15 years, I did not take any drugs voluntarily.

In the last 6 years I have lost my DM, my DH (both to cancer) and last year it was my DF, my MIL, and my last close Uncle in a three month period.

Following my DHs death, I lost my business, the rented home we shared, my finances are in the toilet and I have been ostracized from my community due to the actions of a former friend which I can't talk about for legal reasons and which have been given a free pass by said community if they know anything.

Some of this is indeed "bad luck" but some of it is a domino effect of cause and consequence, and the majority of it has been out of my control, yet I have often been given the side eye like a Typhoid Mary because disaster follows me around. And now at 57 I'm hamstrung and paralysed by it all.

I'm definitely not posting for sympathy, but to show that truth is often more complex than fiction.

On multiple occassions while advocating for my son, and more recently for my elderly parents, I have come up against various health service agencies. While some individuals have "done their best", collectively I have witnessed lack of basic care, a disregard for safeguarding which contributed to my Dad's death and a host of stuff which bureaucracy makes it nigh on impossible to address. And there is a tendency for professionals when challenged to deflect issues and make it "all about you" when it really really isn't.

Yes, sometimes people are just "unlucky" and there are "professionals" out there who claim I am a liar aggressive and delusional for challenging them So I can well believe that in the working environment of the NHS scapegoating does occur.

Takes me back to that old chestnut "What's the difference between God and a doctor?" "God doesn't think he's a doctor".

I've thought for a long time that safety in hospitals needs to be better thought through and much more stringent measures put in place. I had responsiblity for a vulnerable elderly relative at one time and I was horrified at the lack of safety. She broke her hip and was moved around several wards during her hospital stay. All sorts of ppl were wandering in and out of wards. One night she was in a ward right at the end of a corridor with one other person, a woman who was very strange. At one point this person, out of the blue, said to me aggressively " I want to come over there. I want to talk to you about your aunt." I voiced my concerns but basically had to go away after my visit knowing my relative was alone in a ward with a seemingly very odd person overnight. I think the Letby case, whether she'scguilty or innicent, should be a wake up call to the health service to put much better measures in place to protect parents.

So if a doctor or nurse ever did want to murder incredibly vulnerable babies on a NICU, they could essentially do it with impunity because by default the babies’ pathologies would always provide more obvious natural causes of death?

We’re in 100% agreement about that.

Quite

But does it not make you suspicious that even to this day people including Dewi Evans and people related to the hospital STILL try to make out the babies were well and that there was no real issue with substandard care, despite all of the evidence to the contrary?

I'm sure we could work up a hypothetical situation where that would be the case. So many people don't even have autopsies, after all.

But it doesn't apply to Lucy Letby's case. Harm can be accidental, after all. Pathologists would be alert to signs of air embolism in a case like baby A's, preceded by line insertion and infusion, for example. And how would Lucy Letby and Lucy Letby alone know that the babies would show evidence of death by any natural cause, if we are simultaneously being told they were well and stable?

It's worth remembering too that the prosecution case wasn't, natural deaths are possible but we think murder is more likely. It was, we have reached our diagnoses by ruling out natural causes. That is not what we are talking about when we say, well, it's not completely possible that a passing nurse invisibly murdered this child

(If we are at the stage of conceding that there were more obvious natural causes in Lucy Letby's case, I don't know how anyone can think there aren't shedloads of reasonable doubt on her side.)