Lucy Letby (2)

[Oftenaddled]

Not only the second thread of course, but maybe with them filling so fast it is time to start numbering them?

I know no one is suggesting otherwise but no one has ‘won’ anything in this, and I’m not sure how comfortable I am with it being divided into winners and losers (I appreciate it came from those believing there is at least reasonable doubt here being described as ‘losers.’)

If nothing else I think we can all agree the hospital was chaotic and dysfunctional and this heavily contributed to babies dying who otherwise might have been saved. It’s also possible a woman and her family have had their lives destroyed in a terrible miscarriage of justice.

I believe she will eventually be exonerated and released, but she’ll never have the life she had back, and the families won’t have their children, so no one’s ‘won’ anything.

Someone being sentenced to a life term for a terrible crime isn’t cause for gloating or glee or celebration, it’s merely doing what it can after the event.

Agreed, certainly. I've been a bit distracted by the football metaphor. But the talk of winning and losing doesn't work here

There absolutely is no winners or losers but i have to admit when Lucy gets out i am going to celebrate like never before and enjoy the spotlight turning to everyone that set her up. Obviously they will all look to blame Evans and government will use news channels to say it is now time to move on.

It is also important we get to hear from Moritz and Liz Hull to give them a chance to admit they got it totally wrong and who knows maybe they will say they regret what was basically a media witch-hunt with no evidence against a kind innocent nurse.

There are no winners here. Bereaved parents who may never know why their babies died, an inadequate/unsafe neonatal unit, a nurse convicted of “murders” she is highly unlikely to have committed, a police force working collaboratively with a consultant to manipulate evidence, an egotistical “expert” making things up as he goes along….. No one comes out of this feeling or looking good.

For me there will be no celebration when Lucy is released- parents will still endure the awful pain of losing a child and I doubt the people responsible for patient safety and clinical governance at COCH will ever face any consequences.

“winners and losers” feels deeply crass.

Someone gets to temporarily feel morally superior to the rest of us (in her mind, at least), though, don't forget.

Whatever the eventual outcome the damage is done, to everyone involved. The parents are suffering their own life sentence, and will continue to do so. Lucy Letby, even if exonerated / released will continue to suffer a life sentence of stigma. The mere fact of being accused of something so heinous does a real psychological number on a person that is almost impossible to fully overcome.

If I may hark back to my own experience which is nothing in comparison to a large degree, it is just over 30 years ago, but it has permanently altered my world view, relationships, and sense of self. The world isn't chock full of counsellors or therapists with the expertise to help a person fully "get over" something like this, because it is relatively rare. The world at large tends to think some sort of "good outcome" means you can or should just "let it go" and often comes with impatience, frustration and eventually compassion fatigue if the struggling "goes on too long". The idea that eventually "winning" is some sort of magic bullet really overlooks the colossal amount of damage that can be done to a person. I think Sally Clark is worth remembering.

It is impossible not to dwell on the "why me" questions when every part of your character has been attacked and you have been regarded as a monster when there has been nothing up to the "event" to suggest that. We do absorb other people's opinions of us, and if self aware tend to internalise it. How can so many allegedly impartial professionals see one in this way? Obviously I am somewhat generalising, but statistically (ha) experiences like this can lead to CPTSD amongst other things. And I imagine the parents might well experience the same - prolonged exposure to a situation one can never escape, based on the most awful experience of losing or nearly losing a child, compounded by systematic abuse and failure.

Definitely no winners here.

Chief Constable of Cheshire Constabularay has bolted Mark Roberts.

The Dam is about to burst.

FGS it's an analogy to help people understand why we're hearing so much from the innocence side not the people satisfied with the verdict. Are people really THAT literal on here they can't even understand the point being made and have to go "but I don't watch football" or "there's no winners or losers here" I'm beginning to see why so many on here struggle with this case. No one on here even understood Dr Marnerides with his desert analogy either.

It’s not a very good analogy though. The people who think there is reasonable - indeed ample - doubt that there were any murders, let alone of Letby’s guilt, are not losers.

Most of us presumed she was guilty until relatively recently so we didn’t “lose” during the trial. And the CCRC has not concluded its investigation so we are not “losers” in that respect either.

So it’s a strange choice of words. Unless you were using it as an insult, of course.

@EyeLevelStick it's not literal. Do you object to people saying she lost her case/lost her appeal etc.

Living in a society that's created a criminal trial system with so many structural flaws makes losers of us all. The best case scenario here is that, despite the multiple problems both with the system and specific to this case, Letby's still guilty, but the verdicts have still led to very public questioning and lack of trust from lots of people who are extremely well qualified to have opinions. Which isn't really ideal.

I saw that re Mark Roberts @ByAzureMentor. Wonder what the backstory is there.

She didn't lose her appeal because she didn't have one.

🙄

I’m objecting to you saying

It's only the losers screaming from the rooftops.

You didn’t mean Letby, so who did you mean?

Can you say more about the many structural flaws of the criminal trial system? What do you think should be different?

Well, you can splutter about it all you want; it’s still poor taste.

I watched Room a few weeks ago (for those who don’t know, a girl in her late teens is kidnapped and held hostage where she is repeatedly raped and has her abductors baby) and in one of the scenes after her eventual escape, she’s scrolling Facebook and says to her family something like ‘do you know what happened to them … nothing … they just lived a normal life.

I am struck by that after reading @MistressoftheDarkSide ’s post as while I haven’t experienced anything close to what I believe LL experienced I have come across innocuous situations being twisted around to be something sinister.

I have told this story before but over ten years ago now I started a new job, working with very vulnerable young people, and somehow despite my filling in all the correct paperwork, no one sent off for my DBS and no one requested references from my past employers. In other words, I could literally have been anybody. The school couldn't seem to accept it was their error and not mine, and I got a breezy invitation to ‘pop in and see the head’ one day - it was more like an ambush, with the headteacher, deputy head, CoG and some woman from the local authority there on one side of a long table and me sat at the other side, having no idea what the hell was going on.

They demanded to know why I had ‘given them a fake name’ - my name is Hannah Rachel. My maiden surname begins with a H. I was always going to be called Rachel; that was never changed, but my dad decided it would be funny to have me be Hannah Rachel H- - - rather than Rachel Hannah H - - - because then my initials would be HRH. Stupid dad joke (I’ll be honest and say I’ve wanted to throttle him for that joke on more than one occasion as it’s been a lifetime of headaches) but when I applied for the job I just put Rachel where it said first name as I ordinarily do. Otherwise everyone calls you the wrong name! So essentially I’m having to explain why I put my name on the form when I applied for the job.

I was given minutes for a meeting that happened three months ago. In the meeting, an assistant headteacher had discussed my over familiarity with students and I had agreed it was ‘inappropriate to ply students with gifts.’ (I had given the students in my form a little chocolate reindeer at Christmas.) The meeting also noted I had brought alcohol onto school premises (I gave the TAs a bottle of wine as a Christmas present) and I had apparently also agreed this was inappropriate. THE MEETING WAS COMPLETELY FICTITIOUS! It just had not happened. But you can imagine how ridiculous you’d look saying that.

And it does play with your mind - did I have this meeting and somehow forget? Was it maybe worded so pleasantly that somehow it escaped my notice? And then you say no, I’m not insane, this didn’t happen - but how do you prove it? I don’t know; I still don’t.

I resigned anyway and thought that was the end of it until it wasn’t; I shall say no more on that other than I eventually ‘won’ (insofar as I kept my dignity and my position and my qualifications - all of which they tried to take from me) but if comes at a huge cost to your sense of self, sense of fairness, trust (can you imagine LL taking out a grievance in a subsequent job?)

LL is a huge one but tiny injustices like this are absolutely infiltrating our NHS, police and judicial systems and maybe if any good comes from this it’s a reform because god knows one is needed.

The whole country doesn't think she's innocent. I don't for a start. She has been found guilty by two juries. The police wanted her prosecuted for more murders but CPS said not enough evidence.

I think by this point in the thread we all know what happened, @Viviennemary !

Do we. I don't. What happened.

I've posted quite a bit about this before but will summarise. In no particular order, because these are issues that have essentially intersected to create a perfect storm here.

There are pros to the jury system, but it's neither realistic nor reasonable to expect a lay jury of people without relevant professional expertise to appraise huge volumes of evidence in fields where they don't have the experience or training.

Multiple professional bodies have been sounding the alarm about the expert witness system for years, in some cases decades. We don't have safeguards built in to prevent an expert giving genuinely believed but wrong specialist evidence. It should concern us all that Dewi Evans could give incorrect evidence to the court without it being corrected.

In an adversarial system, prosecution and defence have a duty to put the case as well as they can, which isn't the same thing as having a duty to make sure the court is as well informed as possible. There isn't a duty to present an expert witness to the court, hence Letby had at least one expert who wanted to challenge dodgy prosecution evidence but the court never got the benefit of hearing that. Prosecution also have an incentive to do things like give shonky statistical evidence and rely on cod psychological tropes about behaviour, and the prosecution in this case were just doing their jobs when they did it. But it was poor quality evidence.

Then there's the issues with remedying MOJs. The CCRCs organisational problems are well known, but also there's the question of whether the test isn't wide enough. Justice Gap have some good stuff on this.

There are multiple possible ways to remedy some of this. We could keep the same jury system and have an agreed expert model, which I think is probably the likeliest reform. We could have expert juries in cases involving particularly specialist evidence like this, which is imho less likely because such jurors would need paying more for their time than the system currently funds. Non-adversarial systems exist, although I don't think changing to that is on the cards.

For some specific issues like prosecutions including poor statistical evidence, much as I respect the work of the RSS (their various publications have been linked to on previous threads and are very good) I'm not sure education is going to tackle the problem. Not when the incentive remains due to the adversarial system. In order to address that we might need more specific rules about what claims can be made, perhaps specific applications if a party wants to depart from RSS guidance.

(Sorry, that was long for a summary!)

Anyone on Letby's side, obviously.

So… what did you mean by “losers” in that context? As I already said, I don’t think we have lost anything - figuratively or literally.

So, anyone on the side of truth and justice then. Interesting.

I already explained. Football analogy didn't work, fine. The people unhappy with the result shout the loudest. The rest who know justice has been done don't need to be writing articles, launching press conferences and making youtube vids constantly. Clearer?

Not buying it. You were using “losers” as an insult. Own it.