Lucy Letby - Specifically those who think she is guilty…

[BEAchDays2]

I’ve just been reading massive amounts of posts of Facebook following the new doc out about LL. (Blame a long train journey!) and it got me thinking, those who still think she is guilty what are your reasons?

It does feel like the tide has turned generally. I haven’t watched the new doc yet, likewise has anyone seen it, and is it worth it?

@FrippEnos

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/lucy-letby-appeal-team-key-experts-quit-5HjdhS6_2/

i take it you all know that the insulin experts have quit? I think they timed it very well - clearly huge problems with the experts trying to say she is innocent - they have perhaps realised that she isn’t innocent after all!

Okay - I misunderstood what you meant by involved in deaths there. Sorry about that. Yes she was certainly present for deaths that weren't on the indictment. This doesn't surprise me. If she was likely to be on duty when children died, that would apply as much to non-indictment babies as indictment babies, from the time when she earned the qualification in specialism.

Deaths are easy to count and there is no doubt she was present at the majority for that period. "Collapses", especially "unexplained and unexpected" ones, and timing of deterioration leading to death are the two much more slippery elements, likely in my opinion to have inflated the charge sheet.

Two of the nine experts who had written reports on the insulin cases have left the defence team. These two had written one of three reports. All three reports can still be used by the CCRC. They seem not to be interdependent but to offer alternative explanations, from what Mark McDonald and others had said of them before and since this development.

I take it that you realise that the experts that quit still stand by their work and that they believe that letby didn't do it.

They quit because they have concerns about the theories that maybe presented by the defence that other experts have put forward. .

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Nobody has ever suffered a miscarriage of justice then. There are many examples of innocent people being found guilty and jailed.

I am pretty sure there are MORE examples of people who did commit a crime but didn’t get convicted through the legal process. But two full trials that took months? How many people get wrongly convicted like that? LL would have to be spectacularly unlucky to be wrongly convicted not once but twice no?

@Comtesse not to mention all the charges. They always bring up Andrew Malkinson but he was only accused of one rape. For it to be anything like Letby he'd have had to be accused of multiple rapes yet be innocent.

I suppose the SIDS cases are similar to Letby but even then I think they were only accused of two murders. Not seven.

How often are 22 charges tried in one trial?

When the Birmingham Six failed at their first appeal, that was the longest appeal hearing there had yet been in British history.

I don't think length makes an outcome more reliable

But the jury was instructed that if they found Lucy Letby guilty of any crime, they could use this to bolster the likelihood she had committed others, creating a scenario where one false guilty charge generated others.

The difference is that there was certain insulin poisoning at Stockport.

I’ve never been convinced that Colin Norris is a poisoner.

From what I know of Norris's case I'm also doubtful. I'd like to have more information and will try to read up on it when possible

But the jury didn’t convict her of all charges. So it wasn’t like a row of dominoes that inevitably fell - some charges met the burden of proof and others didn’t. It clearly was NOT one fell swoop.

@Comtesse good point. I was saying yesterday that they couldn't decide on her guilt for baby Q, the very last baby. So the theory that they just went "oh she's guilty of all the rest lets find her guilty on these too even if there's not much evidence" doesn't really work.

No - it didn't need to be. It's perfectly possible that some or all of the jury couldn't see how she could have committed some crimes or didn't find particular witnesses or methods convincing. But that wouldn't stop them from applying the judge's instruction elsewhere where it might be sufficient to move the needle.

It is possible to instruct the jury to consider multiple charges separately. This instruction was given in Colin Norris's case, for example. Here, the judge gave the opposite instruction. The charges were not considered independently

But nobody has claimed that happened, @Firefly1987 . You are attacking a straw man there

Well she was found guilty beyond all reasonable doubt…. Yes miscarriages of justice can happen, but thankfully they are rare

They are relatively rare, but it would be easier to rule one out here if the medical evidence didn't rely on unproven science, misunderstood research, and failures of logic. Add to that a lack of eyewitnesses evidence of any crime, the retrospective labelling of events as unexpected and unexplained, police or CPS rejection of a statistical analysis of events at the hospital, and it's unfortunately all to clear how this rare case could be a rare miscarriage of justice.

@Oftenaddled They found 8 natural cases of air embolism was it? Shouldn't the statisticians be all over that new surgeon's assertions that you need air in the heart to diagnose it? 8 cases is hardly a big enough sample to claim that definitively.

No one misunderstood Shoo Lee's paper. What failures of logic are you talking about?

Add to that a lack of eyewitnesses evidence of any crime, the retrospective labelling of events as unexpected and unexplained, police or CPS rejection of a statistical analysis of events at the hospital, and it's unfortunately all to clear how this rare case could be a rare miscarriage of justice.

The criminologist David Wilson said that eye witness testimony can often be wrong. Although he was quite critical of Chris Morris saying how unreliable baby E's mum's testimony was. No one is likely to have realised what she was doing for most of these crimes. Even with his suspicions and going straight in the room Dr Jayaram didn't catch Lucy removing the tube. So who would? Unless someone was tasked with spying on her every move.

They didn't go with a statistical case so I'm unsure what the statisticians are up in arms about. Jane Hutton got what she wanted.

A police investigation showed Norris to be on duty when five patients fell into sudden hypoglycaemic comas. Suspicions were raised when Norris predicted that healthy Ethel Hall would die at 5:15 am one morning, which is when she went into cardiac arrest, and tests revealed that she had been injected with an extremely high level of man-made insulin. Insulin was missing from the hospital fridge and Norris had last accessed it, only half an hour before Hall fell unconscious.

From what I know of Norris's case I'm also doubtful.

Then I'm sure this will be another "that doesn't prove anything, it's just a coincidence, he was such a good nurse he knew exactly when a patient would die" sounds familiar to Letby's "he's not leaving here alive is he?" nothing to see here as always. In this case there's even missing insulin so there's no excuse not to believe he's a killer.

I'll wait until I've read up more on Norris before I form an opinion, thanks, as I said. You had better go and pick a fight with someone else if that's what you want tonight

@Oftenaddled ok fair enough. I just don't really get what makes some people doubt every single conviction, especially when it's a nurse.

You are disputing points I'm not arguing, there.

Unscientific/ illogical claims made by the prosecution at Lucy Letby's trial - not an exhaustive list:

Death by air through nasogastric tube is a clinically proven method of murder

A very premature infant can't dislodge his own ETT tube

Air embolism can be diagnosed from crying alone, without any disruption to the heart-rate

Venous air embolism will show symptoms of arterial air embolism in localised patches (yes, that's misunderstanding Shoo Lee's paper)

Deaths explained by pathologists should be considered unexplained for the purposes of statistical comparison of postmortem features.

The same stomach Ph can prove that the stomach is or isn't empty (depending what helps your case)

The same stomach x-ray can demonstrate murder or wind (depending what helps your case)

Guessing how much insulin would stick to a giving set is an acceptable way of proving murder

A collapse that was suspicious when we thought Lucy Letby was on shift is innocuous when she isn't

A cry such as a mother hasn't heard before necessarily means deliberate harm, not, for example, internal haemorrhage (implied)

There is no need for prosecution witnesses to investigate the nature of a pathogen they haven't heard of to rule out natural causes of death

If a child hasn't inherited a blood disorder, antibodies passed through the placenta can't affect him (implied)

If medical staff decide to take a child with pneumonia off a ventilator, their decision must have been correct so cannot have contributed to deterioration

If a baby collapses and dies, that is evidence of deliberate harm.

A child can die of venous air embolism, with Lee's sign, hours after the air is injected, having stabilised in the meantime.

You can determine that a nurse's presence at a selected range of events is suspicious without a statistical analysis.

It is late at night, and there are certainly more. But there are some of them.

What worries me about this sort of conviction is that it's never obvious how many suspicious incidents you could find if you just picked a nurse at random. For Lucy Letby I have other concerns. I believe from reading their testimony that the expert witnesses took shortcuts, made false claims about the science, filled in the gaps with guesses.

But when people make cases out of things that didn't look suspicious until they counted them, I wonder how often they count them and whether they were really strict with their criteria about what was a suspicious event. Still I am usually very cautious about forming an opinion and want more information.

In Lucy Letby's case I am just really shocked and depressed and angry at how bad the science is. I don't have any weird wish to protect baby killers or blond women. I want to see people take their duty to the court seriously and not to mislead or make convenient leaps to make the story work. I think that some of the prosecution witnesses let absolutely everybody involved down with the standard of their evidence.

She would, but then whatever happened here at least one person has been spectacularly unlucky. Whether it's Letby having been falsely convicted or all the murdered babies and parents who fell victim to a serial killer. The only possible explanations here are all a headfuck.