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?

You've claimed before that the new unit would no longer take multiples-do you have a source for this?

The weakest triplet had no issues, his two stronger brothers died. Like Dr Brearey pointed out, none of this makes any sense from a clinical perspective. You can say oh they were all at risk for x reason but that doesn't explain why the strongest twin/triplet was the one to collapse first. I don't think there's an explanation for that except deliberate harm.

Lucy was there for almost all of them, even the ones with congenital defects weren't expected to die when they did.

It’s ironic that statistical evidence given by an expert led to a miscarriage of justice in the case of Angela Cannings.

Good point. The statisticians just can't get it right can they? Now they've taken an overly cautious approach where they will basically claim every single killer nurse is innocent instead.

Someone did a chart on reddit showing all the evidence heard in court and the shift table was such a tiny percentage of the trial. It's the supporters that focus on it, most people who know she's guilty focus on the medical evidence, her proximity to the incidents and her behaviour before and after.

The statistics in this case, such as they were, went nowhere near misleading the jury in my view, and, crucially, in the view of Myers and the rest of the defence team, who did not raise the treatment of the shift table as a ground of appeal at all. It’s almost as if some of the innocence lobby, who make the same tired old points about that shift table, haven’t read the judgment. Surely not…

Yep and turns out she was on for the vast majority of deaths so even if Myers had shown other deaths not on the indictment it would've just made her look even worse (probably why he didn't) especially now we know when she was working nights all these collapses/deaths were happening between just 12-4a.m. I guess this mystery virus just liked to strike during Letby nightshifts...

It showed her presence relative to the presence of all the other nurses, so they can see she was the only one there for all of them and how few or how many the others were present for.

Yeah I mean, lets say they DID just cherry pick her shifts, that still doesn't explain why her numbers are so far above everyone else's'. Especially when she sometimes struck during other nurses shifts so they were linked to the deaths too inadvertently.

Its almost as if you are ignoring parts on the informtion souly so that you can make her guilty.

It has been repeatly explained why it came about that she did so many shifts.
And it has also been pointed out that all of dewi's theories are just unproven ideas that he put forward including how she so how tempered with tamper proof bags to kill babies that she wasn't there for.

Ian Harvey gave the details at Thirlwall. It's obvious anyway. You can't take planned multiple births when you have only one emergency ICU cot. Monochorionic triplets have a 95% perinatal mortality risk. They're never going to be delivered at a level 1 unit.

Of course the weakest (in utero) triplet can survive when the other two die. Things like infection, birth injury, iatrogenic harm can affect one child and not another, and one child more than another. Otherwise we could predict every outcome at birth.

Yes, Lucy Letby was present for almost all the deaths. The consultants' judgements on which deaths were unexpected and unexplained fluctuated wildly. Not long before they wrote their report to "pique" police interest it was eight. Now it was twelve ... Their criteria of course were never explained

@FrippEnos you know you can repeatedly explain things and it still doesn't mean you're right don't you? People don't just have to accept what you say because you're smart and they're stupid.

Anything to say on the collapses mostly happening between 12-4a.m until she was moved off night shifts, the strongest twin being targeted first, the fact that 32 weekers have almost a 100% survival rate and 6 of the babies who were killed were 32+ weeks? None of this has anything to do with her working more shifts. It's almost as if you ignore anything that points to her guilt.

I really wish people would stop scapegoating Dewi Evans as well, presumably the endocrinologist was the main expert talking about tamper proof bags and insulin. Oh look-

The "tamper bags" or "poisoned second bag" theory regarding insulin administration in the Lucy Letby trial was primarily advanced by paediatric endocrinologist Professor Peter Hindmarsh. 1]
While lead prosecution medical expert Dr. Dewi Evans initially identified the general cases of unexpected neonatal collapses, it was Professor Hindmarsh who provided the specific endocrinology expertise regarding Child F and Child L.

Some posters obviously need it repeatedly explaining to them that Dewi Evans was not the only expert who agreed this was deliberate harm.

Firefly1987

Maybe if you didn't insist on posting only half (being generous here) of the information then the discussion would move passed people having to rehash the same points over and over again and we could actually move on.

You are quite capable of doing so but seem insistant on only posting parts of the information and being snarky towards anyone that doesn't agree with you.

Who was the statistician in the Angela Cannings case?

Well done. You have completely undermined the post you’re agreeing with by demonstrating that you, a potential juror, are completely swayed by dodgy statistical inferences.

It’s ironic that statistical evidence given by an expert led to a miscarriage of justice in the case of Angela Cannings

Not by a statistics expert: a pediatrician (Roy Meadows) doing amateur statistics. Like in the Letby case.

It showed her presence relative to the presence of all the other nurses

Prosecutors implied that, if there were no murders, the rows would be expected to look similar for all nurses. But that wasn't true given how the chart was constructed. E.g. an event where Letby was off-shift would not be on the chart, which was not so for any other nurse. The rows were not constructed identically for all nurses, so it doesn't make sense to compare them. It would only make sense if they'd been constructed without knowledge of any suspect, and only then compared. Also, the number of events a nurse is expected to be present for would be influenced by the number and condition of babies on her shifts, so comparing raw event counts without normalizing for that is incorrect.

it was open to the defence to point out the limitations of this

It's clear that the defence missed some real flaws in the prosecution case. "This defense lawyer did not object" does not mean "no valid objection existed".

Ah another one of these. A question that looks like you already know the answer. Last time you then said it was a genuine question. So here goes. Roy Meadows was the person. Not a statistician. So you could say ‘look what happens when poor statistics are used by someone with a veneer of expertise’. Yes. And there’s absolutely no evidence that’s what happened with LL.

Anything to say about the rest of the post you’ve taken the first sentence from? How was the shift table misused, if you think it was? Any theories as to why Myers hasn’t said it was?

The shift table was misused by its presentation without discussion of its construction and by its inclusion of the claim it covered all suspicious events without discussing how they were identified. We see from the closed-door discussions reproduced in the transcripts that Myers was forbidden to discuss the construction of the case in court and was not granted the information he requested on selection of the cases behind the scenes

P.S. I said "the rows" assuming each row corresponded to a nurse, but now recall that rows may have corresponded to events while nurses to columns. If so, replace "the rows" with "the columns" in my post above.

You stated

“It’s ironic that statistical evidence given by an expert led to a miscarriage of justice in the case of Angela Cannings.”

It would only be ironic if that expert was a statistician.

How about we deal with this, before we discuss the misleading nature of the shift chart.

Quote fail, but my response above was in reply to this.

Ok, not ironic.

Not sure how much more we can ‘deal with it’. I’ve answered you already. My real point is that I don’t think a statistical expert would have assisted the jury in LL, as they were not presented with anything they were not equipped to weigh up for themselves. They were not presented with anything like the Meadows evidence. Even if they would have been assisted by such an expert, that’s not enough to found a basis for an appeal. It has to be shown they were led astray in a material way. From what I know of the trial and what the table showed, they were not.

I respect the fact that you are seeking to engage with the proper issues here which is more than some posters do. This is getting closer to something that could theoretically form the basis of an arguable appeal. Something the defence were denied disclosure on or denied the opportunity to present. But I disagree that we can say there actually was anything of that nature. The person best placed to know about this is Myers, who, as you say, was all over the issue. Very telling, then, that it didn’t form part of his appeal.

So what was your point?

On the shift chart, neither of us knows how much influence it had on the jury, or why Myers didn’t include it in his appeal. But it has been feted by the pro-verdict commentators as being evidence that Letby was “always there”, which seems to me to indicate that 12 good persons may be equally swayed by incomplete data.

I don't know. It's not necessary to have used something as grounds for appeal (or to have had no opportunity to do so) for this issue to be used as grounds for CCRC referral back to CoA later. We are all spilling ink and pixels three years on, but realistically Myers needed to choose the points on which he thought the CoA would be most susceptible and focus his resources for some months of work on the appeal.

He didn't have (for example) the leaked emails from the consultants about piquing police interest at this point, or other material that's emerged from Thirlwall and other sources - details of the unprosecuted "third insulin case", for example, weren't disclosed. So any challenge from McDonald on this point is likely to surpass what Myers could have mustered for the Court of Appeal, and to feature claims re non-disclosure, which is often grounds for CCRC referral.

What was my point? The sentence beginning ‘My real point is…’ is a signpost. Good grief.

Neither of us knows how much influence it had on the jury

Don’t need to know. As long as they heard nothing they shouldn’t have heard (and my argument is that they didn’t), they can let it influence them as much or as little as they liked. It’s their province.

Or why Myers didn’t include it in his appeal

Exactly why doesn’t matter. But one answer to ‘why’ must surely be ‘it wasn’t arguable in his view’ and bearing in mind he was the person making the arguments at trial about the shift pattern evidence, the fact is incredibly significant without going into the whys.

I was asking what point there was in making the factually inaccurate statement:

“It’s ironic that statistical evidence given by an expert led to a miscarriage of justice in the case of Angela Cannings.”

You have to be extremely rigorous to prove a genuine association, and there is abundant evidence what the prosecution expert witnesses were sloppy and inventive instead
The way people's form their opinions is nothing like the process of court. In court, whether someone is guilty or not becomes almost irrelevant. The court is made up of skilled people who try to convince lay members one way or the other.

How are you calculating these probabilities?
I'm not calculating them, and there is no need to do so. I'm giving a purposely large scale. Now if you want to argue that there is a high probability that all the deaths are just a random set of events, you're welcome to do so!

Sadly, average Jo loves to think of themselves as clever detective that can use their superior intelligence to better analyse information than any directly involved professionals and that gives them the aptitude to critic them. More astonishingly, they usually do so with an overt bias, but they still think they've got it right.

It's because we don't expect a jury to weigh up complex probabilities, applying the necessary rigour to decide whether items should be on a chart or not, in this case, that we are questioning the use of the chart by the prosecution.

Your own assumptions about how probable different things are are your prerogative. But it's worth noting that these aren't the alternative probabilities the jury was presented with. The expert witnesses' claims were that they had "diagnosed" murderous methods only on the basis other causes of death weren't possible at all. Without these claims we don't know even whether the CPS would have accepted the charges, never mind what the jury might have thought

Nope. I just understand statistics and the harm their misuse can do.

I also understand that rashes are not symptoms of air embolism, that spiking a PN bag with insulin is an implausible method of murder, that putting air or milk into a stomach has never been documented to cause death, and that inadequate consultant cover and poor infection control puts patient safety at significant risk.

Think you need to do a bit of research. The handover sheets were hers & would not of been filed in patient notes. As she changed her uniform she put them in a plastic bag under her bed, from everyone she looked after not just the babies who died there were some also in a black bag in the garage. Not sure about in a wardrobe but the were 3 kept in a file I presume she had to write statements about, which you have to do in your own time so I presume that is why they were there not sure if they were about any of the babies she was charged with. Most people look up people on FB especially if you were with the family in a traumatic time in there lives & want to see how they were doing think only very small number of babies who died the rest of the searches were just colleagues friends etc. go look at Lucy letby analysis on YT they go through all this ‘evidence’ with a fine tooth comb .

But the problem is they may have not understood the evidence. It would be be like asking you what a brain surgeon did wrong in his surgery you have 3 options. How would you know which option to choose with no background in brain surgery? Did he actually do anything wrong? You only really have the prosecution telling you she did it she had no real defence.