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?

Ah, I see you’re trying to divide parts of the evidence up in just the way I was referring to in my reply to another poster. ‘First let’s see if the science reveals murder, and only then shall we move on to any other evidence’. A murder trial does not and most definitely should not work like that. It’s the reductive approach Nick Johnson referred to in the Court of Appeal.

I can see that the relationship can be more subtle than that, of course. But I am happy to stick with the proposition that the question of whether murders happened cannot be settled without reference to rigorous and reliablely established sciences and that this has not happened in this case.

Jesus H Christ.

Please for the love of all things unholy actually analyse the feasibility of "punching a baby in the liver" with "the force of a car crash" when the liver is going to be about 5cm in size in an average neonate and partially under the ribs, when that baby is in an NICU and an incubator with people milling around and there being no indication of such an event. Even a savage poke would be logistically difficult. And to cause all this without doing any other damage? When is this assault supposed to have happened? It. Makes. NO. SENSE.

But it does make for lurid emotive jury swaying headlines 🙄

That doesn't follow from @DistantEarlyWarning 's statement, that I can see. You can arrange your legal processes either way, in theory - simultaneous or sequential exploration of whether a death is natural and who committed any murder. Often the circumstances make the former a mere formality. But obviously if a death is natural, there is no murderer.

Now, you can argue if you like that where there is any uncertainty about cause of death, the identification through circumstancial evidence of a likely murderer increases the probability that cause of death wasn't natural. But that was not the argument advanced in Lucy Letby's case, where the jury was told that natural causes of death had been excluded by the scientific experts employed by the prosecution

Your proposition is wrong. As demonstrated by cases in which murder has been proved in the absence of a body. You’ll say ‘yes, but where there is a body…’. That your proposition is wrong is also demonstrated by, say, a case in which toxicology shows poisoning but it could have equally been self-administered or not, or where there is blunt force trauma from hitting the ground but the question remains did they fall or were they pushed. In none of those cases would you have a scientific indication of murder. You’d look to other evidence.

In fact, and this is something that occurred to me earlier in the thread when talking about the Shoo Lee press conference, a scientist giving a cause of death wouldn’t actually say ‘murder’ would they? Because it’s not a clinical term. Anyway, they certainly wouldn’t say it in the examples I’ve given, and in many other fairly commonplace examples we could both no doubt think of. So your proposition is proved wrong; whether a murder took place does not have to be, and I would suggest quite often isn’t, settled with reference to science.

@MistressoftheDarkSide I think I'll take the forensic pathologist's opinion that it is possible over yours, no offence. If someone harms a baby then that is going to cause some sort of internal injury. I don't know what she used but she had plenty of medical implements at her disposal. She probably looked down the corridor first and that's all the time it took. Probably seconds. She was a nurse, she knew exactly where to do it. How does a liver spontaneously erupt? Ask yourself that. And why does it only happen when Lucy is there?

Anyway since you asked, it's explained here how it's possible not to have damaged other organs etc.

The prosecution experts, including pathologist Dr Andreas Marnerides, maintained that a severe, blunt-force internal injury could occur in a newborn without leaving external bruises or damaging surrounding organs: 1]

• Elasticity of a Baby’s Body: A newborn's skin, muscles, and ribs are exceptionally elastic, pliable, and flexible compared to an adult's. This compliance allows the chest and abdominal wall to compress deeply under pressure and bounce back without tearing the skin or fracturing ribs, transferring the force directly to the solid organs underneath.

• The Vulnerability of the Liver: Because of active blood cell production, a premature baby’s liver is disproportionately large, soft, and engorged with blood. It sits prominently in the abdomen, making it a highly vulnerable "shock absorber." The prosecution argued that a specific, focused squeeze or blow to the abdomen could rupture the delicate liver capsule and cause massive internal bleeding without necessarily fracturing bones or tearing the highly elastic outer skin.

You are misinterpreting the "without reference to", there. In cases where science can tell us nothing, or offer two reasonable alternatives, we have referred to the science to the extent that it can be applied. In case where the prosecution relies on the science to demonstrate even the possibility of murder, one must also refer to it to the extent that it can be applied. Of course, Lucy Letby's case is in this third category, and has relied, unfortunately, on false claims, exaggerations, guesswork and pseudoscience.

As to Lee's saying, "we did not find any murders", that was not of course his announcing most likely cause of death. He had announced these findings already. It was his comment on the significance of his findings in the light of the accusations levelled at Lucy Letby.

This comment highlights precisely why your comments on this case have no credibility. The verdict that a jury is supposed to reach - beyond reasonable doubt - is a statistical judgement: by definition it is an assessment of probability i.e. that there is statistically such a small chance of the accused not having committed the crime that we can conclude with almost certainty (no reasonable doubt) that they are guilty.

Someone so dismissive of the basic statistical assessment of evidence required to draw valid conclusions from it would be incapable of making a fair assessment of the evidence to reach a valid conclusion based on objective facts rather than their inherent biases, suspicions, prejudices or emotional responses and, therefore, I hope for the sake of us all that you are never called for jury service.

This highlights one of the enormous problems with the jury system particularly in complex cases which involve technical, financial, medical etc. expertise (especially given this is compounded by the failings of the “expert witness” system and the lack of judges and barristers with the expert knowledge needed to do their job effectively in complex, technical cases). I would be absolutely terrified to face a jury trial if innocent given the level of skills in objective rational analysis and statistical knowledge demonstrated by some of the posters on this thread and I should imagine that across the population of the general public the proportion of the population capable of carrying out the role effectively would likely be even lower. It’s extremely concerning because this fundamentally undermines our justice system and the protection for all of us against false allegations.

The jury system is no longer fit for purpose.

Based on what?

Evidently. Therefore, you should never be anywhere near a trial and any comments you make regarding whether evidence is sufficient to meet the of threshold “beyond any reasonable doubt” (a probabilistic assertion) and, therefore, whether such a verdict is valid amount to nothing of any substance at all.

By stating that you “do not care about statistics” you lose any credibility for any of your assertions regarding any legal case because determining the probability of guilt beyond a statistically insignificant threshold is precisely what a criminal case is about.

Without this, we would be reducing the process to people’s opinions, rather than an objective assessment of what is proved by evidence. The fact you think this is possible to do while admitting you have no understanding or and actively ignore statistics/ probability and have “no interest in it” discredits your views to the level of nothing more than conjecture.

I have read this thread with great interest and it is very clear that those asserting very strongly that this case was not a miscarriage of justice have not only failed to put forward any credible argument or evidence supporting that assertion but have failed to refute any of the statistically robust observations made by other posters. As far as I can see, none of the “evidence” put forward at this trial would even meet the “more probable than not” required for a civil case, let alone a criminal one. Despite the dysfunctional nature of the CoA and CCRC, inevitably this case will be exposed as one of the worst miscarriages of justice ever to take place in our legal system. We should all be extremely concerned that someone can have 15 life sentences imposed without one shred of convincing evidence to support even one verdict.

There is not even credible evidence to justify charges being brought at all or the CPS proceeding to court. Firstly, the requirement is to demonstrate that a crime has taken place. This has not happened, let alone proving beyond reasonable doubt that a specific person is guilty of committing these supposed crimes. Yet we have somebody in prison for alleged crimes which have not been shown to have taken place, no credible evidence that this person committed the alleged crimes, and no viable method of them having done so having put forward (let alone a motive, although that’s not a requirement for conviction, it simply makes the allegations even less plausible).

Occam’s Razor has sliced this “case” to pieces, I’m afraid.

Yawn. No wonder you think she's innocent when you listen to statisticians instead of doctors and investigators. Statisticians that seem really put out that lay people can interpret stats better than them. They should all resign and apologise for being so useless. Or at least shut up until they've got all the data (that makes her look even more guilty) and admit they were wrong.

Someone so dismissive of the basic statistical assessment of evidence required to draw valid conclusions from it would be incapable of making a fair assessment of the evidence to reach a valid conclusion based on objective facts rather than their inherent biases, suspicions, prejudices or emotional responses and, therefore, I hope for the sake of us all that you are never called for jury service.

They ask lay people to be on juries not statistics geniuses who think they can do a little equation and determine whether someone's a killer or not. People who don't even understand the concept of circumstantial evidence. I'm more terrified that any of my loved ones could be murdered in hospital and posters on this thread think because they haven't reached some statistical threshold that they don't matter and their killer should go free.

Statisticians that seem really put out that lay people can interpret stats better than them

Why do you think pharmaceutical companies hire statisticians to interpret stats from clinical trials, if lay people can do it better and would be much cheaper? As do government agencies deciding whether to approve new treatments.

Statisticians that seem really put out that lay people can interpret stats better than them.

Are you Donald Trump?

How ironic.

Circumstantial evidence will - if credible - slightly increase the probable likelihood of a suspect’s guilt, but an enormous quantity of it and - crucially - the lack of any other plausible explanation - is required for this alone to secure a valid conviction “beyond reasonable doubt”. The alternative explanation doesn’t even have to be more probable, just enough that there is some reasonable doubt that the accused possibly isn’t guilty. Yet, in this case, the alternative plausible explanations for these deaths are far more probable than that a nurse became a serial killer, particularly when nobody has put forward a viable method for her even to have carried out these “murders” if she wanted to, hence the convictions being unsafe.

The entire point is that the curcumstantial evidence tje prosecution put forward was deeply flawed, presented in a biased manner, with counterevidence not presented in court by order of the judge or not disclosed to the prosecution, and that this evidence the prosecution relied on when considered properly and not misrepresented scientifically is not sufficient to demonstrate guilt to a criminal threshold (reducing the probability of innocence to near zero, and that circumstantial evidence is only sufficient if the overall probability of guilt when taking all circumstantial evidence as a whole is both higher than the probability of any plausible alternative explanation and passes the threshold of “beyond reasonable doubt”) i.e. that there is such a weight of circumstantial evidence that it reduces statistically the probability that the accused did not commit the crime to close to zero: this is what is required to prove a criminal case from circumstantial evidence alone. It seems quite clear that the evidence put forward in this case falls far below achieving that.

On what basis are you asserting that “lay people can interpret stats better than statisticians”? Clearly if that was the case expert witnesses wouldn’t need to be called at all in the many cases where they are used precisely because average lay people don’t have the skills to assess such things. As I and others have pointed out, the system for providing such witnesses unfortunately is deeply flawed and has led to numerous miscarriages of justice to date so requires urgent reform to make it fit for purpose. That said, why would courts call expert witnesses at all if “lay people” were better at assessing technical information or mathematical probability and the validity of technical/ complex evidence and whether it is presented objectively and in a non-misleading manner?

You are making comments about statistical analysis/ probability and dismissing this as irrelevant (“I have no interest in statistics” - your words) while simultaneously highlighting that you do not understand that establishing probability is the entire purpose of any criminal court trial because the purpose of the jury’s role is to determine whether the required threshold of likelihood of guilt (beyond any reasonable doubt) has been supported by the evidence presented.

Any jury making a decision while disregarding probability would not be able to do their job at all, by definition, since this is their entire purpose in the role.

On what basis, instead, do you propose they determine their verdict?! Whether they like the defendent? Their “demeanour”? Their “gut feeling”? Their fear of something similar happening to their family, as you suggested in your latest post to me? Superstitions or sayings such as “there is no smoke without a fire”? Any method of determining a verdict that isn’t an objective and rational assessment of probability and establishing that no other plausible explanation for events exists demonstrates that the jury system is not serving its legal purpose, and sadly this lack of capability in juries alongside a flawed legal system/ lack of specialist knowledge in barristers/ judges, inappropriate expert witness selection and use procedures, etc. underly the many miscarriages of justice that have been identified to date, and I’m sure many more that haven’t been exposed. This should terrify anybody who values their freedom.

Hence the concern caused by comments like this on this thread from numerous posters, that many random members of the public if selected for jury service would not only not be capable of carrying out the role if a jury member adequately but even, it seems, incapable of understanding what the purpose of the role is in the first place.

Clearly in this case the jury was presented with very misleading evidence, false assertions from “experts”, purjured witnesses, non-experts purporting to be experts and making up implausible/ impossible causes of death and presenting these as facts (then later changing or retracting them), false assertions that no other cause of death was possible, and only a limited and biased sample of the evidence because some evidence was banned from being presented in court/ illegally withheld from disclosure by the prosecution. So in this case it is not the jury’s fault that they made an incorrect verdict because the trial process was a shambles. Hence it being so vital that statisticians and objective scientific experts with the right expertise are involved throughout court processes - and should also be advising judges on what to admit to evidence - to ensure that such miscarriages of justice as minimised in future.

However, in terms of cases in general, your comments are baffling. Why do you think evidence is presented in trials? What do you believe is the purpose of the trial process: to see how the jury “feels” about the defendant? Or for them to make an objective and rational analysis of whether the evidence meets the evidential threshold necessary i.e. demonstrating that there is close to zero chance that the accused is innocent? How do you believe this can be achieved without assessing probability relative to any other possible explanations?

What do you mean by “shut up until they’ve got all the data (that makes her look even more guilty) and admit they were wrong”?

What data? Are you claiming you have data that isn’t available in the trial papers and transcripts, medical reports etc? What’s your evidence for this claim that statisticians’ and scientists’ analysis of the evidence in this case is “wrong”? I have read all of your posts and haven’t seen any explanation for this assertion that stands up to any scrutiny so I am genuinely interested to hear your reasoning with reference to the actual evidence and how you believe this proves guilt beyond reasonable doubt (especially as there is more than reasonable doubt about whether any murders took place at all).

I have to say when reading the thread I have found your posts aggressive, quite rude and dismissive of robust points put to you politely by other posters, and notably lacking of any coherent or rational response to refute the scientific and statistical evidence put to you by others.

Reading this thread has highlighted to me a stark and conspicuous contrast between the well-reasoned, detailed, calm, well-informed, scientific, mathematical and rational posts from those who believe this was a miscarriage of justice/ the convictions are unsafe, and on the other hand the fact that many (not all) who seem to believe that LL is guilty (not even that the convictions are safe, but actually positively asserting there is sufficient evidence of guilt even with the previously undisclosed/ unadmitted evidence at the trial which has come to light subsequently) have posted in a rather rude and aggressive manner, made misinformed and vitriolic posts and yet such posters have been unable to provide a single coherent argument between them to support this which stands up to scientific or mathematical or evidential scrutiny in terms of coming close to meeting the required evidential threshold for criminal conviction. Instead, there have been posts accusing people of being racist or sexist simply because LL is female and white, there have been ridiculous comments about “would you ask her to babysit your children?” which is irrelevant, there have been posts telling people they are “supporting a babykiller” just because they want our justice system to be fair and ensure people aren’t convicted without sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt (which is surely in all of our interests!).

When one hopes to read a rational discussion with both sides of an argument put coherently this discrepancy between the two perspectives and how they are argued has been very apparent and I think anybody rational reading the thread will probably, like me, find the silly and largely vacuous responses from those convinced of LL’s guilt and their inability/ unwillingness to engage with any of the evidence of far more than “reasonable doubt”, dismissal of the mathematic rigour which is used to draw valid conclusions in research in every single field of science, etc. quite undermines your own position @Firefly1987, so in my opinion your approach to your posts is quite counterproductive in terms of what you’re actually hoping to achieve.

I listened to the podcast following the trial knowing the verdict and being prepared that she was guilty. But I still found the evidence to be incredibly weak and mainly circumstantial. I actually don’t know if I think she’s guilty or not, but I don’t think anything presented really met the beyond reasonable doubt test.

Really? You don’t think that the first step in investigating a suspected crime should be to establish if there was a crime? If there isn’t even sufficient evidence that any crime took place at all, what on earth were the police investigating and how can they seek a “suspect”? This isn’t “reductive”, it is literally how the judicial system is supposed to work.

“I'm more terrified that any of my loved ones could be murdered in hospital and posters on this thread think because they haven't reached some statistical threshold that they don't matter and their killer should go free.”

Do you genuinely not see how this statement contradicts itself? If there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that a crime took place at all, let alone sufficient evidence to reach a valid conclusion beyond reasonable doubt that a specific person committed this supposed crime, then there is no rational reason to suspect that there is a “killer” present of whom you should be scared: in the absence of any convincing evidence all that exists are insinuations, hunches, misapprehensions, biases, suspicions, prejudices, etc. In effect, you’d be being scared of nothing more than your own imagination and that certainly isn’t a reason that someone else should spend their lifetime in prison.

Most of us like to believe we’ve moved on a little since the old traditions of throwing suspected witches into lakes with their hands bound just to be on the safe side, with the “lucky” ones proving their innocence by drowning and the unlucky evil crones floating and then being burned alive afterwards.

Most of us are very concerned about the integrity of our judicial system which is essential to minimise the likelihood that people are convicted of crimes without sufficient evidence to meet the stringent probability threshold for criminal cases which is - rightly - very high. That is why a case like this is so very concerning, with someone being convicted of such serious crimes without any credible evidence put forward that comes close to meeting the threshold required. If the CCRC does not take the necessary action to address this due to its own restrictive criteria - which are not designed to ensure that the correct decision was made, rather, primarily, to defend the flawed judicial process from challenge - then I think that organisation will be inadvertently signing its own death warrant because its position will become completely untenable.

Let me try and illustrate with an example. I fear it will be used against me by posters determined not to listen, but here goes.

Imagine a loved one dies after falling from a balcony. They were with one other person at the time, there’s circumstantial evidence surrounding that person, maybe they were heard arguing with the victim beforehand and seen running away immediately afterwards (insert any other circumstantial evidence you can think of, as strong or as weak as you like, as long as it’s not based on science). Then imagine the police come knocking at your door to say ‘sorry, we can’t investigate this any further, and we can’t look into any potential suspects, because the pathologist says she can’t say he didn’t get the injuries just by falling rather than being pushed; as we can’t establish a crime with reference to science, case closed’.

Happy? That’s all I’m saying. You don’t say ‘first let’s see if the science reveals murder and only then move on to other evidence’. I’ve deliberately repeated the wording from my earlier post because it seems in danger of being misinterpreted/twisted.

Sorry no. A true comparison would be if he’d been complaining of chest discomfort all day, assuming it was indigestion and had then suffered a fatal heart attack and was dead before falling. Although the post mortem identified this the police ignored it and still brought murder charges.

That example makes sense, of course, but isn’t equivalent.

In your example the cause of death was un questionably traumatic injury, which was in turn caused by a fall. The question is whether that fall was an accident or was murder.

In the Letby case the medical cause of death is disputed, and the underlying reason is also disputed.

If we don’t even have certainty that air embolism killed a baby, then we can’t know that it was deliberately injected.

If we did know that AE was the cause of death, then we’d be closer to your scenario.

NB It’s not meant to be anything like Letby. It’s meant to illustrate simply the point I said it’s meant to illustrate.

I get the point... but in your particular example, there's no argument that the person died by hitting the ground below the balcony and it's the circumstances of that fall (accidental or not) that are important. In that case, circumstantial evidence can't be ignored. The injuries are going to be similar in either case. If they were found in a swimming pool then it would be important whether they drowned or had a heart attack or broke their neck so the medical evidence would be more important, regardless of who they were seen arguing with.

In the LL case, the prosecution gave a whole range of different methods of harm (some changing during the trial, some events shifting in time and some apparently no longer suspicious) and the closer you look at that, the more it looks like they started with a "murderer" and fit the events to it.

I'm not saying they don't have their place or that lay people can do it better every time. It's just so obvious that in this particular case the person is guilty and lay people can see it whilst the statisticians can't. So it means they're not much use here.

I'm just perplexed why they are getting so involved in this case. The police tried to make it into a statistical case and were told no you can't do that, so they didn't. You'd think Jane Hutton would've been happy with this? I don't see what the issue is. All I can ascertain is that they want far more input than was ever going to happen. And Hutton is angry she was fired. I'm sure there are plenty of statisticians out there not sticking their oar into a case they know little about, in which case I have no issue with them.

But the babies collapsed and died suddenly and unexpectedly so your comparison with someone complaining of chest discomfort all day doesn't work. These babies were stable, that's literally the point of the whole case against her. If someone was in hospital complaining of chest pain all day and then had a heart attack would people be that surprised they'd died?

But the case was, in fact, based on statistics. You yourself keep on saying things like “what are the chances” and “she must have been very unlucky”.