Anyone else doubting Lucy Letby's guilt?

[Nickersnackersnockers]

Don't know if I am allowed to share a link so please Google 'Science on Trial Lucy Letby'.

It's written by a scientist with no association to LL who is asking questions that were not addressed in court.

I am very disturbed by the article. Don't start slinging mud at me, make a large coffee, go read it, come back, and tell me what you think!

I attended part of Letby’s trial. Until she trashed herself on the stand I thought there was a chance she was innocent. After her evidence I thought she was guilty (and a compulsive liar). When her defence QC called no witnesses except a plumber I was baffled as to why he did that, especially when the plumbers evidence confirmed the prosecution case. I fully expected him to follow up with a witness - or witnesses - to confirm that the babies could have died from infection. But nothing. Zero. Zilch. Then I had no doubt Letby was guilty as charged.

The "scientist" is a nutcase. She never actually graduated and there's a court case transcript about her detailing what a psycho she is.

This is why defence witnesses shouldn’t put defendants on the stand. It never does them any good, innocent or not.

Letbys defence didn’t call any medical witness to the stand to cast doubt on the medical evidence presented by the expert witnesses for the court. Why do think that could be?

Why do you think Letbys KC put the defendant on the stand?

If a defendant does not testify, the jury will be instructed by the judge that they can draw negative inferences from this failure unless their physical or mental condition is such that it is inappropriate for them to give evidence. A failure to give evidence cannot, on its own, be held to prove guilt, but the jury is allowed to use it to assist in determining guilt. There is clearly a question as to whether this breaches the defendant's rights under Article 6 of the EHCR, but no defence barrister is going to recommend remaining silent and mounting a challenge on these grounds. It is therefore rare for defendants not to give evidence.

I didn't follow this case closely enough to have an opinion on Letby's guilt or innocence. However, as I understand it, the medical evidence may have shown that the baby's in question were murdered but didn't show that Letby was the murderer. I believe the case against her was almost entirely circumstantial (she being the only nurse present when all the babies died) coupled with the contents of her diaries. That sounds worryingly similar to the case of Lucia de Berk.

Some of those claiming Letby is innocent appear to be crackpots. However, I note that Richard Gill, emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University and one of the statisticians involved in getting the de Berk case re-opened, is concerned that there was no statistical analysis to determine if there was a higher rate of incidents during Letby's shifts than outside them. He also claims that the rules laid down by the Lord Chief Justice for presentation of scientific evidence were not followed. Gill does not claim Letby is innocent but thinks there should be a retrial. The Royal Statistical Society has also raised concerns and wants the inquiry to look at the use of statistical evidence.

Just to be clear, thinking there may have been factors around her trial that give cause for concern does not mean I think she is innocent. I put myself very firmly in the don't know camp.

You didn’t follow the trial closely. Ah ok.

Personally I don’t rate Richard Gill at all. He was all for Sarrita Adams in the beginning. Now she’s been proven to be a fraud he’s backtracked.

Why wouldn’t a defence KC call a medical witness to argue against claims made by the many medical witnesses for the prosecution?

Not sure why the sarcasm in your first paragraph. I really didn't follow the trial closely.

The defence did not have to prove that the babies were not murdered. They simply had to show that there was reasonable doubt that Letby was the murderer. The medical evidence did not (and could not) prove that Letby was guilty. Of course, if they did have medical experts willing to contradict the evidence called by the prosecution and argue that the babies were not murdered, not calling them may have been a poor decision.

Ben Myers stated in his opening statement that he had medical witnesses to call to the stand. He didn’t call them. Any idea why?

I don't have any inside information.

If Myers said he was going to call medical witnesses, he must have had witnesses available. A barrister is not allowed to lie to the court. It could be that he felt that he had done enough to undermine the medical witnesses called by the prosecution and that further medical evidence might end up being counterproductive, but that is just a guess. I really don't know.

Well he didn’t do anything to undermine the medical evidence produced in court. Hence Letby being handed 14 WLO’s. But you haven’t followed the case so you don’t know why her QC didn’t put up a fight. Fair play to you for admitting that.

I think confusion arises between the UK legal systems and the US, where no inference can be drawn from a decision not to testify (5th amendment), so the defendant is almost always strongly advised not to do so . The right to no adverse inference is so strongly upheld that even a failure by a judge to issue jury instructions about this can itself be a violation of 5th amendment rights (Carter v Kentucky).

Re Letby, I know many HCPs who are concerned about the safety of the conviction - while not necessarily believing her to be innocent - because of the reliance on statistics both to prove that the deaths were homicides and that Letby was the killer.

@prh47bridge

Interesting and fair. I followed the trial to some degree. I cannot comment on LL’s guilt/innocent because I don’t know. All I can say is that on the basis of the evidence, there was no hard evidence to link LL directly to any of the deaths.

I would go further and say from scientific pov there was no hard evidence of murder in any of the cases - the evidence presented was mainly theoretical and some of it highly speculative.

You may be aware of evidence of problems at the unit. This was not discussed at the trial and may not have been acceptable as evidence, but given outcomes, certainly significant to the bigger picture.

Even the defence conceded that the insulin cases must have been deliberate, i.e. clearly attempted murder.

They did, for reasons that are not clear. But if you read the data on each insulin case, it is by no means clear a crime has been committed.

I've spent ALOT of today reading the page you're referring to.

I can say, with experience as a nicu nurse in a large level 3 surgical unit,

Pushing air via a feeding tube, can and does cause a gut injury (perforation of bowel) which can lead to death.

In once instance the 27 week who "self extubated" right in front of LL. would have, without a doubt needed help to breathe without that breathing tube, she was seen. Just standing there and stated "I was waiting to see if baby did anything by itself" she was basically watching this premature baby gasp for air.

The insulin debate, she did the fluids, it would have been easy for her to inject the fluid, even into the next bag that would be used because the made up bags of TPN are generally made up for specific days. No one would have known it had happened.

I do think she's guilty,

It angers me that all us good dedicated nurses are now under scrutiny daily doing the jobs we love.

I bet the scientist who wrote that page has never stepped foot on a neonatal unit,

And he's berating Dr Evans for using out of date research, when many of the papers quoted in this website are from 1982!

It's hard to gain research on neonates because it's un ethical,

A premature baby, can be clinically stable,

I think you don't realise just how painstaking the investigation was, and how comprehensive the evidence given to the court. Using records from every source, including medical records, computer records including records showing when information was input, swipe cards, phones etc the police and prosecution put together a minute by minute account of everything that was happening in the unit at the relevant times, showing who was where also from minute to minute. Taken with the forensic evidence which the defence did not seriously contest, it really didn't leave room for reasonable doubt.

All that and you haven’t even noticed it was all circumstantial with no direct evidence linking LL to the deaths, and no forensic evidence either (altho forensic evidence is circumstantial).

And yet her application for permission to appeal has just been thrown out.

Circumstantial evidence is perfectly valid. Unsurprisingly, murderers tend not to perform their crimes in plain sight.

Indeed. I think she may get a retrial in the end. The expert witness Dr Dewi Evans’ evidence has all the making of another Roy Meadows.

I did not say circumstantial evidence isn’t valid, but it doesn’t prove murder in this particular case. Validity and proof are not the same thing.

She's been refused an appeal, she's not going to get a retrial!

If the evidence was not capable of proving guilt the judge would have had to direct the jury to acquit, and Letby would now have permission to appeal. Do you think perhaps that the people sitting in court who heard all the evidence, including Letby's, and saw all the documents might know more about it?

You state this as fact but haven't seen all the evidence or heard all the testimonies. And those who did found her guilty on many counts.

They found her incident of a number of counts, which indicates they didn't make their decisions rashly and weighed up the evidence without bias in the end.

You staying as fact that the evidence doesn't prove her guilt means you're saying you know better than the jury, despite them having full access to far more information than you.

Which is quite an odd stance to take. Almost arrogant. Very dismissive of what must have been an utterly traumatic experience for the jurors.

That was obviously meant to say:

They found her innocent of a number of counts, which indicates they didn't make their decisions rashly and weighed up the evidence without bias in the end.

I think the volume of scientific information presented to the court was highly problematic given that the average jury member may not have any scientific or medical background.