Is Ravi Jayaram Shady? (Lucy Letby)

[ConcernedCitizen0502]

It seems the police made an error with key card swipe timings that was discovered between the first and second Letby trial's.

At the first Letby trial and in the media Dr Ravi Jayaram made a lot of melodramatic statements about having a "precise memory" of looking at his watch "emblazoned" in his mind and "etched in my memories and nightmares forever".

Yet when the keycard error was discovered at the second trial, the altered timings put him against the witness statements of two independent nurses (plus Lucy Letby) and also a note he made to the transport team.

Do you think Dr Ravi Jayaram is trustworthy? He was reprimanded for bullying Lucy Letby before the police became involved in the case. He also guided the direction of the police investigation.

Breakdown of the timings with reference to the court reports here;

If the other evidence stacked up then you wouldn’t get expert after expert followed by newspaper after newspaper questioning it.
Even the Daily Mail had a sympathetic headline yesterday.

I think the problem with Dr Jayaram, by contrast, is that he became more certain as time went on eg. Initially saying he didn’t remember whether the alarm was going off then remembering at trial that it wasn’t.

So why were death rates so much higher after Letby started working at the hospital?

I find it so strange that people are trying to assert her innocence when she's so obviously guilty based on the evidence.

@DirectionToPerfection

"So why were death rates so much higher after Letby started working at the hospital?

I find it so strange that people are trying to assert her innocence when she's so obviously guilty based on the evidence."

Correlation isn't causation

I know he’s an unreliable witness.
Is he shady? I don’t know.
I have the most difficulty in understanding why LL’s defence was so poor.

I don’t know if LL is guilty or not because most of the evidence is circumstantial or could be caused by other things.
Imo the only person who knows if she’s guilty is LL.

The mortality rate of very premature babies is only 6.5% in the UK. It’s more common for all sick premature babies born from 27 weeks (the babies that Lucy’s team cared for) to survive and deaths should have been rare. Nurses noted that deaths only stopped between Lucy’s shifts and they had reported it from the beginning.

Clearly there were suspicions from some, but not all, colleagues. That doesn’t mean there weren’t serious problems with the investigation, expert witnesses and the defence.
Clusters of deaths related to infections happen in hospitals - especially where you have sewage leaks.

Deaths did not stop between Letby's shifts. The chart used by the prosecution which they claimed "proved" Letby's guilt by showing her as being on duty whenever a baby died had a number of problems. We now know it was wrong - the chart shows her on duty on at least one occasion when she wasn't - and it doesn't show anything like all the deaths that happened during that period. It is a shame the defence didn't call a statistician. They would have torn that chart to pieces. The only thing it proves is that, when Letby was on duty, she was on duty.

On the subject of the thread, I don't see any reason to believe the consultant is shady. However, we know that memories are reconstructed, not replayed. That means they are a lot less reliable than we think. I know that I have two or three vivid memories that, for various reasons, cannot possibly be true. The consultant may well have the vivid memories he claimed, but they were wrong.

The stats I have seen are that there were 250ish births at the hospital per year with 7 deaths in 2015 and 8 deaths in 2016.

The stats seem to be muddled because of babies getting passed from hospital to hospital. I guess a baby could also be considered a healthy birth and then admitted at 13 days for instance.

There seems to be some kind of genuine coincidence (if you think Letby is innocent) which alerted the consultants to Letby's presence or it could be that Letby was the cause of the deaths.

I don't think the statistical evidence is over whelming damning because otherwise there wouldn't be as many statisticians speaking out. However, John O'quigley did say that the Countess of Chester was the worst performing hospital statistically in 2015 if you scale for admissions though a hospital in 2014 apparently did quite a bit worse if you compare to other years.

"Nurses noted".

It's not really true to say that there were accusations against Letby coming from Nurses.

On the contrary she was quite popular amongst Nurses.

The RCPCH review noted;

"The review team was told that the individual was an enthusiastic, capable and committed Nurse who had worked on the unit for four years

her nursing colleagues on the unit were reported to think highly of her and how she responded to emergencies and other difficult situations"

At the most recent retrial one of the Nurses, Joanne Williams, contradicted Dr Jayaram's account of the incident. Dr Jayaram said alarms weren't sounding when Letby was alone with baby K, Joanne Williams said to her recollection both she and Dr Jayaram went into the room at the same time and Dr Jayaram asked her "who was in the room when the alarms went off" which obviously implies that firstly alarms were sounding and secondly he didn't really know what was going on.

So I had a little Google about why the defence was so poor and stumbled across this.
It’s both enlightening and concerning.

I've not seen anything from her occupational health record that shows she was troubled up until she was accused of murdering babies, initially it started with canteen gossip.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/13/doctor-who-helped-convict-letby-no-objective-evidence/

Jayaram said there was "no objective evidence" against Letby months after all the incidents took place.

He sounds pretty shady here to be honest.

Yes and this part from the article is extremely worrying too.

Peter Skelton KC, representing the parents of children, also questioned why Dr Jayaram had not raised his suspicions of Letby at an inquest into Baby A in October 2016.
He said: “Dr Jayaram gave evidence under oath, but for reasons that will require justification, when they gave evidence no one told the coroner there had been a concerning cluster of deaths at the hospital, that this is was being investigated, and most critically, that there was concern that a member of staff is involved and was harming babies deliberately.”

I think he undoubtedly made dreadful mistakes and got involved in a spiral of confirmation bias that led to a very, very, dark place.

The Thirlwall Inquiry has just exposed that after the infamous “caught her virtually red handed” incident he stated in an official meeting that there was “no objective evidence” that Lucy Letby was harming babies, and that he was more concerned that she would suffer psychologically from being present at so many deaths/collapses. He also made no notes on the event at the time, or any mention at all until a year later. I can only imagine how the parents of Baby K and the babies who died after Baby K feel about that. He also changed the “red handed” story three times, including on the stand, and claimed to remember it better years later then he did in his first police interview (a year after the event).

Oh, and he supported Roy Meadow, the very confident but very wrong doctor who got Sally Clark banged up for murdering her own children, which of course she hadn’t done. Poor Sally died shortly after her eventual release and was never able to restore her relationship with her surviving son.

It’s very hard for me to get past all that.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/13/doctor-who-helped-convict-letby-no-objective-evidence/

The fact that her longtime nursing colleagues supported her and had no concerns is very compelling to me. I don’t believe for an instant that the barely present consultants (who were roundly criticised for not being present enough) would accurately sniff out a suspicious nurse without any of her nurse colleagues having any concerns, when they worked at the coal face with her day and night for years. Some of them went to both of the trials and were warned off from giving evidence for the defence in the first trial:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/20/claim-nhs-hospital-told-nurse-dont-give-evidence-lucy-letby/

Random clusters are a statistical reality that most lay people are flummoxed by when the stakes are high, particularly when the numbers are low.

For example, if you usually only see a yellow car twice a year, but across a couple of months you see 10, you’d think nothing of it really, because the stakes are very low.

However, if the stakes of a random cluster are very high - say the deaths of babies - you are very inclined to think this can’t be a coincidence. The unfortunate reality is that numbers don’t care about our emotions and, mathematically speaking, the incidents are just as likely as each other to be random clusters. This is why assuming intentional acts from such small numbers is risky.

“though her occupational health record show she was a troubled person.”

Can you point to a source for this from before she was isolated as a potential serial killer, removed from the job she loved, and had the police snaking her drains and digging up the garden? I have seen nothing like that. Everything I’ve seen supports that she was well adjusted, popular, hard working, and competent.

This isn’t true. She was already working there, completely uncontroversially, well liked by staff and parents, for several years before the spike in deaths.

I find him to be totally inauthentic and insincere. I wouldn't rely on anything he said. Any consultant who does just 2 rounds a week is totally lacking in any dedication to his work. Lucy Letby's only "sin" was having the impertinence to complain about the doctors. I believe she is a dedicated, caring and compassionate nurse and that she took her work seriously. No good deed goes unpunished. Retired Nurse.

I think the more appropriate question is: Why did deaths fall when COCH was no longer allowed to look after the very premature babies.

Conditions at COCH were perhaps OK for the full term, stronger babies. However, doctor numbers and their skills, expertise and qualifications were definitely lacking for the care of babies who required high level care - level 3.

Level 3 care is required for the tiny vulnerable premature babies that need so much more 1:1 care. They often require skilled experienced medical intervention like insertion of endotracheal tubes, umbilical venous and arterial catheters for intravenous fluids and monitoring etc. There was only one trained neonatologist working on the ward.

I think its so very unfair to lay blame on a nurse - the one who tried to do her very best.

Retired nurse.

To be fair, not as shady as Dewi Evans. I just heard him on File on Four.

Did you see Evans’s interview in the telegraph last night? He’s now no longer sure that three of the babies were killed by the air in the stomach method (never before seen in medicine) that he insisted on during the trial. Of course this has nothing to do with the fact that a multitude of eminent neonatologists and pathologists have come out to say that this method is “absurd”, “ridiculous” and “fantastical”. This is not the first time he’s shifted the goalposts either. He’s a charlatan and a disgrace.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/01/lucy-letby-witness-changed-mind/

Thanks @Kittybythelighthouse. I think it might be rather cringe to say the least so I haven’t registered for the Telegraph.
This article on Baby C seems to have helped his change of mind.
https://medium.com/@triedbystats/lucy-letby-was-convicted-of-murdering-baby-c-based-on-evidence-from-a-day-when-she-wasnt-on-shift-8fb2bb93e0ef