Lucy Letby innocent?

[dubsie]

I posted a thread a while back saying that the conviction of Lucy Letby was questionable and I believe it might be a miscarriage of justice.

The more I read and the more evidence that comes to the public space the more I think this is going to be one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history.

Turns out there's no medical evidence at all

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/04/no-medical-evidence-to-support-lucy-letby-conviction-expert-panel-finds

So the conviction has been based on circumstial evidence and a written note authored on the advice of a therapist.

I think a rapid look at this trial and the evidence is imperative.

She gave 14 days worth of testimony at trial, in her defence, not once suggesting she was intending to act as whisteblower.

How long has she already been locked up for?

Since late 2020.

Justice Goss ruled that her expert witness couldn’t give evidence on each count as they went along. He also ruled her defence could not mention the fact that she won her grievance, despite it being known to the court that she had brought a grievance. He also ruled a report by the RCPCH which gave other causes for the deaths inadmissible.
Her defence had a difficult job.

Poor woman. I think some of the main causes are:

• Group think setting in amongst the consultants as they became determined to blame Lucy for the deaths and save their own careers
• Unquestioning acceptance by the police of the narrative presented by the consultants. They looked for evidence Lucy was guilty rather than addressing the bigger picture
• Dodgy expert witness Dewi Evans volunteering himself and bascially manufacturing / inventing causes of death for the babies
• CPS stopping the police when they hired a decent statistics expert who would have advised them of the statistical errors made (that the consultants had cherry picked the cases to be only those where Lucy was on shift)
• Ineffective defense not bringing expert witnesses
• Trial judge not allowing other deaths, or a report into failings on the unit to be admitted. Allowing Evans to continue after another judge had written to say he was not reliable.

You are right. The judge was a big part of the problem.

So Dr Jayaram, whose testimony was used in her conviction, has now been shown to have lied after the recent email leak? The UK justice system is making itself a laughing stock imho - though plenty of the Country’s institutions appear to be coming apart at the seams😔.

I feel like throughout the process there has been a presumption of guilt at every step.

• The consultants assumed she must be guilty because lots of babies were dying, she was there a lot, and it couldn't possibly be their fault right? So they looked to gather evidence together to confirm their theory.

• The police assumed she must be guilty or why would the consultants have raised such extraordinary concerns?

• Dewi Evans assumed she was guilty. I mean why else would the police be investigating? So really it was his job to find out how she could have murdered the babies in such a clever way as to escape detection.

• The CPS assumed she was guilty. Look at all the evidence from the consultants and the expert witness. It was really important to make sure they got a guilty verdict. As such they needed to make sure their case wasn't weakened by a statistics expert throwing doubt on things.

• The judge assumed she was guilty. Look at all the unexpected deaths when she was on duty and the medical evidence? If he threw out the prosecution expert witness then a mass murderer would get away on basically a technicality.

The consultants started it. And I think they were the only ones who may have acted in a deliberately malicious way. But at every step there was a chance to stop and look at the case properly that wasn't taken.

I asked a friend who works in health care what he thought of the case and he said, well maybe there isn't enough evidence that she did it but I am sure that she must have done or why else would her colleagues have accused her of such a thing?

I think that has been the attitude of the authorities from the begining to the end of this case. The exact opposite of the presumption of innocence which exists for very good reasons.

Maybe if you don't have enough evidence to prove someone commited a crime one possible reason could be that they didn't?

So she's lost 5 years of her life already. Nothing can replace that when it's found that no murders had happened and she was scapegoated for failures on the ward.

I’ve rarely read such rubbish

The problem with this argument is that the police didn’t only look at the deaths where Lucy was on shift and they didn’t start for an assumption that Lucy was guilty. It even that any one was guilty.
That only became the narrative once Lucy was convicted, andI’ve not yet seen any evidence for it beyond - Lucy was found guilty and I think she’s innocent and there’s been a huge miscarriage of justice therefore the police must have done a really shit job.

Let’s have your analysis then.

I don't think the police did anything wrong, nor do I see any substantive errors in the administration of justice.

I do think (more off of the back of what statisticians have said, rather than my own analysis) that there seems to have been questionable presentation of certain of the statistical evidence.

I do think that, even without considering the merits of his evidence, that Dewi Evans fell far short of his duties as an expert witness (something which he was absolutely eviscerated for by a judge in another trial).

On the merits of his evidence...it seems to be highly dubious based on what many other experts (many of which are more qualified than him) have said.

It's hard to know exactly why Letby's team did not lead their own medical evidence, which now seems as real blunder. That could have been a strategic miscalculation by her counsel, or on her own instructions for whatever reason.

I do think that her trial and appeals have been handled in a procedurally fair manner, but that there are significant evidential issues which may have produced an unfair result

To be clear, I don't think this necessarily means that she's innocent (I'm more inclined to think she is not), but I do think there are valid concerns to the extent that a re-trial might be for the best. I'll respect the CCRC's review on that issue, though.

She was taken off nursing duties in July 2016. It must have been hell ever since.

“I don't think the police did anything wrong, nor do I see any substantive errors in the administration of justice.”

How much have you studied the case?

This item in the Guardian certainly suggests bad practice by the police and CPS. The more that comes out about Dewi Evans, the more the Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy comes to mind. The whole cock up of the prosecution regarding Baby C when evidence from an X-ray taken before Letby had encountered the baby was used to convict her casts doubt on the judge’s judgment. A lot of Goss’s judgments look highly questionable. It seems to me there was so little good evidence to start with you can’t undermine it and still have enough for a retrial.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/10/lucy-letby-police-cps-handling-case-raises-new-concerns-about-convictions?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The police did start from the assumption that either there was no crime or Letby was the murderer. This was based on the consultants' report telling them there were too many unexpected deaths to be explained, and that Letby was on shift for these and various collapses.

The police did indeed look at all deaths, but not at all collapses. Having eliminated some deaths which seemed inevitable or explicable, they then found a medical "expert" to deduce from the notes that various children who had died of infection, stroke, massive internal haemorrhage or inadequate resuscitation attempts had in fact been murdered. That's why, the minute reporting restrictions were lifted, real medical experts were clamouring to alert the press, the GMC and the defence to the nonsense the prosecution presented.

I think the police were certainly misled by that medical "expert", but also that they bear some blame for allowing the consultants who accused Letby to work with them on the investigation - a clear sign, there, that they weren't open to considering other suspects and that they didn't consider the quality of medical care in the unit relevant. I'm sure they don't bear all the blame but you can see his they left the door open for a dreadful miscarriage of justice.

I think @ShortSighted101 has things spot on.

I wonder if part of the problem is that the police simply aren't medical experts and therefore were ill positioned to investigate without full support from expert neonatologists from the outset?

I guess when it comes down to other obvious murder such as stabbing the police are well equipped and experienced with these scenarios but when it comes to extremely complex alleged crimes with administration of drugs to extremely unwell infants then they would be simply put if their depth?

The police when investigating must have been convinced by staff at the hospital a crime has been committed as the average policeman wouldn't have a great deal of knowledge about cause of death; they were reliant on others.

I think that's exactly it. To the extent there are issues with the statistical or medical evidence, they (the police and the CPS) will likely be reliant on and guided by their own experts, for the most part I'm not really sure what else they can be expected to do.

I have said this before, I'm not sure on this thread but the police are not well educated.

Recently it has become a degree profession but until the majority have a degree the critical thinking you acquire while studying for degree are not there.

They also, by the nature of their job, they 'investigate crimes' it doesn't occur to them that there is no crime and worse if there is no crime then it counts against them in the stats they have to keep.

Yes. Phil Hammond (Private Eye) has suggested that the key recommendation from all this could be an independent task force which would examine NHS units when numbers or clinical judgement suggest a problem.

This is what was set up in the Netherlands after a nurse was wrongly convicted on medical grounds there. As he said, it often finds incompetence or negligence, not evidence of crime, and surely it's in everyone's interest to know about these problems too.

I wouldn't blame the police entirely at all,bbut they need to stop weighing in with assurances that the conviction is safe and shouldn't be challenged now if they want to be thought impartial.

The vast majority of policing sadly is about repeat criminality and behaviour of the underclass on reality. By the nature of the profession police are often hard bitten and cynical as continuously portrayed by fictional TV. As a profession there were always going to be difficulties with approach in something as nuanced and complicated as this.

The police as matter of professional pride do not want to think they were unwittingly a part of the most gross miscarriage of justice in British modern history so are doubling down on the guilt running parallel cases in Liverpool . To my mind this not about justice but professional face saving.

I have t followed this all closely but the email seems to undermine the conviction further.

I’m wonder if any steps will be taken now. If she is innocent it’s a shocking miscarriage of justice.

That should be haven’t. It looks like from another thread the defence team is putting together any new evidence.

Most importantly IMO is that the prosecution medical expert is not a neonatologist and said he knew she was guilty after scanning the evidence for ten minutes.
Just this sentence should disqualify him from ever giving evidence again.
incredible arrogance.

And also said an expert witness should never say they can't explain a death - that's it's a sign of failure.

If a pathologist hasn't been able to explain a death, toxicology tests weren't performed, genetic testing wasn't performed, and the body is no longer available, the solution is not for someone with no relevant expertise to invent fantasy invisible causes of death.