The investigation of Lucy Letby on Netflix

[TheRozzers]

Anyone watched it yet? It’s a really excellent documentary with loads of footage of her police interviews.

You see the police asking her questions about those ‘confession’ notes.

I won’t put spoilers in the OP but I’d love to hear what others made of her responses.

Mid way through I thought she’s 💯 guilty but by the end I’m really not sure. A lot points to her being innocent.

I feel for the parents of those babies so much, the uncertainty must be horrendous 😞

Medics disagreeing

like they do all the time

Gosh- I’ve got 5 pets and It wouldn’t enter my head to cuddle them if the police had come to arrest me for killing babies

Gosh, it’s almost like people react in different ways to traumatic situations. How strange.

it is strange to cuddle your pets when your being arrested for deliberately killing babies

i can’t see the ccrc accepting her application and it won’t hinge on whether she kissed the cat

All medics are not equal. Not by a long shot.

On one hand, you have world-renowned, leading experts in the field of neonatology that quite literally wrote the paper being relied on. On the other you have an unpublished prosecution witness-for-hire retired paediatrician (that needs to keep his daughter’s horses paid for), that has a history of failing in his duty of neutrality to the court, and consultants that were failing those babies regardless of whether murder occurred or not, one of whom lied on the stand.

I know who I find more credible. Of course, if the prosecution can find anyone with even close to equal credentials to back the findings at this point I would be more than willing to listen to their take.

Shall we agree that you think it’s strange, others don’t, and move on then? I’m getting a bit sick of the bloody cat to be honest.

Also just seen notes from a report from the unit that said there was a culture of staff taking away hand over notes and not properly disposing of them. Either taking them home or leaving them laying around inappropriately. Paints a very different picture of how suspicious it was that Letby had the notes at home. And this is the issue, all these bits of circumstantial evidence sewn together to paint a picture that may well be wrong. Did the police ask questions about the wider culture about documentation management? No! Because they were looking for evidence to support their theory, not to investigate without bias

Yes. The prosecution witnesses kept talking about things they had never seen, as if that mattered. Evans, who retired when premature babies had lower survival rates, working with different treatments and equipment. Bohin, who provides care for children on Guernsey, with serious cases and complex pregnancies delivered on the mainland. The consultants at Chester, who weren't neonatologists but general paediatricians, and who started taking more complicated cases into their unit in 2015 (when their death rate went up).

As against that you have a group of experts who lead major medical units and research groups, and who know that what they have or haven't seen is genuinely irrelevant - what matters is the science. Different league.

yeah me too - the cat isn’t significant

I don’t think it will get overturned because medics disagree which they do all the time and is expected - they would have to come up with a scientific provable method of death across all cases as I understand it

there were 6 experts witnesses and Dewey was cross examined for 2 weeks - then 7 consultants - in terms of them letting the babies down or care not being great - to me those were a constant - same situation over time and then deaths spiked amongst those same conditions

I just don’t see them meeting the threshold for retrial/appeal

the evidence was cumulative - and two juries accepted it - unanimously I believe - the juries weren’t misled

the ccrc will be reluctant to pit “experts who disagree” against two juries that hadn’t been misled

Dewey has not been discredited despite what people think

They wouldn't have to come up with a provable method of death -: just a plausible one. That's because the prosecution argued that they had eliminated all possible natural causes and left their murder methods.

Dewi Evans has been thoroughly discredited. He's repeatedly told the press his own methods aren't scientific

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/20/my-kind-of-case-intense-focus-falls-on-lucy-letby-trial-expert-witness

He's contradicted the prosecution case and the jury findings as published by the court of appeal more than once, including in email correspondence published today

medium.com/@triedbystats/new-prosecution-expert-opinions-further-undermine-allegation-lucy-letby-murdered-baby-c-2d076f5627ff

But if you study psychology then this type of groupthink and being led by others is easily understandable. Particularly if people are worried about the finger being pointed at them which would have likely been the case with this struggling unit

As it is about very vulnerable patients it was always a tough hill to climb. The headline “Killer Nurse” is also sells a lot more papers.

Everyone is going on their gut or intuition about how they would have behaved in those circumstances and judging her behaviour.

The facts are that there was a rise in neo-natal deaths on the ward. There is no direct evidence that LL was involved in any deaths. The circumstantial evidence is only overwhelming if you take it out of context. If you add the context -it was a failing ward, caring for very sick babies that had limited medical oversight and there was also an increase in deaths in the elderly care ward then the circumstantial evidence is less
powerful.

The problem now is she could be anywhere from completely innocent to a murderer but we will never know.

Only other than the fact she referred to herself as the cats mummy, had a Mother’s Day card on her fridge or something that was signed from the cats, cried in court at the mention of her cats and frequently mentioned how much she missed them.

I absolutely adore cats and baby my own cat but not to this extent. Yes she was single with no kids, but it’s almost like the cats were her substitute children. She clearly wanted kids as had written on notes about never being able to have a family (which also showed she knew she’d be arrested). She certainly (and undeniably) showed more emotion over those cats than in the court talking about those poor babies.

You have clearly never worked in an underperforming hospital with poor leadership. This type of gossip goes through the place like a wildfire. We even get training on what it’s like to be the “second victim” of a patients death i.e you were the clinician provided care and they died and how to deal with your colleagues reactions and what to consider if you are the colleague. Everyone is trying to cover their arse ESPECIALLY consultants.

This is part of the problem with the trial- none of the stuff you said is particularly unusual for a clinical person to do. I had to be sent home from a placement as a student physio because a patient died when we helped them out of bed and I was waiting for the police. When I called my mum (a nurse) the first thing I said was I killed someone. I was also hiding depression at the time because I was worried they wouldn’t let me pass. Lots of cognitive distortions going on. So yeah if that was how she was processing the deaths because she had to work to pay her mortgage the that is reasonable.

Defence struggled to find expert witnesses as most such medics did not want to be associated with the defence of a “baby killer”. This is exactly why there should be no media coverage until someone is found guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

You were there, were you?

I am a teacher. Over the last five years, we have sadly lost a student every single year.

I have not cried. I am so sorry for the child, for the life they will not live; I have compassion and enormous sympathy for their families and am so sorry for their loss. But I have not cried or shown any real emotion.

I don’t think I’m cold, it just isn’t my grief; I am on the outside of it.

Letby’s trial was 22/23. I remember as I was pregnant with my daughter and she was a month old when the news broke that she’d been found guilty. The babies died in 2015/16. It was another world. Does anyone expect her to suddenly show great emotion and sadness over events that happened seven / eight years ago? Then I’ll mention the anti depressants one more time and that they work by numbing and suppressing emotions.

It isn’t that hard to work out why someone would be a tad emotional when their job is gone, their home is gone, their friends are gone and their pets taken away. Surely. But maybe it is.

But across all children? That fits a pattern

and shows the juries were misled

I don’t think so - they heard the prosecution cross examined and decided it still fitted and was probable

ive also read they need to do more than plausible at appeal - and that the prosecution never claimed to have ruled out natural causes when addressing the jury - that matters

I genuinely don’t understand how anyone could think DE has been anything other than discredited at this point, but each to their own.

We have no idea what the CCRC will do. Either way the outcome will be subject to extremely heavy scrutiny. What we do know is that refusal of leave to appeal is not the same as “the verdict was correct”. Right to appeal is a matter of law, not a matter of fact. It cares about process, not truth.

They had some ready to go but stood them down - what you have said implies the medics knew she was a baby killer

what you have said contradicts what’s happening now - surely it must be worse to be part of freeing a baby killer - aren’t their 14 plus “experts” with dr shoo

It doesn't need to fit a pattern

The children all had different causes of death after their original postmortems. They died over 13 months, at different ages. Sometimes people seem to think there's one big explanation for everything - a particular infection, early on a particular doctor. But it would be strange if the same things had been missed in every case.

The international experts do argue that there were poor standards of care and that failures to diagnose or treat appropriately may have caused some deaths. They aren't even saying anything new there. Three external reports said the same thing before the police opened investigations. But the judge did not allow the jury to have any knowledge of these reports or these claims, so they have never been tested in court.

So there is a pattern of background medical failings, as we have seen in lots of NHS units unfortunately, but each death has its own explanation

He hasn’t been legally discredited - look it up
He has not been struck off, not been ruled unreliable by a court, not found to be dishonest - not had evidence declared inadmissible

he’s just had professionals disagree with him and say he overrated certainty - the jury saw his certainty cross examined so they saw both sides

professionals often disagree - also it’s ok to be over certain as long as like here it is seen to be challenged by the jury

there were 6 expert witnesses and 7 consultants and then around 20
other witnesses for prosecution

lots of professionals agree with his findings but they aren’t in the press saying so they are just getting on with their jobs

Of course it doesn’t imply that. It’s well known that defence witnesses are harder to find because if they lose then they are branded the person that “defended a murderer”. Who wants to go to work the next day or treat a patient after just being in a high profile murder case defending a convicted murderer? It can sorely damage their reputation.

If the prosecution loses then their witnesses were just someone trying to do the right thing/robbed of a conviction, so it’s much safer. It’s the same with barristers. The right to representation doesn’t seem to matter based on the sheer volume of “how can possibly live with themselves defending that murderer/rapist/thief” comments that always come out. The only difference is that barristers tend to be on both sides of the fence with the cab rank rule so by and large don’t get too tarnished.

Then it’s more likely that they didn’t do a good job of finding the right experts. Given the actual expert was located afterwards, did the analysis with 14 other experts and confirmed that what was being described did not match hos research at all. The ‘expert’ for prosecution made inaccurate findings.

To be honest, the lack of proper defence for Lucy in itself is a miscarriage of justice. They failed her - even if the outcome was the same- they failed her in providing a proper defence.