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 😞

Why aren't the non disclosures by the prosecution new evidence? Why aren't the scientific experiments on insulin delivery new evidence?

You keep saying no new evidence but that doesn't make it correct.

It isn’t significant because it’s like playing expert top trumps. The opinion of an academic bioengineer using mathematical modelling to make a deduction vs a practising peadatrician endocrinologist. Geoff Chase’s paper is just his opinion and interpretation like the thousands of medical papers written about insulin/immunoassays etc. It isn’t smoking gun new evidence that would have a high chance of overturning the verdict which is CCRC’s threshold. It’s one expert’s word against another. and the original trial expert Dr Hindmarsh didn’t base his opinion on what Geoff Chase wrote but on numerous other research and experience that would support his own testimony.

At the original trial, as per the Letby book by Judith Moritz, the defence team did commission their own insulin experts and a report but ultimately they too agreed with the prosecution experts which is why it wasn’t presented. CCRC isn’t about hitting up new experts until you find one that says what you want - that way rich prisoners would just commission some university researcher to write a paper that suited their narrative.

As for Shoo Lee’s paper - British journals have refused to accept his ‘modifications’ so it won’t carry as much weight as the documentary shows.

Plausible reasons to doubt the test is enough, because the jury was told there were no plausible reasons to doubt the test (that is, they were misinformed). I don't know where you are getting your information from but it's just not accurate.

You said people are being swayed by the fact that “she doesn’t look like a killer”. Every time I’ve seen this it’s about her being white, blonde, and pretty but I’ll happily correct myself if you meant something else?

I have looked it up. Alas, Google isn’t playing ball and giving me the answer you have. So I’m asking for your definition and the origin so I can actually find it and understand. It isn’t some ploy to trip you up here, I’m genuinely asking because I expected it to be easier to find. Legal definitions have origins, so is it case law? The criminal procedure rules?

We are clearly going to keep talking at cross purposes. I understand you don’t consider any of the new information to be relevant. I do. I find it more convincing than the prosecution evidence available. You keep coming back to “it’s just medics disagreeing” but only one can be right. Is understand you are focussing on the legal likelihood of a retrial. I’m not. As I’ve said, guessing at what the CCRC will decide without seeing the full report is pointless. We’ll get the answer to that in due course. I am, however, interested in whether she actually did it, which is not the same thing.

What British journals have refused to accept his modifications?

(That would be quite unusual and, with the state of this case, headline news. I think you've got something mixed up here)

New experimental data on insulin (not available to the original defence) are among the grounds to review the case.

A better question is - which British journals have published his latest findings? Or rather - where was it published before it went to CCRC? His paper in 1989 was published and peer reviewed, everything since is just his opinion.

You only publish academic articles in one international journal. They don't accept duplicates and they don't want research that has already been published elsewhere.

You would be laughed out of court if you insisted that academic articles had to be published in Britain. Lots of the most prestigious journals are American anyway.

His most recent paper was published in a peer reviewed American journal a few months before the application to the CCRC.

Scientists form opinions based on evidence, and, crucially, write them up so that other scientists can test their conclusions.

The CCRC will, if necessary, commission experts to scrutinize new scientific evidence. The international expert panel will be used to this, since a similar process will take place when they publish academic papers.

So calling the new work Lee's and Chase's opinions isn't wrong, strictly speaking, but the point of science is that is gives a transparent framework for other experts to weigh up these opinions. That's what the CCRC needs.

The immunoassay is not designed to differentiate medicinal insulin from endogenous insulin and is known not to be reliable for that purpose. So much so that the lab reports warn of this.

Your second paragraph is incoherent, so I am not sure what your point is.

People always make out that circumstantial evidence is weak evidence. But it can be very strong indeed and is often used to convict. It does require an inference, but seeing a defendant leaving the scene with a weapon is merely circumstantial since no eyewitness saw them do it. It's strong evidence, though.

Letby does not have to have been eyewitnessed for her to be guilty. And one mother did walk in on her assaulting a baby.

As for motive, the same can be said for anyone who abuses children. They do it because they want to.

Well his 1989 paper was published in the BMJ which is pretty prestigious and one of the top international journals…

His latest paper was apparently refused for publication by the first journal (unknown) he submitted to, as per his own comments in the link below. Plausible it may have been BMJ for continuity since they published the first one. He then made a few amendments and submitted to the much smaller and not as prestigious journal American Journal of Perinatology (owned by a German publishing group Thieme) which accepted it. It’s an open access ‘for profit’ journal where you can pay to be published…

https://pubpeer.com/publications/457C9A9DF7B389621C9FEC4CE3FE7D#1

The manuscript for the paper was also shared at the Court of Appeal and rejected as new evidence. You can read the reasons why in the official ruling. But it’s not difficult to see that no prestigious journal was going to affiliate themselves with this circus when he’s blatantly trying to manipulate the findings to suit the ‘miscarriage of justice’ narrative. Anyway, if it was rejected by the CoA already, it doesn’t pass the threshold for the CCRC that there’s a strong possibility the verdict will be overturned.

So he’s now got a panel of experts to write a report to the CCRC to say the cause of death isn’t linked to the skin discolouration or embolism but something else they can see from the medical records - because he can’t disprove the interpretation of his paper like he tried at the appeal. Geez. I’m sure the experts have come up with something groundbreaking…..

This is a misconception, her legal team absolutely can speak to her old legal team with her permission

It's very different to waiving full privilege so that people outside your legal team can see it, something which you wouldn't do unless necessary, like if the CRCC asked her to.
And if the CRCC did ask her to then you wouldn't know about it, it's not like they'd announce it to the media.

@Flowerytwits
It's actually not true that the evidence has to be new, they can refer on the basis of 'lurking doubt'. They have never done that though, because in practice when they do have 'lurking doubt' they find a way to justify a referral. They have significant powers to search for new evidence and can even instruct other people forces to carry out investigations carried out by other police forces.

You're mixing up academic and legal processes. An academic journal isn't interested in whether the court of appeal considers a paper admissible as evidence in a particular case or not. That has nothing to do with academic merit.

Journals reject papers for all sorts of reasons: fit, timeliness, theme, significance. The air embolism paper isn't (academically) very important. People don't go around identifying air embolism by symptom - they observe the mechanism and they verify with tests on live infants (which don't work postmortem). The paper doesn't work on a large cohort and it doesn't throw up a surprising result. It won't change medical treatments because you don't identify air embolism by symptom away.

So yes, possibly not a BMJ paper at that time but this doesn't make it less accurate or relevant to Lucy Letby's case. Most papers aren't published in the first journal they are submitted to. That isn't seen as a problem or failure. We know that the BMJ reviewer accepted the basic premise, since he is the one who suggested tabulating symptom by type of air embolism. And then the paper was published in a perfectly respectable journal, in a revised form, later that year. This is all absolutely normal, not at all sinister or a reflection of problems with Lee"s paper.

A lot of people online really seem desperate to smear him - I wonder why - but they tend to show very little knowledge of his profession when they do so. I'd be careful what I repeated from some online sources on him - they really are stretching to try to discredit him.

The panel of experts - 14 adults with minds of their own - have proposed alternative causes of death for the children Lucy Letby is convicted of murdering. They've dismissed Evans's fantasies about air embolism as a distraction in doing so, but it's far from the main thrust of their work. Lee's paper is a peer-reviewed reference among others for them, as legitimate as any other such work for this purpose.

No mother walked in on Lucy Letby assaulting her baby. Obviously if this had happened, it would be a very different case. I'm afraid you have your facts wrong here. This was never clsimed by anyone, parents or prosecution.

It is definitely true that people have been correctly convicted on circumstantial evidence, some of whom later DNA technologies later proved to have been 100% guilty all along. That's happened too many times to count. Some of those people had had massive campaigns to free them by well meaning people.

If there are no other probable killers in the frame, or anyone else with motive or opportunity, then circumstantial evidence can lead you to the irresistible conclusion that X did the foul deed. See for example the Bruce Burrell murders in Australia. They never found what he had done with the bodies, but he was connected to both victims shortly before their deaths (they were with him, then vanished) and there were other convincing reasons for him to murder them. In a case like that, the jury are entitled to find him guilty.

Likewise in the case of Lizzie Borden (who had an axe and gave her father forty whacks according to the rhyme)- only circumstantial evidence connected her to the murders. She seemed to be the only person about that day, and the only person who hated her father and stepmother. But the jury found her NOT guilty after seeing her and hearing all the evidence, which they were also entitled to do.

Here in the Lucy Letby there is significant debate as to whether or not any murders actually took place. To my mind, that is pushing the bounds of circumstantial evidence right to its very limits. Was there even a crime? Was she around, yes, but- for what exactly?

https://memento.epfl.ch/event/a-tale-of-two-lucys/

The similarities to the case of Lucia de Berk in the Netherlands who was eventually acquitted under similar circumstances are the reason that I find it hard to believe she’s really guilty. Plus cases like that of Sally Clark where expert evidence has been found to be so wanting (as it clearly is here).

@Gobacktotheworld2
Here in the Lucy Letby there is significant debate as to whether or not any murders actually took place. To my mind, that is pushing the bounds of circumstantial evidence right to its very limits. Was there even a crime? Was she around, yes, but- for what exactly?

That's an excellent point about pushing the bounds to its very limits

I'm in Ireland and we had a very disturbing case a few years back, the murder of Elaine O Hara, the man who did it was without a doubt a serial killer in the making and they ended up catching him by accident pretty much, they weren't looking for a murderer or for the victim.

In that case when they found what was left of her remains they were not able to ascertain the cause of death, so our state pathologist was extremely shocked that he was found guilty when they couldn't prove she was murdered, such is the importance of that fact actually being established.

However, in that case the level of circumstantial evidence against him was so exceptionally high that even though the remains didn't prove murder, there was no doubt whatsoever that he did murder her.

In the LL case there's no concrete evidence that any crimes even took place, AND there's no concrete evidence that show that LL was committing any crimes.

The CCRC is deeply flawed and not fit for purpose according to the Justice Select Committee.

It allowed Andrew Malkinson to languish in prison for 17 years and twice refused him an appeal despite clear DNA evidence of his innocence. Not to mention their previous failures in the cases of Victor Nelson, Sam Hallam and Peter Sullivan all of whom were denied the chance to appeal their cases and were eventually acquitted after many years in prison.

The CCRC not referring a case would not give me any confidence at all that the person was safely convicted.

Didn't the new head of the CCRC say that in the past it seemed they didn't learn from their mistakes and she was determined to change that culture and do whatever it took to reform the organisation?

Of course that may be just words

Well let’s hope that’s true

For me the issue is indeed whether there was any crime at all. I do not find it hard to believe that the babies died of natural causes. Most of them were originally ruled as such. Statistical evidence is so often flawed and coincidental so it has to hang on whether there is actual credible evidence of an unnatural cause of death. The air embolism stuff is evident bollocks so it all hangs on the insulin for me. It does seem to be the method of choice for medical serial killers. I do not find her writings convincing either way as I have seen many people express thoughts like that who are depressed and not guilty of anything.

What a case to start off with!

Obviously there's others going through the process, but there's people around the world paying attention to this one.