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 😞

The immunoassay test was fine because it showed the c-peptide levels to conclude whether exogenous insulin present - so test perfectly adequate

experts often refine their opinions as new material emergences - DE concurred there was still harm he was just less sure of mechanism in a few cases but said harm had still occurred

enough insulin would be present despite some sticking to bags to harm a neonate as they are extremely sensitive to it - when bags were removed babies recovered and when same bag restarted again collapse

events ceased when LL not present - resumed when she was reinstated - BEFORE downgrading - structural issues like ward rounds would have been constant over that time - harm tracked LL presence not unit issues

BUT I do agree DE comes across as arrogant in documentaries and not open to discussion - he said he didn’t watch the press conference of the panel of experts and when did was “well they’ve got that wrong” and seemed very dismissive

and defo agree about women being scapegoated but not sure that’s what’s happening here

Hello again! You would never hang up the same bag again because of infection risk, and the timings suggesting that the children's conditions got worse when bags were hung have been disputed. Cotside glucose tests (heel prick) has a large margin for error so charting small variations tells very little. The children were certainly hypoglycemic but infection is a likely explanation for this.

One of the babies died without ever seeing a consultant. The hospital's own review of his death, long before anyone started talking about Lucy Letby, said that tests should have been ordered on his last day of life but were omitted.

👋 hello

ah.. it seems it can always be argued both

i said bags restarted - you would do that wouldn’t you?

and it was exogenous insulin???

They asked the nurses at the trial and they said they would always start a new bag in the circumstances they were discussing (when the line wasn't in correctly)

Yes I suppose there are other circumstances where they would just restart, but I don't think that happened at any point here.

They didn’t cease though. Upthread you can see that parents came forward with concerns about the deaths of their babies that occurred after she left and were told they were ‘outside the scope of the investigation’ ie arse over tit statistical inference that if she wasn’t there those could not have been a crime. I think there is a Texas sharpshooter fallacy at play here and that events are only being classed as events if she was there. There is evidence of this happening with cases being dropped from the charges when it was discovered she wasn’t there. Very eminent statisticians like Sir David Spiegelhalter agree that this was the case.

The immunoassay is not conclusive because it had a false +ve rate and the lab itself stated that it cannot be relied upon to determine exogenous administration. It is certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt.

How is DE so sure there was deliberate harm when he doesn’t know how it happened? His theories about air embolism and still more stupid air in feeding tubes etc really do seem like empty conjecture to a clinician.

It is entirely possible that she is innocent and being scapegoated and she would not be the first nurse that this has happened to.

I thought they said at trial they had - right going to look it up!

or staff records showed they had been restarted

It is extremely important whether it was exogenous insulin as this is really the only ‘proof’ of any harm albeit to babies who did not actually die and not directly connected to Lucy.

To my mind it is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt because of the fallibility of the immunoassay used. C peptide can also degrade if not stored correctly and its normal range is not really known in sick neonates.

It is inherently hugely improbable that a nurse would inject a premature baby with insulin and therefore it requires a highly reliable result to overcome the inherent improbability of such an event. The consultant who first saw the test result clearly concluded that it was false as she took no action at all on it. She explained to Thirlwell that erroneous lab results are common in neonates partly because it is so hard to get blood from them and it frequently hemolyses.

I find it far more likely that a lab test in a premature baby was incorrect than that it was an attempted murder. The only reason it is now seen as anything different is all the hullabaloo about post it notes and cats and other peripheral bollocks. I fear that almost anyone could be made to look guilty if their life was trawled over in as much details as Lucy’s

No. The immunoassay result is not fine. That is the whole point.

There are many potential interferences with this type of assay. The lab report form from Liverpool specifically says, in red, at the top, that the test cannot be used to determine whether there has been exogenous administration. There is another specific confirmatory test that should be done, but this did not happen.

Did the experts at the trial
say there was definitely exogenous insulin present and could of only come from the bags?

I don’t rate the post its - definitely something you’d do therapeutically

I fear that almost anyone could be made to look guilty if their life was trawled over in as much details as Lucy’s

They absolutely could - and this is the inherent problem with an adversarial system based on who spins the best story in court rather than an inquisitorial system to establish facts and truth.

The toxic consequences of that adversarial storytelling are abundant in some of the dross spouted on this thread about how she supposedly didn't cry at the right triggers and therefore must be guilty. That's literally a recitation of the prosecution's ludicrous bombast. (And not very different from what happens to rape victims - didn't cry so must be lying, cried too much so must be lying, blah blah blah.)

She has PTSD from this experience and much of her supposedly odd or unsympathetic behaviour under cross examination is a direct result of that. Besides which, nobody knows how they would react if they were falsely accused of murdering babies and lost everything as a result. So many people seem unable to recognise that real people don't behave like actors in films.

It was interesting that they used a paper written in 1989 to aid their conviction in relation to the air embolism - only for the author of the paper, Dr Lee, to speak out and say that they had interpreted his paper incorrectly. It was all to do with how they misinterpreted his explanation of the rash.

This is what Peter Hindmarsh said, yes. Other experts disagree.

Interestingly, he is no longer registered with the GMC, following a couple of years working under restrictions.

They presented the insulin/ C peptide results as being a fact and confirming that exogenous insulin was administered. I think that is a lot to hang on one very fallible test.

The idea that it was in the feed bags has to be just conjecture because the bags were not preserved or tested of course.

In fact it was said that the glucose remained low even after the bags were replaced but that must have been because she has contaminated all the bags including the stock ones as many as 3 or 4! FFS it’s obvious to me that this is a made up story and nowhere near a piece of evidence. It’s literally just conjecture.

Well, you can look at it one of two ways. You can keep an open mind and listen to both sides and form an opinion. Or you can just decide she's guilty and consider no other alternatives, as in this case. They called experts for the prosecution. The defence have declined to offer any explanation as to why they did not call any experts to offer an alternative viewpoint.

A panel of experts have since come together to look over the evidence of their own volition, led by Dr Lee who wrote a paper on air embolism in 1989. The paper that he wrote was used by the prosecution. Dr Lee spoke out because his paper was being misrepresented in the case.

None of these people had to put their head above the parapet. They were not called upon. They were a fresh pair of eyes and they have picked holes in the case. Enough for the case to be put back before the CPS.

Whether she is guilty or innocent, neither you nor I know. I'm not entirely convinced either way. But from what has been shown in each documentary to date is that the case was being built around proving her guilt, not questioning her innocence.

It wasn’t as interesting or revealing as I thought it would be.

I didn’t find the ‘innocent’ evidence at all convincing.

I found it chilling she took home and kept all those medical notes on the babies.

I ended the documentary thinking the same as I did before watching: she is guilty.

The police interviews were interesting, though. What did the psychological profiles say about her? She comes across as someone with some kind of neurodivergence. Her monotone speech and lack of empathetic expression. She is also really weirdly childlike - living in parents house and cuddling her cat like a teenager.

I know all of that already

The ccrc haven’t said yet they accept her application (think that’s how you put it)

im sceptical about panel of experts after the case working as all the knowledge was around at time of trial and defence didn’t call them or stood them down - that isn’t grounds to hear it now or a retrial

I’m not sure they are going to show anything they couldn’t have at time of trial which would mean it’s not new evidence - other experts disagreeing with you is par for the course and not cause for retrial - hard as that sounds

Her behaviour is also in line with trauma.
And she didn't live in her parents house, she had bought her own house and was living alone, I believe she went back to her parents house after she was bailed.
And many adults a lot older than her cuddle their pets, surely you know this?

As previously stated, the evidence doesn't need to be strictly new for the CCRC to refer, if there is lurking doubt they can refer under that principle, but what the CCRC tend to do is to find some way to justify going the 'new evidence' route if they have doubt but the evidence isn't strictly new.

you make it sound like they will then

it does matter the evidence is new otherwise everyone would apply - I read their procedure is to reject if the knowledge was out there at the time and the defence just didn’t put it forward

surely they would need to show the jury was misled and this “new evidence” would lead to diff outcome to get a review

The experts we are talking about weren't around at the time of the trial. Almost all of them live outside the UK and knew little or nothing about the case. The best-known of them, Shoo Lee, only found out his paper was used months after trial in an email.

Some of them were aware of the trial. Dr Neena Modi, for example, who works in the UK. She is Professor of Neonatal medicine at Imperial College London and president of the UK Medical Women's Federation. She contacted Lucy Letby's defence during the trial to express her extreme alarm about what she was hearing - how the prosecution theories made no sense. But it would have been too late to bring her in at that point.

They can't just have an appeal or retrial based on disagreeing with what was argued at the trial, even though so many experts with no skin in the game keep coming forward saying, this makes no sense. Fortunately, they have quite a lot of new evidence and known irregularities in the prosecution proceedings to work from. It's also possible that Mark McDonald will be able to have Evans's role reconsidered because of some of his statements to the media.

So there is a lot of genuine experts concern about the case to build on, and some clear if never certain pathways to bring the case back to court.

Yes the general principle is that the evidence is new, but it's also possible if there is lurking doubt, and in this case there are many high profile people who are saying publicly that there is doubt.

My source is this book

Reasons to Doubt presents the findings of the first thorough empirical study of decision-making and the use of discretion within the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

And it also says that they have never referred on the principle of lurking doubt, because what they do is find some way to justify referring it the normal way and have considerable power to search for 'new evidence' to justify it, they can get an expert panel together themselves, they can even instruct a police force to investigate the previous police forces investigation to get the 'new evidence'.

https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/miscarriages-justice/reasons-doubt

Yes. The new legal argument, discrediting Dr Evans following his media statements, might suffice. The disclosure failings are another important route. And the expert panel have asked repeatedly to be allowed to see the obstetrics notes, which would obviously bring new evidence to the case as neither prosecution nor defence looked at them last time.

I meant knowledge not experts
, it’s only what I read about the procedure

and wouldnt the judge of kept reminding jury how to view DE evidence? Like making sure levels of Uncertainty or over confidence were communicated

Plus the CCRC have been acknowledged to have too high a bar to putting cases forward and the new boss said she would do better post Malkinson. Maybe that will have an influence.

It basically seems as though the only way you can get your case looked at again is if someone finds some kind of forensic smoking gun (and quite frankly not even then if someone decides it’s too expensive to retest) but if all the evidence was circumstantial in the first place it seems like it will be much harder. How the hell can you disprove such nebulous stuff? I have no idea what you can do if you were poorly represented in the first place as so many people (not necessarily LL I admit) are. The fact that evidence existed and your team failed to put it forward still seems like it ought to be a ground of appeal to me.

Her life is ruined either way to be honest. I don’t know if I would have been able to carry on.