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 😞

I would only wonder in the context of a wrongful conviction - from what I’ve read it doesn’t sound likely, although there may be a degree of social awkwardness.

Neurodivergent individuals are over represented in the criminal justice system and it is always something that needs to considered as part of a forensic assessment

Misinformation.

Well put.

To put someone through all that and then say "oh she's not displaying the emotions I imagine she should, therefore she must be guilty" is the same bullshit logic used in the witch trials.

I genuinely can't understand how people fail to take such obvious things into account 🤔

Have they never seen people shut down or become numb after trauma? Have they never met any people in real life? 🤔

Sure, but not necessarily related to wrongful convictions.

Poor impulse control related to ADHD may result in some actions but if they are crimes, they are crimes, regardless of neurodivergence.

She had over 250 of them, in chronological order, kept in a box labelled 'keep' (it was the box to her shredder that she used on bank statements etc but chose not to use on these). She moved house with them twice. No this doesn't make her a murderer any more than buying a hammer makes someone a murderer but they're all parts of the puzzle. Clues as to the actions of a sick individual who was also killing the babies in many of the notes.

The CCRC only send 3% of cases back to the court of appeal. This one is very very unlikely to be heard again. It was heard very robustly the first time.

There was only 5 in that box and none of them related to the babies in this case.

Considering the amount of people expressing concerns, and the very clear undeniable issues in this case she has a very high chance of being one of that 3%.

She did it. End of. She thought she had outsmarted the medics but there was overwhelming evidence. The jury found her guilty. She's in jail for her crimes. Stop clutching at straws. Focus on something worthwhile.

There were over 250 sheets but they were all over the house in shopping bags and things like that. The doc is misleading that she had them all filed in this box marked ‘keep’. Although from a professional point of view it’s worse to have them strewn around the place rather than kept together until she could safely dispose of them.

It is very odd and unprofessional behaviour to have these. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just take them back to work the next day and put them in confidential waste. This is what I did if I ever inadvertently took confidential things home. However, unprofessional and odd behaviour though it is, it’s not as obviously sinister as filing them in date order which seems to be a misrepresentation.

@EverythingGolden Yes everyone came away from the documentary believing they were all in the box marked keep and stored in chronological order, even though it's not true.

Experts have said that those insulin blood results could be caused by endogenous insulin rather than exogenous insulin. In some cases babies can exhibit very high blood insulin which is bound up and not fatal.

It must be nice to be so sure.
I don't know if she is innocent or guilty but I do know that there are many problems with her prosecution and trial.

No, this isn’t how the CCRC work. Media coverage, Facebook courts and people chipping in after documentaries have been aired are not part of their consideration and shouldn’t be.

Theres quite a bit of misinformation on this thread.
The idea that the babies were sick and were not murdered, but died of natural causes was raised by defence, thoroughly discussed and tested at trial - and the jury did not find this compelling. Letbys defence had access to Shoo Lee’s report at trial.

The idea that the insulin results were not indicative of exogenous insulin, or not forensically significant was also raised and discussed at trial and the jury rejected it.

leave to appeal was denied when this was all brought back to court as well, so McDonald only really has the court of public opinion left.

so never say never, but unlikely I think.

Yes this is my thinking exactly but people are saying there is new medical evidence around the insulin

The only unanimous verdicts were for children F, L and O.

The jury was instructed that if they thought Lucy Letby was guilty of any charges, they could consider this is judging the remaining charges.

For children F, L and O, part of Mark McDonald's submission to the CCRC is non-disclosure of significant information by the prosecution. This information became public only during the trials, with the Thirlwall Inquiry.

So I would not accept that the two issues you raise above were discussed and decided in court with the benefit of all relevant evidence.

If we are going to consider jury decisions sacrosanct, we obviously have to hold the legal system to its own minimum standards. The "story" of a conviction doesn't end, legally, with sentencing. It continues with proper legal scrutiny of the conviction wherever re!evant concerns are raised.

There's a tendency - not yours I know - to imply that people concerned about the conviction are in some way undermining the legal system or the jury system. That's incorrect. They are upholding it.

Some of you have far more belief in the inherent integrity of various organisations than I do.

Trust me, once a case becomes embarrassing for the great British institutions, they’ll do something about it!

Information became public only after the trials, that should say

"People keep saying a failing unit, short staffed and so on but are not specific about how that caused each individual death. You still need a reason why a particular baby on a particular day suffered an unexpected and unexplained collapse." -- on a short-staffed failing unit, doctors are more likely to miss signs of an impending collapse, making it seem unexpected. Also more likely to fail to record relevant signs or order the tests that could help explain the collapse in a retroactive examination of notes. If that happened, how would you get the reason years later? Plus, "unexpected and unexplained" does not mean murder. Some fraction of collapses in hospitals remain unexplained, and the vast majority of these don't reflect purposed harm.

I didn't say anything about facebook and the random public. there are a lot of credible experts expressing concerns, the investigators are supposed to remain objective under pressure obviously but as humans they will no doubt be feeling that pressure. And they will get backlash no matter what they decide

Those things were raised at trial but not with expert witnesses

@kklooyou’re right in that there were no witnesses raised at trial, and - quite rightly - the judge directed the jury that defence counsel opinion / questioning in itself, is not evidence.

I think my questions around why the evidence itself was not raised in the trial were mainly answered by reading the full judgement of why Letby was denied leave to appeal - when Lee’s second report, the one where he clarified what was and wasn’t diagnostic of air embolism in his eyes, was submitted as new evidence. The judge explains why it’s not new evidence in detail. Long but worth a read - it made it plain to me that if Lee had been called, he would not have withstood cross and would have worsened Letby’s defence. Full link here: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/R-v-Letby-Final-Judgment-20240702.pdf

I read that at the time and tbh I didn't put any weight on the rationale given in the refusal, she had zero chance of getting an appeal so soon and I saw it as mainly just a formality that she applied in the first place.

If Lee had been called at the trial, he would have had the opportunity to explain that the elimination of other, much more common and likely, causes of death was unscientific.

The court of appeal was persuaded that air embolism was not diagnosed based on the specific rash described in his paper only, and that other rashes could also appear with air embolism. But the other rashes, and the other symptoms listed, are seen across such a wide range of conditions that that is pretty meaningless.

It is still very hard to prove a negative - i.e. that something didn't happen. In this case, we have Evans saying that it's hard to prove air embolism because it can leave no traces. So how can anything disprove it?

That's why the international expert panel has taken the unusual step of seeking to demonstrate what actually did kill the children, rather than only respond to the prosecution case - because without an alternative cause, you can't in any circumstances disprove air embolism.

The judgement repeatedly mentions rashes and discolourations as being mentioned in Lee and Tanswell’s paper, as though the 1989 paper was in some way relevant to the Letby babies.

Why do you think Lee would not have stood up to cross examination?