Lucy Letby

The vast majority of evidence is circumstantial, and is frequently stronger evidence than the most common forms of direct evidence (e.g. eyewitness testimony).

Police procedural shows have a lot to atone for.

 

I couldn't disagree more. Direct evidence is far stronger than circumstantial.

 

Oh, really? Excluding the slam dunk undoctored video recording of the entire crime (which just doesn't exist in most cases for obvious reasons), what other types of strong direct evidence should be relied on in cases such as this?

 

I'm not basing it on one case. I mean in general.
So what was the circumstantial evidence that was the slam dunk for the prosecution?
As I said before I don't know if She's innocent or guilty. What I will say is that things don't quite add up.
Nobody can explain how a very talented nurse with no criminal convictions becomes a monstrous serial killer. Can you?
Can you honestly with hand on your heart and say she is 100% guilty of all crimes? Come to think of it why wasn't she charged with the other deaths that occurred on the ward?
I'd like to believe that the judicial system is full proof but it isn't and history proves this.
You asked: what other types of strong direct evidence should be relied on in cases such as this? A very good question. I can't answer this in all honesty because there isn't any in the Letby case. None at all.

 

The answer to most of the questions in here is the same: I wasn't in the courtroom. I don't have the benefit of weeks of testimony, evidence and oral arguments like the jury did. I wasn't privy to the jury deliberations.

At this point, she's been found guilty in court by a jury, and she's unsuccessfully appealed. If the evidence was that weak, the question becomes why her defense team apparently didn't notice what random people on the internet think they did. That would be one heck of an incompetent defense team.

As for 100% certainty: I'm not 100% sure on anything at all, never mind a court case outcome, and it would be foolish for anyone to say yes given we know people have been falsely convicted in the past. I would argue those caveats are not really relevant in the context of a single case, though, because the legal standard isn't certainty; it's beyond a reasonable doubt. We can't construct reasonable doubt on the basis that, taken as a totality, some people are wrongly convicted and therefore this specific conviction is unsafe.

With the jury having sat through 10 months of (expert) testimony, evidence and other relevant data presented by legal professionals and overseen by a judge, plus an appeal, the notion that I'm somehow better informed than the jury simply seems farfetched to me.

 

I saw @Carpster kill those babies with my own eyes. I’m willing to testify to that in court.
That sort of direct evidence ?

 

From reading the Guardian article it seems that defence messed up in not calling the medical experts to counter question the prosecution medical experts.

I don’t think jury’s are necessarily best qualified to judge complicated specialist evidence but at the same time I’m not sure there is a better system than what we have.

I did a jury service on a case which involved a horrendous attack by an elderly man on his family (will spare the details). There was no doubt that the accused had carried out the attack and that the impact was massive. What the jury was asked to judge was the insanity of the accused. We listened to loads of technical and contradictory evidence which we were totally unqualified to judge.

 

As an aside this is obviously a highly emotive case so I think we should be grateful that there have not been any riots and public disorder directed at white blond women in their 20s and 30s.

 

Or for balance no one blathering on about the myth that is "white privilege" either ......

 

I can't comment on Letby's case as I haven't read any detailed stuff on what was presented in court or the counter arguments that she's a scapegoat - but I can tell what I've seen and experienced during my time working for the NHS.

I changed career not quite 10 years ago to work in a hospital, and in my experience at all the hospitals I cover within my Trust, it is quite frightening how (not all but) many of the top doctors/surgeons etc walk around with a God complex and exert their influence over seemingly any matter they choose to get involved with. The mantra is always to protect the reputation of the hospital before anything else.

The paradox to this is that all throughout the 3 year training/university period the teaching constantly referenced how important whistleblowers are to the NHS and covered in great detail the terrible things that occurred during the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandal (look it up if you're not aware of it). The message was always to call out wrong/shoddy/incompetent/dangerous behaviour/processes no matter what reputational damage is done to the hospital as a result. Yet once you're employed, it becomes apparent very quickly that the opposite is true.

If you're a band 5 NHS employee and you feel like you need to bring to light a concerning matter which is ultimately affecting patients but which goes against the thinking/opinion of one the dept heads/top doctors etc.........good luck. Most staff are employed on what they call 'bank' contracts - effectively a posh term for temps. You dance to the hospitals tune or you'll be dancing with them no more. It took me 4 years to get employed on a 'normal' contract.

Sadly, after less than a decade in the role I'm already thinking about changing careers again despite not being far off of 50 - a real ball ache I could do without.

So is Letby guilty or innocent? I've no idea. But our 'wonderful' NHS is certainly guilty in many cases when it comes to protecting itself over individual staff members - and as has been proven in the past, that often isn't always a good thing as it keeps bad practice in place to the detriment of the patients.

 

The last Labour government legislated for serious fraud trials to be held without a jury in certain circumstances. But the law was never formally commenced (which would need the Commons and Lords to both vote affirmatively) and is still pending 21 years on.

 

We made mistakes over Letby evidence, admits CPS

Door swipe data ‘vital’ to showing which nurses could have been on ward were incorrect

Sarah Knapton,
SCIENCE EDITOR, Daily Telegraph
16 August 2024 • 9:00pm

Evidence presented in the case of Lucy Letby showing which staff came in and out of the baby unit was wrong, the Crown Prosecution Service has admitted.

During the retrial, Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, told the court that door swipe data, showing which nurses and doctors were entering and exiting the intensive care ward, had been “mislabelled”.

Now Sir David Davis, the Tory MP, has written to Sarah Hammond, the chief crown prosecutor of Mersey-Cheshire CPS, asking her to “urgently make clear” what timing errors were made during the first trial and how they relate to the prosecution arguments.

In several cases in the first trial, the door swipe data was used to show that Letby was the only nurse present in the unit when babies suffered catastrophic collapses. ***But the CPS refused to confirm that all other door swipe data was correct during that first trial.***

The trial of Letby has come under scrutiny in recent months, with several scientists and doctors questioning the statistical and medical evidence that was put before the jury.

There are concerns that not enough weight was given to levels of understaffing, poor practice and cramped conditions in the baby unit, as well as the severe prematurity of the babies.

The Royal Statistical Society is due to convene a meeting in the wake of the verdicts, stating that it was aware of “concerns” from its members and the wider community regarding the use of statistical evidence in the case.

Since the trial, it has also emerged that the ward struggled to contain infectious outbreaks that may have put the babies at risk.

Sir David, who is analysing the evidence used to convict the neonatal nurse and is planning to bring a parliamentary debate after the summer recess, said: “The door swipe data is clearly vital to knowing which nurse was where at one point in time, and this in turn was vital to the prosecution’s case in the first trial.

“It is therefore essential that the CPS makes it plain whether those errors occurred throughout any of the evidence of the first trial.”

 

I was involved in a trial as a layman three decades ago, during which the BBC broadcast a pioneering 'pretend real jury' experiment about a very similar case. (They filmed deliberations, interviewed 'jurors' afterwards etc.) As a numpty, I thought the jury system came out of it very well; decent serious people doing their honest best etc. Preparing for court next day, all the solicitors and barristers were discussing it in the corridors - and were uniformly dismayed by the alleged misunderstandings, illogical reasoning, ignoring of legal points etc etc! I suppose this is partly why many countries have 'professional jurors'.

Back on point: I obviously have no idea whether Letby did it, and know only that two courts have decided she is guilty. But it seems perverse to close one's mind at least to the possibility that she is innocent, especially given the UK record on miscarriages since the Birmingham Six broke the spell. Andrew Malkinson has only just left the front pages, lest we forget. (And the observation that the green-inker conspiracists have also jumped onboard this bandwagon is surely irrelevant amd inadmissible evidence, m'lud.)

 

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/lucy-letby-trial-expert-witness-evidence-outcome-nxfltvkm2

today's Times:

My evidence might have changed Lucy Letby trial, says expert witness
The defence team failed to call Dr Michael Hall, a neonatologist who says he believes the jury was denied the whole truth

Tom Whipple Science Editor

Sunday August 25 2024, 7.00pm BST, The Times

Lucy Letby at the time of her arrest. She is serving a whole-life term for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of another seven
Lucy Letby at the time of her arrest. She is serving a whole-life term for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of another seven
CHESHIRE CONSTABULARY/PA
An expert witness for the defence in the trial of Lucy Letby has said he is “troubled” by not being called to give evidence, and that he believes the outcome might have been different if he had done so.
“It’s something I wrestled with for some time,” said Dr Michael Hall, a neonatologist. “I did not consider that the jury had heard the whole truth.”
Letby was convicted of the murder of seven babies while on duty at the Countess of Chester hospital. A jury also determined that she had attempted to murder six others. She was found guilty of a seventh attempted murder at a retrial after the original jury was unable to reach a verdict on one charge. She is serving a whole-life prison term.
The original trial, conducted last year, was one of the longest murder trials in English legal history. It followed a police investigation that considered over half a million medical documents and involved more than 2,000 people. Two applications for an appeal have been rejected.
However, despite two juries finding her guilty, some experts have since expressed concern about the strength of the evidence. Hall had been hired by the defence as an expert witness, but was not called upon at the trial.
He said that had he been in the witness box, he would have questioned some of the assertions made by the prosecution. “I would have given different answers to those given by the prosecution’s medical expert witnesses, and different interpretations for some of the cases,” he said. “That’s not to say that I know all the answers, or that I know that Lucy Letby is innocent. There were certainly some events which were difficult to explain.”
“But the evidence, in my view, was open to challenge.”
Letby’s crimes were carried out at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital
Letby’s crimes were carried out at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital
ANTHONY DEVLIN/***** IMAGES
In particular, he said, he disagreed with claims around the health of some of the babies prior to death. “I do think that the prosecution medical expert witnesses overstated the degree to which some of the babies were ‘completely stable’ before they collapsed.”
He also argued that the evidence supporting the argument that some babies were killed by injecting air was relatively weak, and drew heavily on a research paper that actually considered oxygen injection, despite the fact that air is mainly nitrogen. “The importance of that is that oxygen and nitrogen behave differently in the body. Nitrogen doesn’t cross membranes very well. It’s an inert gas.”
• How strong is the evidence against Lucy Letby?
Hall, whose advice informed the defence barrister’s strategy despite him not giving evidence, said he did not know why he was not called. The solicitors who commissioned his advice cannot comment, as the decision falls under legal privilege.
Mark Solon, a solicitor who runs a training company that teaches expert witnesses how to work within the legal system, said there could be several reasons. One plausible explanation is that the defence felt he might not have done well under cross-examination — perhaps because he would not have definitively backed Letby’s innocence. Another is that they felt they had already made their case.
“It may be they thought, ‘Well, we’ve demolished the prosecution case sufficiently that we don’t need to put somebody against them’,” Solon said.
“You don’t over egg the pudding. If you think you’ve done it, you don’t keep putting more eggs into it. With evidence sometimes less is more. There’s a risk you’re going to confuse the jury. So it’s a tricky one.”
Hall said: “The bulk of the evidence was circumstantial. No one saw her do anything and there was little forensic evidence to support the accusations.
“My understanding is that the judge will have told the jury that to convict, to find her guilty, they have to be sure. It’s not ‘just about sure’ or ‘nearly sure’. It’s ‘sure’.”
He said he would have explained there was still, in his view, doubt. “It seems to me that not calling expert witnesses may have had an important effect on the outcome of the jury.”

 

"The other signatories are voicing their concerns formally for the first time. They include Dr Tariq Ali, the former head of the paediatric critical care unit at Oxford university hospitals, and Philip Dawid, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge.

Others raising questions about the Letby case include Jane Hutton, a professor of statistics at the University of Warwick, Prof Gillian Tully, a leading expert in forensic science, and Dr Neil Aiton, a consultant neonatologist who is also a medical expert witness with more than two decades’ experience."

There is a growing level of concern about this case.

But first to raise concerns more than a year ago, was Professor Emeritus Dr Clive Kremlin who has many more than two decades experience of powerful chiefs desperately 'covering their arses' by choosing a lowly individual on whom to dump all the blame for a collosal workplace côckup.

Unfortunately Professor Kremlin received considerable abuse in response to his expression of concern about the case and was accused of loving murderers and wanting to kill babies and such.

 

Lucy Letby inquiry should be postponed or changed, experts say
Group including neonatal experts and statistics professors question its setup amid concerns about conviction

Felicity LawrenceTue 27 Aug 2024 19.00 CEST

A group including some of the UK’s leading neonatal experts and professors of statistics is calling on the government to postpone or change the terms of a public inquiry over concerns about the conviction of the neonatal nurse Lucy Letby.

In a private letter to ministers, seen by the Guardian, the 24 experts said they were concerned that the inquiry’s narrow terms could prevent lessons being learned about “possible negligent deaths that were presumed to be murders” in the neonatal ward of the Countess of Chester hospital (CoC).

 

76% of statistics professors make things up. I think we can discount their input into this.

 

A statistician helped with the case of Lucia de Berk in the Netherlands!

 

However it has been shown that that is only true 62% of the time.

 

64% of people know this.

 

And this case is unravelling faster than 94% of previous contested verdicts.

In all seriousness...those whose memories stretch back to the Brum 6, Guildford 4, Bridgewater Farm etc will be surprised by how quickly 'the gathering' of the great 'n' good has developed in Letby's cause.

 

Completely off subject but I would like peoples opinions on the Maddie McCann case?
I'm tempted to buy the new book called The Sudden Impulse.
It's another case that has always gnawed at me.

 

Did that temptation suddenly come out of the blue ?

 

So Gerry said.

 

It’s just a shame the great and the good couldn’t be arsed to help her before her convictions, when it might actually have made a difference. Any of them could have offered their services to either the defence or prosecution teams if Lucy Letby was their main concern. I think Gill over in Holland did, but then he’s always attracted to these sorts of cases

Makes you wonder what the motive of the others is really. They sent their letter to the government last month. I guess toys are out of the pram now because it didn’t get the response they wanted.

 

If her parents weren’t well to do medical professionals with high incomes we wouldn’t be talking about Maddie anymore.

Also, anyone who leaves their children in a room/chalet/apartment unsupervised whilst on holiday gets no sympathy from me.

 

I disagree, they don't know the half of it!

 

There are still people here who think she's guilty?

WOW.

 

Yo be fair, she *could* be guilty.

What I (and my fellow-come-lately) professors are pointing out, is that the evidence on which they convicted her was woefully deficient.

 

Well, some of the evidence is definitely subject to ongoing debate and some professionals from non-legal fields (not all) are calling it into question. But that isn't the whole case. She wasn't prosecuted based solely on a chart, however the stattos are portraying it. Likewise if the insulin medical evidence is ever found to be wrong she's still got many other convictions which didn't rely on that.

I think a lot of the doubt - not saying for you - comes from the instinctive reaction of well-meaning people that 'evidence' cannot or should not be circumstantial.

 

I think there are many more unsolved crimes that she has yet to be linked with.
The hospital will have a deemed 100% patient survival rate, and the local police a 100% "crimes solved" rate by the time they have got to the bottom of everything.

 

Shame her whole defence team couldn’t work that out given years to do so.

 

I’m not reading through 11 pages of this thread but if Letby didn’t do it, what is the suggestion of what happened?

 

Already very sick and premature babies died because of institutional failings in the neonatal maternity unit where she was working. And the management preferred to find a scapegoat than face that reality.