UK - Nurse Lucy Letby, murder of babies, 7 Guilty of murder verdicts; 8 Guilty of attempted murder; 2 Not Guilty of attempted; 5 hung re attempted #36
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Dr Lee has not debunked the evidence whatsoever in relation to baby A. A neonatologist cannot debunk the evidence of an expert in blood when it comes to determining the blood clotting condition of the mother. You seem to have your timings mixed up and think that they could not find a reason then suddenly came across Dr Lee's paper? I think you need to stop isolating small snippets of evidence and look at the full picture of what was happening. Dr Lee is now suggesting different causes of death for each baby but the fact remains that these deaths whereby air embolism is claimed, all feature studded acute arrest, an unusual rash and a lack of response to normal resus methods. All three of these are features of air embolism.
Its a fact that he has purposely gone back over his paper to look for reasons to exonerate Letby. The bias is so strong that it's frankly ridiculous. It will be ridiculed by the CCRC. Just like he was told in no uncertain terms at the appeal hearing. Skin discolouration was not the only feature of the collapses which pointed to air embolism.
The handover notes, there was 257 found In Letbys possession. She moved properties on at least 5 occasions and she took them with her each time.
The handover debacle is absolutely relevant. It clearly shows that Letby was happy to break the rules from the moment she became a nurse despite being aware of the significance of patient data. If Letby had been found with the handover notes in any other circumstances she would possibly have lost her job and been prosecuted.
The handover notes aren't just "bits of paper mixed in with other bits of paper" they contain the confidential information of babies that died in Letbys care and for whom she was proven to be searching for online. It's a fact that Letby could not spell a family name for whom she was searching for online. She had the handover notes of almost every single baby in the charges underneath her bed. I wouldn't necessarily call them trophies but they gave Letby the ability to research and recount.
by her own wording, Letby was taking them home, removing them from her pockets, putting them into her workbag and then ferrying to and from work everyday.
I personally don't believe that she was doing this, but this clearly shows that she had an awareness of what she was doing every single day. She choose to take them home with purpose. What that purpose was is debatable but it's a fact that she purposely took home the handover notes and kept them underneath her bed, moved with them and took them with her. She kept some at her parents home. If these are bits of insignificant paper that you collect by habit then you don't keep some in a box marked "keep"
The handovers provided a key insight into Letby's behaviour when testifying. She altered her version of events to suit the questions being asked at the time, while contradicting things she had said previously.
So few of them relate to the children. Ok, this is strictly true, as there was 257 of them.
BUT, you also have to consider the fact that there was 31 stored together in the Morrisons bag under her bed, and of those 31, there was notes on 17 babies in the case.
She had managed to isolate 31 notes of these 257 and of those 31, there are details of 13 babies from this case, over 17 handover sheets.
how was LL able to specifically organise these 31 handover notes together, at a time when she was not suspected of any wrongdoing and before the point that any medical experts or police had dediced which were the cases of foul play.
Because at least 6 of the babies in those notes did not die.
What gave LL the knowledge to do this?
I believe Lucy Letby absolutely did not want to admit any sort of awareness of these handovers , however ridiculous it made her appear because if she did, she would have faced questioning about
organisation of them.
‘i really can’t do this anymore i just want life to be as it was. I want to be happy in the job that i loved…
That's not a protestation of innocence. Whichever way you look at it. I don't believe an innocent person would be writing down that they were evil and that they killed the babies on purpose if they had not done anything wrong. Letby can claim what she wants now, and people are helping her do this by claiming things she did not say herself in relation to the confessions. Letby was also scrawling notes about police investigations long before there was any involvement by the police.
There's also some interesting patterns with Letbys FB searches, whereby she is looking up past victims and future victims together, one after the other in the space of a couple of minutes. At the time there was nothing to link these families together. A key behavioural aspect that the prosecution claimed was that Letby was getting pleasure from seeing the grief of these parents. We know she searched these families on particularly dates such as Christmas, anniversaries of deaths and birthdays. We also have further evidence about Letbys association with grief, with her forcing herself into multiple families personal grief at the worst possible time and making them uncomfortable. I suppose it's quite easy to look at each piece of evidence in isolation and try to find an excuse for her actions but i think this is flawed. I don't think you can continually give the benefit of the doubt to Letby, despite the evidence, on every occasion. It doesn't make sense.
"There's also some interesting patterns with Letbys FB searches, whereby she is looking up past victims and future victims together' ..
again so compelling..it's was not just Facebook searches it was the order of them..searching for her victims at the same time. She also marked the initials of one of the babies in her diary also.
I could never understand why she would take a photo of the card she sent to one of the parents either.
Because the whole case rests on probabilities in the absence of direct evidence and human beings are terrible at evaluating probabilities.
There are countless books on who we are fooled all the time by randomness. You learn a new abstruse word you’ve never heard of in your life and the following day you encounter it a second time, what are the odds?
There are no witnesses to testify that Letby was caught in the act attacking the babies. There was medical evidence based on inferences which has now been cast in serious doubt. So, yes, the statistical evidence is a huge part of the case without which none of the other circumstantial evidence seems very compelling. The idea that Letby’s presence at these unexplained and unusual collapses is the statistical evidence which has now been exposed as nothing more than a familiar statistical fallacy. On the face of it, her presence at so many collapses seems damning.
But imagine you took one of the other medical staff who Dr Lee says made mistakes in giving care (either waiting 4 hours before infusing the baby’s line or giving boluses of glucose which he says is incorrect in those particular circumstances). Imagine a staff member had noticed this and people started attributing these seemingly unexpected and unusual collapses to this staff member of staff. It turns out there were six other deaths during the period that Letby was not present at which the jury were not told about. It would not take a massive coincidence or even much to draw a similarly compelling chart to the chart shown to the jury. Only this time, one that included a different subset of the data and that showed that this other worker - who has actually been accused of making an error (so there’s some potential ‘concrete’ evidence of harm being done to a baby albeit inadvertently) - was present at ‘all’ the collapses.
But Letby wasn’t present at all the collapse because the jury were not given all the data. To find out what went wrong you have to analyse all the data and not just a subset of it.
And you need to compare how likely the different causes of deaths are to one another. How likely is it that these other explanation - now put forward - explain it versus how likely it is that Letby killed the babies.
It appears to us at first glance that because the probability of this spike in deaths at a neonatal unit in such a short period of time seems so low, then the alternative explanation of murder seems more likely. But it’s an error to take this at face value.
We need to assess the probability of alternative explanations and causes and compare these to the probability that Letby is guilty and judge which is most likely. The prosecution’s argument that she murdered them might turn out to be even more unlikely than appears as an unusual pattern but is in fact just randomness.
The jury was led to believe that the odds of these babies dying of natural causes were extremely rare. Therefore a jury untrained in statistical errors were implicitly invited to make the corresponding inference that the probability that she murdered the babies was high or perhaps extremely high.
But multiple infant murders while not unicorns are themselves extremely uncommon. It’s difficult to weigh the relative likelihood of different events and easy to get it badly wrong but that’s what really matters when it comes to finding out what really happened.
So how likely is it that Letby looks up the parents of some of these babies and writes these notes out of curiosity and such and puts them in a box entitled keep and gets details wrong at trial that could be construed at trial? Without clear and compelling and untainted medical evidence, I don’t believe, once you honestly correct for the notion that her presence is necessarily this massively meaningful coincidence and that random coincidences like this surround us all the time, that all the circumstantial evidence looks nefarious enough in that light to say that it’s enough to convict her of these murders. Not when alternative explanations have now been advanced, which to me just seem more believable than the likelihood of a serial killer of infants. Remember you need to factor in other probabilities into this calculation and many things we’re possibly neglecting to think about. What’s the probability of an infant serial killer that decides to use these multiple different MOs one of which - air embolism - is vanishingly rare (there have been like 80 odd cases in medical history). You could say it’s opportunistic but it doesn’t sound more plausible than not to me. What’s the likelihood that she never looked any of these techniques up online? Absolutely no evidence like this on her searches. So much doesn’t stack up for me.
Sorry to be so long and rambling, just trying to think this through and see what you guys think.
There are countless books on who we are fooled all the time by randomness. You learn a new abstruse word you’ve never heard of in your life and the following day you encounter it a second time, what are the odds?
There are no witnesses to testify that Letby was caught in the act attacking the babies. There was medical evidence based on inferences which has now been cast in serious doubt. So, yes, the statistical evidence is a huge part of the case without which none of the other circumstantial evidence seems very compelling. The idea that Letby’s presence at these unexplained and unusual collapses is the statistical evidence which has now been exposed as nothing more than a familiar statistical fallacy. On the face of it, her presence at so many collapses seems damning.
But imagine you took one of the other medical staff who Dr Lee says made mistakes in giving care (either waiting 4 hours before infusing the baby’s line or giving boluses of glucose which he says is incorrect in those particular circumstances). Imagine a staff member had noticed this and people started attributing these seemingly unexpected and unusual collapses to this staff member of staff. It turns out there were six other deaths during the period that Letby was not present at which the jury were not told about. It would not take a massive coincidence or even much to draw a similarly compelling chart to the chart shown to the jury. Only this time, one that included a different subset of the data and that showed that this other worker - who has actually been accused of making an error (so there’s some potential ‘concrete’ evidence of harm being done to a baby albeit inadvertently) - was present at ‘all’ the collapses.
But Letby wasn’t present at all the collapse because the jury were not given all the data. To find out what went wrong you have to analyse all the data and not just a subset of it.
And you need to compare how likely the different causes of deaths are to one another. How likely is it that these other explanation - now put forward - explain it versus how likely it is that Letby killed the babies.
It appears to us at first glance that because the probability of this spike in deaths at a neonatal unit in such a short period of time seems so low, then the alternative explanation of murder seems more likely. But it’s an error to take this at face value.
We need to assess the probability of alternative explanations and causes and compare these to the probability that Letby is guilty and judge which is most likely. The prosecution’s argument that she murdered them might turn out to be even more unlikely than appears as an unusual pattern but is in fact just randomness.
The jury was led to believe that the odds of these babies dying of natural causes were extremely rare. Therefore a jury untrained in statistical errors were implicitly invited to make the corresponding inference that the probability that she murdered the babies was high or perhaps extremely high.
But multiple infant murders while not unicorns are themselves extremely uncommon. It’s difficult to weigh the relative likelihood of different events and easy to get it badly wrong but that’s what really matters when it comes to finding out what really happened.
So how likely is it that Letby looks up the parents of some of these babies and writes these notes out of curiosity and such and puts them in a box entitled keep and gets details wrong at trial that could be construed at trial? Without clear and compelling and untainted medical evidence, I don’t believe, once you honestly correct for the notion that her presence is necessarily this massively meaningful coincidence and that random coincidences like this surround us all the time, that all the circumstantial evidence looks nefarious enough in that light to say that it’s enough to convict her of these murders. Not when alternative explanations have now been advanced, which to me just seem more believable than the likelihood of a serial killer of infants. Remember you need to factor in other probabilities into this calculation and many things we’re possibly neglecting to think about. What’s the probability of an infant serial killer that decides to use these multiple different MOs one of which - air embolism - is vanishingly rare (there have been like 80 odd cases in medical history). You could say it’s opportunistic but it doesn’t sound more plausible than not to me. What’s the likelihood that she never looked any of these techniques up online? Absolutely no evidence like this on her searches. So much doesn’t stack up for me.
Sorry to be so long and rambling, just trying to think this through and see what you guys think.
notsure
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The card that said "Your loved one will be remembered with many smiles."
I feel fairly sure that had I been following along I would’ve felt the same about her guilt. When I read the New Yorker article it resonated so hard because in the last few years we’ve been getting daily reports of different hospitals on the verge of collapse. The problems with the statistical evidence were more than alarming. And here was another expert saying that the air embolism theory was faulty, although at that point it seemed more like a difference in interpretation than a clear cut misunderstanding by the prosecution expert. So I looked into the case for some bit of evidence that looked like a smoking gun proof. It seemed to be the insulin cases. At that point there was all this circumstance evidence which wouldn’t by itself prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt for me, but someone had to have administered that insulin or whatever.
But now that has been thrown into doubt.
Not to mention things happening when her colleagues had just left the unit or gone on a break!
oh richard and judy have got inolved 'Lucy Letby may be the latest in a long line of wrongful convictions'
The New Yorker article was full of misinformation. I don't think it's a very good starting point for the case at all. Its an unfortunate fact that most people believe the first thing that they read. They then look to affirm these beliefs and often won't change their stance. The new Yorker article was very cleary pro Letby and cherry picked bits of information and left of most of anything that pointed to Letbys guilt. The articles two biggest contributers are Richard Gill, The man who claims Harold Shipman, was doing us a service and performing some kind hearted authenasias, threatened to go to the courtroom with an AK 47 and has some type of autism. He is unable to accept any criticism of Lucy Letby in any shape or form. The other contributer is Sarrita Adams. Who pretended to have a PhD. She is a grifter and sells tote bags on her conspiracy theory website. She invented the pathogen theory on Reddit and used it to solicit donations from gullible old fools, which she spent on merchandise for her store. Everything she has said in relation to he case has been thoroughly debunked. She is a complete faker.
greenwoodlad
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...the common feature..? but not the consistent feature ...or maybe I'm wrong .... the Guardian reported that the shift roster / spreadsheet that stated she was present at every collapse or death was fallacious....in fact she wasn't on duty for all , some but not all so yes common but not consistent.
Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence
Exclusive: Doubts raised over safety of convictions of nurse found guilty of murdering babies
...the common feature..? but not the consistent feature ...or maybe I'm wrong .... the Guardian reported that the shift roster / spreadsheet that stated she was present at every collapse or death was fallacious....in fact she wasn't on duty for all , some but not all so yes common but not consistent.
Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence
Exclusive: Doubts raised over safety of convictions of nurse found guilty of murdering babieswww.theguardian.com
Sigh. She was present for all the suspicious episodes which were covered in the trial. I have no idea what your point is.
I'm talking about events that were deemed to be unexplained. There seems to be a suggestion amongst pro Letby people that if Letby was not present then the collapse was not considered even if it was unexpected or unexplained but I don't think this tallied with the evidence that Dr Evans gave. He said he wasn't made aware of Letby when he was looking thorough the evidence to find what he considered to be suspicious events. The police also stated that they were separated into teams to investigate every collapse on its own....the common feature..? but not the consistent feature ...or maybe I'm wrong .... the Guardian reported that the shift roster / spreadsheet that stated she was present at every collapse or death was fallacious....in fact she wasn't on duty for all , some but not all so yes common but not consistent.
Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence
Exclusive: Doubts raised over safety of convictions of nurse found guilty of murdering babies
The prosecution produced a table of the 24 events that were deemed suspicious. Letby was the common feature. The nearest other colleague was at 10 events I believe. Letby was also one of only 2 colleagues who were present for both of the insulin poisonings and hung medication in both instances.
Letby was the sole signee of the first TPN bag for baby F, she also recorded the only normal blood sugar reading right before she left.
According to Dr Lee, the author of the literature review on air embolism that has stood the test of time, an incredibly rare cause of death with only 80 odd examples, there has never been a single recorded instance of a baby presenting with a rash/skin discolouration with an air embolism in the venous system; discolouration has only ever been present with the arterial system. They used skin discolouration as an identifying symptom of air embolism in the venous system but this is incorrect. In cases where air was injected into the veins there were no patchy skin discolourations ever described in the literature. So the evidence that they can be diagnosed as having air embolism because they collapsed and had skin discolouration has no basis in fact. If this is true, it is the first case ever described. Moreover, there’s a specific reason that explains this to do with the differences in physiology of the arterial and venous systems and something to do with pressure. That’s something like a smoking gun-like error in diagnosing the symptoms and signs of air embolism.
Dr Lee says that the other alternative explanations for causes of death are far more likely. He says post mortem showed evidence of thrombosis in the baby. And that the line staff put in the baby ‘tissues’, meaning that there was no infusion. He says that even in babies with no problems they avoid putting lines in with no infusion because if you do that clots can form. The baby is predisposed to clots due to the mother’s condition (disputed at trial you say) however having a line in for four hours without an infusion is a risk. Minutes after infusion was restarted, the baby collapsed most likely due to a blood clot. He says that there’s also another way a blood clot might have happened. He believes the occurrence of the collapse just minutes after the line was re-infused points towards the first of his theories about blood clots and the brain stem.
The original theory was that the baby died and they couldn’t find a reason for it. The baby had these skin discolourations that were consistent with air embolism.
But what he’s saying is that the second reason doesn’t hold. Air embolism in the venous system does not produce these discolourations. There has never been a case in the literature and there’s a plausible technical reason why that is so.
Given the fact there is a plausible and reasonable reason why the baby collapsed, they feel like this diagnosis is wrong.
That seems like pretty devastating new evidence to me.
Dr Lee says that the other alternative explanations for causes of death are far more likely. He says post mortem showed evidence of thrombosis in the baby. And that the line staff put in the baby ‘tissues’, meaning that there was no infusion. He says that even in babies with no problems they avoid putting lines in with no infusion because if you do that clots can form. The baby is predisposed to clots due to the mother’s condition (disputed at trial you say) however having a line in for four hours without an infusion is a risk. Minutes after infusion was restarted, the baby collapsed most likely due to a blood clot. He says that there’s also another way a blood clot might have happened. He believes the occurrence of the collapse just minutes after the line was re-infused points towards the first of his theories about blood clots and the brain stem.
The original theory was that the baby died and they couldn’t find a reason for it. The baby had these skin discolourations that were consistent with air embolism.
But what he’s saying is that the second reason doesn’t hold. Air embolism in the venous system does not produce these discolourations. There has never been a case in the literature and there’s a plausible technical reason why that is so.
Given the fact there is a plausible and reasonable reason why the baby collapsed, they feel like this diagnosis is wrong.
That seems like pretty devastating new evidence to me.
RSBM
Could you link to the evidence that the longline was in for four hours without an infusion please?
As well as phrases such as “I am evil I did this”, she also wrote things like: “Why me?”; “I haven’t done anything wrong”; and “Police investigation slander discrimination victimisation”.
I genuinely think her writing down all that stuff, allegedly at the behest of a counsellor she was seeing, was a case of her venting and guilt-tripping and ventriloquising her accusers and feeling sorry for herself amid losing her job and being investigated.
I think it’s more probable than a killer writing down I’m evil and then also that ‘I haven’t done anything wrong’.
Experts have since said that they believe such evidence taken as a whole and not cherry-picked as it was at trial (they left out the fact she was seeing a counsellor for some reason) is bordering on meaningless and I agree.
It’s the medical evidence and the multiple catastrophic failures alleged by Dr Lee and co which hold so much more weight for me.
I just listened to the evidence and case notes for one of the other babies who was said to have been killed via embolism and the medical failures seem to have been devastating. The baby was not given antiobiotics prior to birth and there was a delay in recognising realities distress after birth, there was a delay in starting antibiotics, and delay in starting treatment for respiratory distress as the baby’s condition deteriorated from infection. Whereas at trial it was claimed that the baby was stable, Dr Lee says there were multiple signs of the baby’s deterioration that were missed and that the baby most likely died from sepsis and another two causes. They did not find any evidence of air embolism.
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thats not 100% accurate imo. he agreed with the symptoms but not the cause, he said it was thrombosis aka blood clot that caused the circulatory system blockage rather than administered air embolism doing the same. the reason why dr shoo lee has said it was thrombosis rtaher than ae was due to the mother of baby A having a blood condition that made blood clots more likely, it has been conclusively ruled out that baby A had the same condition so no greater likelihood of developing blood clots. the case of baby a and baby b were the first of a series of events that were not at all likely to happen without deliberate human action and many of these babies suffered the acute decline and difficulty in resus that made AE a likely potential. it wasnt just baby a that made human action a likely potential it was baby a plus the rest of the evidence.
I don’t set much store in these coincidences. After all, in the scenario in which she’s innocent she’s searching for the parents of this very unusual and unexpected cluster of babies who were most unwell and who died. She was a prolific voyeuristic searcher on facebook. She searched for people in her salsa classes and apparently people whose names she heard on the street.
I read the New Yorker article knowing it was a polemical piece of investigative journalism which wasn’t attempting to rehash the original evidence etc. Nothing I’ve read since or none of the evidence I’ve seen tells me that the article was full of misinformation or unduly biased. If anything I think it stands vindicated. The questions around air embolism cited as doubts or a difference of interpretation in that article now look something more like a clear mistake in applying the findings of a study by a prosecution witness, to add to a number of other alleged mistakes which surely must be either disputed or taken into account by those who believe she is definitely guilty so that they can adjust the level their certainty accordingly.
As far as I can tell, it is not reasonable or sensible to wave away such new and substantial interpretation of the medical evidence and case notes by saying ‘these have already been tested in court’. It’s not true as far as I can tell. The idea that Letby had an adequate defence seems beyond dispute. To take one example, you have a nurse testifying in court that one baby had respiratory problems but was stable. On the other hand, you have Dr Lee claiming that the baby wasn’t given antibiotics prior to delivery as is customary when the mother is in that condition, that there were delays in noticing the respiratory problems and delays in treating them and three attempts to intubate the baby. There were multiple signs the baby was not stable as the court heard, but his/her condition was deteriorating all the time in ways that led to the collapse. So collapse was not unexpected. Staff just didn’t pick up on the symptoms and signs.
This is just one case. I think it’s more plausible that experts looking through these case notes and court transcriptions with the benefit of hindsight can come to a more objective conclusion than frontline staff in the heat of the moment in such dire circumstances as have been described at the hospital.
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