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 #37

[Rohmer]

Personal feelings? It is proven in a court of law she is a liar. I don't need to remind you about what I'm sure, there are too many to remember. Her lies were proven, as required by a UK court, via documentary evidence (false/altered nursing notes, her messages, handover sheets, digital searches), other witness testimonies (most of the 246 witnesses including expert witnesses), and other evidence, like telling a doctor that a mother had commented on a baby not looking as good as before, and that mother saying she never said that, major discrepancies between what she told eg police interviewers and the jury. Her defence was that she was scapegoated and was a victim of a campaign. And yet, when she was asked countless times to specify what the 'gang of four' had done, she offered barely anything specific. Because she was lying about this campaign. And the obvious lie about how she was isolated and banned from seeing colleagues when she actually socialised with them regularly. And the relatively more minor 'go commando' comment and the infamous Lee Cooper leisure suit. The jury is directed that lies can be considered evidence if they think the lie is deliberate and related to a specific issue. It is fact that the jury mostly believed other witnesses over her and considered her lies deliberate and related to specific issues. Her whole time on the stand was spent desperately trying to use generalities, avoid a question, be deliberately obtuse, answer a different question obfuscate and lie. If she hadn't done any of that, and was a credible witness giving straight answers, the jury may have spent even longer deliberating. Her pathological lying (or shall I say perjury?) was a significant support for the verdicts. People are given the Miranda warning for a reason.

No doctor was proven to have lied, as far as I know. Dr Jayaram was believed over her in her trial for Baby K. Anyway, none of them are sitting in a jail cell and never will be. Dr U, I suppose, could face charges of some kind, maybe civil ones.

the fact that you cite the ‘go commando’ comment as evidence of lying is very telling. Women who were suspected of supernatural activity were similarly investigated for signs of bad character or a naughty manner of living. Letby’s innocuous life was fitted in court to the required template of drinking dancing gambling and sex. It’s ludicrous to view her answers to a lowly attempt to humiliate her as evidence of her being a liar and a manipulator. The prosecution used circumstantial evidence of her ‘bad character’ her to frame her as a and a liar. The idea that this line of questioning somehow contributes to her guilt is shared by many people online in various forums, but it was simply an example of completely innocuous behaviour that proves to be red meat for lynch mob morality.

If you have her pretermined guilt in mind then I’m sure you can see a lot of lying and manipulation. The point is we have the luxury of being able to view all this evidence and expert opinion in the round and after the fact, a luxury that was denied to the jury who were very much badly mislead on a whole litany of vital points.

 

[Rohmer]

You are narrowing down on one tiny detail----the trial involved 27 incidents, of unexplained sudden collapses of newborns. And the attempts to revive the newborns had some confusing things in common-----the babies needed several shots of adrenaline to get them to revive. That was highly unusual. Most of the babies were considered healthy and were expected to be released very soon.

And yet the symptoms and potential causes of the collapses were varied.

What was the ONE factor they all had in common? >>>> Nurse Letby

The reason other nurses began to be suspicious was because in the initial collapses, the designated nurses would go on dinner breaks and Nurse Letby would take over----when designated nurse would return, their patient would be unresponsive and in resuscitation.

That happened a few times and it caught people's attention. And Letby continued to be the causal factor. When she went on her 2 week vacations, there were never any collapses. But the day she left and the very day she returned, there would be collapses or unexplained deaths, each time.

ALL of the collapses happened during the night shifts. So they moved Letby to day shift, and the ALL of the collapses happened during the day.

When they finally took her off the floor, the unexplained collapses stopped happening.

Dr Brearey said there were ‘no more events’ after Letby left the neo-natal unit. ‘It was the same staff doing the same job and there were no sudden collapses’.

Except it was not the same job. On July 7th 2016 the unit had been reduced from Level 2 Intensive Care Unit to a Level 1 Special Care unit, so the level of dependency had changed.

‘Unwell neonates may initially demonstrate subtle clinical signs, but may rapidly decompensate if left unrecognised and untreated.

According to the RCPCH in 2016, ICU had ‘insufficient senior cover’.

Moreover, autopsies established natural causes for almost all the deaths Letby was later accused of causing. The doctors however continued to maintain that the deaths were sudden and unexpected, and their suspicions of Letby on the grounds of proximity were so intense, that explained deaths were de-explained!

 

[marynnu]

But that’s the thing. There is police to call.
They are doctors. If they have concerns, even about three cases, they have to stop it.

I have very little time to watch YouTube show detailing each case, medically, but I am. I know that humans are gullible. We live in a society where we should learn reason, and yet…well-known doctors publish books about cats predicting deaths; TV persons put “seers” into PET scanners to check their brain activity, etc. I am a skeptic and my main goal is to be sure that we don’t have a modern Salem witch trial here. That NICU “chart” linking LL to deaths was statistically analyzed. That each case was offered alternative reasons except for “murder”. I can’t imagine a hospital where every morning there shouldn’t be a morning round with a consultant and the registrars. This is how you teach; not by overburdening yesterday’s students. And if the hospital has no money to cover all hours by a consultant, it borders on criminal to assign the NICU unit Level 2. JMO.

All units are covered 24/7 by a consultant, meaning they are available. They do not need to be physically present all the time.
I have no idea what you mean by 'yesterday's students'.

 

[Rohmer]

Dr Lee didn't even hide the fact that he excluded air embolism before the whole panel went on to make their (consequently biased, non-independent, non-impartial) conclusions.

timestamp 18.15
"So let's do away with that theory, alright? The notion that these cases are air embolism because they collapsed and because there were skin rashes has no basis in evidence. Okay, let's be very clear about that. Now, so what can be the possible causes then? Why did these babies suddenly collapse? So we went into the history of this baby to see what actually happened."

Before seeing the medical records -

“What they said to me was that you have literally got to find a different person or thing that caused the death,” said Lee. “And I asked ‘So what’s the chances?’ They said ‘none’, because it’s going to be very hard to prove anything now. ‘We’ve had our chance, and unless you can come up with something that is totally different, she’ll be in jail for the rest of her life’. And I said, ‘Well, this is not fair, because the evidence that was used to convict her, in my opinion, wasn’t quite right.’”

He asked if he could examine the 35,000 pages of medical evidence to assess whether it was “faulty or good”.

My research was misused to convict Lucy Letby — so I did my own inquiry

Dr Shoo Lee, a neonatologist whose 30-year-old paper was pivotal in the nurse’s trial, and an expert panel have re-examined the case and reached ‘explosive’ conclusions

www.thetimes.com

He excluded air embolism before the panel went on to make their biased opinions? Hun? He excluded air embolism because he knows it is nonsense. He didn’t exclude it before the panel went on to make their opinions. They agreed to publish their opinions regardless of how it reflected on Letby.

Why would 14 renowned experts who have spent their entire lives looking after people risk it all to support a child serial killer because they were being biased or doubling down on some self-interest. Fourteen! I don’t know what you’re trying to imput to these medical professionals but the level of bad faith is genuinely flabbergasting.

That’s twice you’ve cherry picked those quotes from Dr Lee to make it seem like an underhanded attempt to do absolutely anything to scrabble around and find evidence that would exonerate her when the full context of what happens shows very clearly that that’s the opposite of what happened.

By the way, where are the medical experts who have been invited to reply to these experts’ counter arguments and evidence in the pages of Dr Hammond’s Private Eye column? Radio silence. No takers. Just think of the plaudits that await them from Wes Streeting and the Media and most of the legal establishment.

We can pick apart the medical evidence ad naseum on here but I think the only sensible thing to do is to defer to what the experts say on a subject so complex that they often seem to be at odds with one another. There are already suggestions that some of the secondary opinions sought in the prosecution against Letby were preselected. Dr Hutton’s invitation and then her disinvitation, for example. And it appears that Dr Evans’ competency as the main expert witness has been discredited.

There is now a wall of evidence and expert opinion from multiple fields casting grave doubts on every meaningful aspect of the case against her.

I would like to know, from those who still support the verdict, how much pause this has given you. How can you still be certain that her conviction is safe and that vital lessons have not been learned? I’m still open to hearing some piece of new evidence that might strongly point towards her guilt. But the evidence that was used to convict seems to have been dismantled beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

[Parker Knoll]

Zero pause.

 

[May72031]

The whole case against her has been dismantled.

No, it hasn't.

 

[May72031]

But the evidence that was used to convict seems to have been dismantled beyond a reasonable doubt.

It hasn't been "dismantled", despite how fond you are of that word.

 

[katydid23]

Dr Brearey said there were ‘no more events’ after Letby left the neo-natal unit. ‘It was the same staff doing the same job and there were no sudden collapses’.

Except it was not the same job. On July 7th 2016 the unit had been reduced from Level 2 Intensive Care Unit to a Level 1 Special Care unit, so the level of dependency had changed.

Many of the babies who collapsed were Level 1 condition, and ready to be released. There were 27 unexplained collapses, and they were not all level 2 condition at that time. That's the reason the collapses were deemed unexpected and unexplained.

‘Unwell neonates may initially demonstrate subtle clinical signs, but may rapidly decompensate if left unrecognised and untreated.

The babies who collapsed were not untreated and poorly cared for. Their vitals were good and strong, and many were about to be sent home.

According to the RCPCH in 2016, ICU had ‘insufficient senior cover’.

Moreover, autopsies established natural causes for almost all the deaths Letby was later accused of causing.

One can always find a potential natural explanation for a preemie's death. But 27 collapses, with such unnatural responses to resuscitation defy the 'natural cause' explanation.

When taken one at a time, one can explain it away as an outlier case---a baby that seemed fine but actually was on the verge of sudden death. But how many of those 'outlier' cases can there naturally be?

And every one of them happens in the middle of the night? So they transfer Letby to daytime shift and suddenly the collapses only happen in the daytime. I don't care how many explanations one tries to give for that big coincidence.

Add that to the curious fact that these sudden collapses didn't happen when Nurse Letby was away on her 2 week vacations. But on the day she'd leave for vacay, and on the day she returned, there's be collapses and/or deaths, each time.

A baby would have strong vitals, eating well, resting well, designated nurse would go to dinner----she'd come back and Nurse Letby would be helping with the emergency resuscitation. That happened a lot/


And she got caught in lies during her trial. There was evidence that she falsified some of her medical logs to try and make it look like she was nowhere near the collapsed baby. But OTHER paperwork and electronic data often showed otherwise. She was caught in some damning lies that she could not explain.

The doctors however continued to maintain that the deaths were sudden and unexpected,

Because they were...

and their suspicions of Letby on the grounds of proximity were so intense,

it wasn't just proximity. If you followed the entire trial you'd see there was a lot more to it.

The mother of Baby E walked on the assault of her baby, found him screaming and bleeding from the mouth, but Letby was able to lie her way out of it at first. She claimed she'd called for the doctor---which was a LIE.

But during the trial, the ugly truth came out. The jury saw 2 grieving parents, sincerely describing what happened to their baby boy. Letby denied their claims and called them mistaken, if not deceitful. She said there was no blood and the mother didnt come with milk at 9 pm. She said the 9 pm feed was cancelled by the doctor.

But the parents had phone logs to corroborate their timeline, and Letby's medical logs contained some false information, designed to make the baby's mother look wrong or dishonest. But the midwife and the consultant denied Letby's claims. He never cancelled that 9 pm feeding.

that explained deaths were de-explained!

Yes, but the 'explained' deaths were RE-explained, not de-explained.

 

[joltz]

the fact that you cite the ‘go commando’ comment as evidence of lying is very telling. Women who were suspected of supernatural activity were similarly investigated for signs of bad character or a naughty manner of living. Letby’s innocuous life was fitted in court to the required template of drinking dancing gambling and sex. It’s ludicrous to view her answers to a lowly attempt to humiliate her as evidence of her being a liar and a manipulator. The prosecution used circumstantial evidence of her ‘bad character’ her to frame her as a and a liar. The idea that this line of questioning somehow contributes to her guilt is shared by many people online in various forums, but it was simply an example of completely innocuous behaviour that proves to be red meat for lynch mob morality.

If you have her pretermined guilt in mind then I’m sure you can see a lot of lying and manipulation. The point is we have the luxury of being able to view all this evidence and expert opinion in the round and after the fact, a luxury that was denied to the jury who were very much badly mislead on a whole litany of vital points.

You've got this one massively wrong but you are too far gone to change your stance. Maybe you would be better suited over at the Letby trials Reddit. I suppose you are already on there though...

JMO

 

[Baileyboo]

A credible witness giving straight answers?

’too many times for coincidence’ - how many times do you need it explained to you that the original chart which completely tilted the whole trial against Letby from the start, is complete rubbish. The statistically-illiterate prosecution speculated on the basis of the chart that the probability was somewhere on the order of a million to one. But then after the professor of statistics whose help the police originally invited to give guidance explained that it was a statistical fake and entirely invalid and misleading, well, at that point the prosecution disinvited her.

So no, it was not too many times for coincidence. The odds might have been 50/1 or 30/1.

The odds of a serial baby killer whose MO is an elaborate series of mediums from the mundane to the arcane, all of which completely escaped detection by pathologists at the time and a worldwide team of the best experts in the treatment of newborns who pored over the case notes for weeks and months, the odds of that are absolutely astronomical. Not 50/1.

She used air embolism, because it’s easy to find air in a dead body and would be, she presumably thought, impossible to detect. Even although it was such a rare event in the entirety of medical history, she thought of it as way of doing harm to kids. Never mind that when Dr Jayaram read about this technique in an obscure paper and a shiver went down his spine, the author of said paper has come out to explain that the prosecution witnesses have badly misinterpreted it.

So even although the original chart showing her present at all the deaths was an abomination, and a bunch of the greatest experts in the world have concluded that her alleged victims were victims of a badly run hospital and medical errors, taking apart the supposed smoking gun evidence of her alleged use of insulin to poison the babies, the people who continue to defend the verdict simply aren’t able to answer the grave doubts that have been cast on her guilt.

The idea that anyone is still defending her ‘confession’ notes is laughable. No one who hasnt completely invested their ego in the outcome here who has any common sense thinks they have any evidentiary weight.

‘I don’t know if i killed then. Maybe I did, Maybe this is all down to me’.

I mean, that must go so hard if you’re caught up in a witch hunt.

She literally says in court this was how she was feeling at the time, and crossing it out is ‘just something she would do - a way of me processing and dealing with things’.

‘We tried our best but it wasn’t enough’.

‘I can’t do it any more’.

‘Kill myself right now’.

The name on one of the notes is Kathryn de Berger who was the woman in occupational health supposed to have been like a counsellor to her. So we can see that her name is on the notes and mentioned in trial.

You can rely on fine distinctions (just like how the prosecution had to claim the babies Letby allegedly attacked by force feeding with milk exhibited not mere vomiting but projectile vomiting despite the fact that at least one other baby had shown the same symptoms while Letby was not present) by saying she wasn’t a counsellor but the gist of the point remains.

‘Did you get any support from work?’ ‘Yeah they referred me to occupational health and things’.

As top criminologists and forensic psychologists point out these notes are far from a gotcha moment, they’re meaningless given the circumstances.

The whole case against her has been dismantled.

The original chart shows who was on duty when each charge on the indictment occured. Surely the prosecution has to show this to make their case? Where the defendant was when the alleged crime took place is discussed in all trials.

 

[Tortoise]

I don't think anyone can disagree that Dr Lee approached this matter from the point of view of staunch disagreement with the trial experts over the air embolism evidence, and has self-determined himself to be an absolute authority on it. As the individual who convened the expert panel, to come up with something different, unless the other experts can demonstrate that they considered ALL possibilities, he has tainted and discredited the entire panel as independent non-partisan trial witnesses. JMO

 

[Rohmer]

Many of the babies who collapsed were Level 1 condition, and ready to be released. There were 27 unexplained collapses, and they were not all level 2 condition at that time. That's the reason the collapses were deemed unexpected and unexplained.


The babies who collapsed were not untreated and poorly cared for. Their vitals were good and strong, and many were about to be sent home.

One can always find a potential natural explanation for a preemie's death. But 27 collapses, with such unnatural responses to resuscitation defy the 'natural cause' explanation.

When taken one at a time, one can explain it away as an outlier case---a baby that seemed fine but actually was on the verge of sudden death. But how many of those 'outlier' cases can there naturally be?

And every one of them happens in the middle of the night? So they transfer Letby to daytime shift and suddenly the collapses only happen in the daytime. I don't care how many explanations one tries to give for that big coincidence.

Add that to the curious fact that these sudden collapses didn't happen when Nurse Letby was away on her 2 week vacations. But on the day she'd leave for vacay, and on the day she returned, there's be collapses and/or deaths, each time.

A baby would have strong vitals, eating well, resting well, designated nurse would go to dinner----she'd come back and Nurse Letby would be helping with the emergency resuscitation. That happened a lot/


And she got caught in lies during her trial. There was evidence that she falsified some of her medical logs to try and make it look like she was nowhere near the collapsed baby. But OTHER paperwork and electronic data often showed otherwise. She was caught in some damning lies that she could not explain.

Because they were...

it wasn't just proximity. If you followed the entire trial you'd see there was a lot more to it.

The mother of Baby E walked on the assault of her baby, found him screaming and bleeding from the mouth, but Letby was able to lie her way out of it at first. She claimed she'd called for the doctor---which was a LIE.

But during the trial, the ugly truth came out. The jury saw 2 grieving parents, sincerely describing what happened to their baby boy. Letby denied their claims and called them mistaken, if not deceitful. She said there was no blood and the mother didnt come with milk at 9 pm. She said the 9 pm feed was cancelled by the doctor.

But the parents had phone logs to corroborate their timeline, and Letby's medical logs contained some false information, designed to make the baby's mother look wrong or dishonest. But the midwife and the consultant denied Letby's claims. He never cancelled that 9 pm feeding.


Yes, but the 'explained' deaths were RE-explained, not de-explained.

That report that the hospital had insufficient senior cover was in 2016! And now these world class experts, not a few of whom are literal heads of prestigious international bodies, who far outrank the prosecution witnesses, have weighed in on the state of hospital and the catalogue of elementary errors in the treatment some of these children received. I’m not trying to blame any individual staff who were no doubt doing their best. I hear people say that they trust the opinions and experiences of these consultants and experts more who were there in person. However, it’s increasingly clear that it is they who had an understandable bias in looking to pin the blame elsewhere in the knowledge that they’ve done their level best and still there remained this spike. Not having an independent panel looking at the evidence in this first place was in effect like getting these witnesses to mark their own homework.

And Dr Evans constructed this case entirely from case notes himself. One of the defence witnesses gave his opinion, unlike the original pathologist without having seen the body. Dr Evans was responsible for constructing 95% of the case which was then rubber-stamped by another prosecution expert. If you actually look into the transcripts and notes it turns out that several of the 6 or 7 prosecution expert witnesses contribute nothing at all. The furthest they go, for instance, is to state that gas found in the babies is ‘consistent’ with air embolism, which is altogether different than a medic asserting that something is diagnostic of air embolism.

We know air embolism has been rubbished as a likely explanation, from the horse’s mouth himself. Dr Evans literally said he arrived at embolism from a process of elimination of all other explanations despite the fact that people on this forum keep citing an outright fanciful quote from the letter denying Letby’s application to the Court of Appeal. Dr Evans is literally on record saying the exact opposite, that he since he could not identify any other possible cause of the babies collapse that therefore what was left was the diagnosis air embolism. The very type of diagnosis by exclusion Dr Shoo Lee warned against. So in other words, her conviction is a complete mess.

Regarding her supposed lying and manipulation, the whole tone of the procescution case in court is full of assertions as to her bad character (trying to humiliate her by bringing up the entirely innocuous ‘go commando’ message) and her lies. Just because the prosecution fits her to a pattern of circumstantial evidence and twists every false recollection or minor inconsistency into evidence of her lies, it’s so easy to see this for what it is, the prosecution striking an emotive tone to paint her in a certain light. The prosecution opening by focusing on her inability to shed tears is a case in point, a total red herring, and the exact treatment meted out to supposed witches in the past.

It’s the exact same nonsense that Nicola Bulley’s husband was subjected to, because he nervously grinned at the media while in a state of shock and looking for his missing wife. It plays well to a jury as an extra bit of all-to-compelling theatre when the person’s guilt has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. But her failure to cry at appropriate times or inability to recall details from how many years before in circumstances like this, it’s not simply bad psychology it’s about as ‘worthless’ as previous work given as evidence by Dr Evans.

How can you be sure that discrepancies about swipe data and who was where and what happened when from 6 years before were lies and manipulation and not completely innocuous and notorious inconsistencies with witness testimonies.

Just because the case is prosecuted in an emotive manner, full of stern moralising speech to make a reassuring exemplary spectacle of a killer in such a big case, does not mean lies were proven in court simply because they were asserted as so.

We’re trying to figure out if any crimes were committed here at all, so you better hold that possibility close at all times if you’re making an honest and objective attempt to figure that out.

I’m still open to any new piece of evidence that points to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt but if you let go of proceduralism, it seems clear that we’re nowhere near that, given all the flaws in the evidence and the complete lack of any hard evidence.

The idea that Letby was present at nearly all the collapses has been comprehensively debunked. See the Unheard article for heaven’s sake!

 

[Tortoise]

The original chart shows who was on duty when each charge on the indictment occured. Surely the prosecution has to show this to make their case? Where the defendant was when the alleged crime took place is discussed in all trials.

The jury was also given a document showing what all the staff on the unit were recorded as doing at those times.



Recap: Lucy Letby trial, Tuesday, October 18

Ms Tyndall is showing the jury a walkthrough of the 'neonatal unit review schedule' electronic documents, which are to be presented to the court.
The talking through of this set of evidence is for Child A. It is a seven-page document showing a timeline of data for all babies being treated in the neonatal unit around the time of Child A's collapse.
It is split into the date and time, the baby's name, what type of record is made, a summary of that activity, the member of staff administering that activity (if known), and a cross-reference to where further details of this activity can be found in the electronic evidence bundle.

 

[Sweeper2000]

They don't actually outrank the prosecutions witnesses. The prosecutions witnesses are professors in dedicated specialties which outrank the maccie d's panel. they are also top league guys such as Dr marnerides who is mroe or less the head of his class. have no doubt they are top top guys as well.

Dr Evans was different to the people who medically examined the cases of the babies who went before more or less totally as he was the first to actually be open tot he possibility of deliebrate intent being the cause of the babies declines. he was the first, the original patholigists were not because they had not been informed of that potential so looked for natural causes of decline. had they been properly informed of the docs suspicions the result would have been very different no doubt. in essence it was limitations that defined the initial explorations of what exactly happened had they been open to all possibilites the result would ahve been very different.

ETA.
Even the defences silent expert Dr Michael Hall a "world class expert" himself did not disagree with the prosecution, he just said the health of the babies was overstated. he even has expertise in air embolism believe it or not. We afetr the trial heard nothing from him to actually contest the prosecutions case.

here is his own research and contributions on air embolism, it makes sense he was chosen as a defence expert due to this paper but remember he did not contest that it did indeed seem like air embolism. . is paylocked though.

Resuscitation of a preterm infant with massive air embolism | ADC Fetal & Neonatal Edition

Resuscitation of a preterm infant with massive air embolism - PubMed

Resuscitation of a preterm infant with massive air embolism

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Sweeper2000]

A letter from Michael hall actually going against the defences panel and suggesting that Dr Lee is indeed not such an expert in the cases of air embolism as seen in the trial.

"Dear Editor,

The verdict following the retrial of Baby K followed soon after the announcement by the Appeal Court judges, on 2nd July 2024, that all applications for leave to appeal the convictions in the original 2023 trial were refused. The trial jury would have been aware of this decision and it is possible it influenced them in reaching their verdict. The judgement raises important issues concerning the interface between the legal and medical professions with regard to evaluation of medical and scientific evidence and the regulation of expert witnesses.

The phrase "skin discolouration" appears 48 times in the judgement; the names "Lee and Tanswell" appear 25 times. A major component of the prosecution case was that the skin discoloration observed in some of the babies who were the alleged victims of Lucy Letby was caused by her injecting air into their veins, leading to "air embolism". The main medical evidence offered by the prosecution in support of this accusation was a paper by Lee and Tanswell which reviewed 53 published cases of neonatal "air" embolism.(1) Certain types of skin discoloration were reported in some of the cases. After reviewing this evidence, the judges concluded that any form of skin discoloration may be a sign of air embolism, provided that it is not the only clinical sign. The judges did not list the other signs but sudden unexpected collapse seems to be one of them.

The basis for the judges’ determination is flawed, in my opinion, for the following reasons:
(i) The Lee and Tanswell paper, despite its misleading title, did not describe features of air embolism – the gas which entered the babies’ circulation was primarily oxygen, not air, and it was pumped at high pressure into the pulmonary circulation, not injected into a peripheral vein.
(ii) I have found only one paper which describes specific skin changes associated with the accidental injection of air, rather than oxygen, into a peripheral vein.(2) The changes were quite different to those described by Lee and Tanswell and to those described in the trial babies. Of particular note, the changes were not transient or "migratory", a pivotal feature of the case alleged by the prosecution and embraced by the judges.

It is likely that an independent experienced medical reviewer would have identified these evidential concerns and would have been able to advise the judges accordingly.

The second issue relates to the suitability of the two prosecution neonatal expert witnesses to interpret for the Court neonatal practice as it was in 2015-2016. Dr Evans had retired from full-time clinical practice in neonatal intensive care in 2009 and Dr Bohin also in 2009, although she continued to practise in Guernsey as a consultant paediatrician with neonates – that is in each case 13 years before the start of the trial. In all, five judges determined that the two expert witnesses were suitably qualified to give evidence and that it was for the jury to assess the validity of their evidence. But, first, on what basis were the judges qualified to make this decision? Second, as no medical expert witnesses were called for the defence, how could the jury assess the validity of the prosecution medical expert evidence, in the absence of any peer comparators offered by the defence?

There is a need to explore how we – the medical and legal professions - can do better in combining our areas of expertise in the identification and evaluation of medical evidence. In the meantime, we need to recognise and respect the boundaries of our different areas of expertise.

Dr Michael Hall
Retired Consultant Neonatologist

1. Lee SK, Tanswell AK. Pulmonary vascular air embolism in the newborn. Arch Dis Child. 1989;64(4 Spec No):507-10.
2. Willis J, Duncan C, Gottschalk S. Paraplegia due to peripheral venous air embolus in a neonate: a case report. Pediatrics. 1981;67(4):472-3.
Competing interests: MH was an expert witness for the defence at the Letby trial who was not called to the stand"

Re: Lucy Letby is found guilty of attempting to murder premature baby after retrial

www.bmj.com

 

[Sweeper2000]

Just had an interesting thought, I would not be surprised if one fo the results of this trial was that a deeper more thorough understanding of air embolism was achieved. What this would need is for it to become medically certified though. Before this its depth seemed more or less just that it was obviously something to be avoided.

 

[Tortoise]

They don't actually outrank the prosecutions witnesses. The prosecutions witnesses are professors in dedicated specialties which outrank the maccie d's panel. they are also top league guys such as Dr marnerides who is mroe or less the head of his class. have no doubt they are top top guys as well.

Dr Evans was different to the people who medically examined the cases of the babies who went before more or less totally as he was the first to actually be open tot he possibility of deliebrate intent being the cause of the babies declines. he was the first, the original patholigists were not because they had not been informed of that potential so looked for natural causes of decline. had they been properly informed of the docs suspicions the result would have been very different no doubt. in essence it was limitations that defined the initial explorations of what exactly happened had they been open to all possibilites the result would ahve been very different.

ETA.
Even the defences silent expert Dr Michael Hall a "world class expert" himself did not disagree with the prosecution, he just said the health of the babies was overstated. he even has expertise in air embolism believe it or not. We afetr the trial heard nothing from him to actually contest the prosecutions case.

here is his own research and contributions on air embolism, it makes sense he was chosen as a defence expert due to this paper but remember he did not contest that it did indeed seem like air embolism. . is paylocked though.

Resuscitation of a preterm infant with massive air embolism | ADC Fetal & Neonatal Edition

Resuscitation of a preterm infant with massive air embolism - PubMed

Resuscitation of a preterm infant with massive air embolism

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Yes, Dr Dewi Evans said this to Liz Hull -

DE: For the past 10 years I’ve probably prepared as many reports for the defence in criminal cases as I have for the police, for the prosecution. And the rules in relation to the defence are totally different. The defence is under no obligation to disclose anything. Now what they are obliged to do is to get an independent opinion if the prosecution says that the defendant has harmed an individual and that the evidence is based on medical expertise. So therefore they need to get their own expert, or experts. And this is what they did. But once I saw the reports from the two paediatricians, this is in June, I told the prosecution team and Cheshire Police they are not going to call their expert witnesses.

 

[joltz]

That report that the hospital had insufficient senior cover was in 2016! And now these world class experts, not a few of whom are literal heads of prestigious international bodies, who far outrank the prosecution witnesses, have weighed in on the state of hospital and the catalogue of elementary errors in the treatment some of these children received. I’m not trying to blame any individual staff who were no doubt doing their best. I hear people say that they trust the opinions and experiences of these consultants and experts more who were there in person. However, it’s increasingly clear that it is they who had an understandable bias in looking to pin the blame elsewhere in the knowledge that they’ve done their level best and still there remained this spike. Not having an independent panel looking at the evidence in this first place was in effect like getting these witnesses to mark their own homework.

And Dr Evans constructed this case entirely from case notes himself. One of the defence witnesses gave his opinion, unlike the original pathologist without having seen the body. Dr Evans was responsible for constructing 95% of the case which was then rubber-stamped by another prosecution expert. If you actually look into the transcripts and notes it turns out that several of the 6 or 7 prosecution expert witnesses contribute nothing at all. The furthest they go, for instance, is to state that gas found in the babies is ‘consistent’ with air embolism, which is altogether different than a medic asserting that something is diagnostic of air embolism.

We know air embolism has been rubbished as a likely explanation, from the horse’s mouth himself. Dr Evans literally said he arrived at embolism from a process of elimination of all other explanations despite the fact that people on this forum keep citing an outright fanciful quote from the letter denying Letby’s application to the Court of Appeal. Dr Evans is literally on record saying the exact opposite, that he since he could not identify any other possible cause of the babies collapse that therefore what was left was the diagnosis air embolism. The very type of diagnosis by exclusion Dr Shoo Lee warned against. So in other words, her conviction is a complete mess.

Regarding her supposed lying and manipulation, the whole tone of the procescution case in court is full of assertions as to her bad character (trying to humiliate her by bringing up the entirely innocuous ‘go commando’ message) and her lies. Just because the prosecution fits her to a pattern of circumstantial evidence and twists every false recollection or minor inconsistency into evidence of her lies, it’s so easy to see this for what it is, the prosecution striking an emotive tone to paint her in a certain light. The prosecution opening by focusing on her inability to shed tears is a case in point, a total red herring, and the exact treatment meted out to supposed witches in the past.

It’s the exact same nonsense that Nicola Bulley’s husband was subjected to, because he nervously grinned at the media while in a state of shock and looking for his missing wife. It plays well to a jury as an extra bit of all-to-compelling theatre when the person’s guilt has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. But her failure to cry at appropriate times or inability to recall details from how many years before in circumstances like this, it’s not simply bad psychology it’s about as ‘worthless’ as previous work given as evidence by Dr Evans.

How can you be sure that discrepancies about swipe data and who was where and what happened when from 6 years before were lies and manipulation and not completely innocuous and notorious inconsistencies with witness testimonies.

Just because the case is prosecuted in an emotive manner, full of stern moralising speech to make a reassuring exemplary spectacle of a killer in such a big case, does not mean lies were proven in court simply because they were asserted as so.

We’re trying to figure out if any crimes were committed here at all, so you better hold that possibility close at all times if you’re making an honest and objective attempt to figure that out.

I’m still open to any new piece of evidence that points to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt but if you let go of proceduralism, it seems clear that we’re nowhere near that, given all the flaws in the evidence and the complete lack of any hard evidence.

The idea that Letby was present at nearly all the collapses has been comprehensively debunked. See the Unheard article for heaven’s sake!

Funny that you mention Nicola Bulley because The Letby TrUtHeRs are the exact same category of people that would not accept her death for what it was: a tragic accident.

JMO

 

[Tortoise]

Just had an interesting thought, I would not be surprised if one fo the results of this trial was that a deeper more thorough understanding of air embolism was achieved. What this would need is for it to become medically certified though. Before this its depth seemed more or less just that it was obviously something to be avoided.

It's such a shame that Letby didn't get back in time with the camera. I'm sure she tried.

Why didn't she whip her germ-infested phone out of her pocket? Oh yes, she wasn't allowed to use it on the unit.

 

[Sweeper2000]

Yes, Dr Dewi Evans said this to Liz Hull -

DE: For the past 10 years I’ve probably prepared as many reports for the defence in criminal cases as I have for the police, for the prosecution. And the rules in relation to the defence are totally different. The defence is under no obligation to disclose anything. Now what they are obliged to do is to get an independent opinion if the prosecution says that the defendant has harmed an individual and that the evidence is based on medical expertise. So therefore they need to get their own expert, or experts. And this is what they did. But once I saw the reports from the two paediatricians, this is in June, I told the prosecution team and Cheshire Police they are not going to call their expert witnesses.

so interesting and I can't help but notice the degree of confidence necessary to make such a statement. He called it wayyy before the trial and was correct. so interesting. I'm wondering who the two ped consultants are though? M Hall and?