Being a trial lawyer made me sensitive to post-verdict critics who pop up to say the result is obviously wrong. These critics need to ask themselves a basic question: Hang on, why wasn’t my point raised by the trial actors themselves? We see this failure in two ways with Lucy Letby. One is the key point made in your letter—namely, Letby herself conceded someone harmed children. The other is Letby’s failure to offer an alternative explanation—for example, she testified that hospital negligence was not to be blamed. Add all that to other evidence—such as testimony about Letby diagnosing an infant from across a dark room—and the truth is her defense team had limited arguments.
The hospital suppressed a report about contamination on the ward. It was only leaked after the trial was over. Others knew about the report but were afraid to come forward fearing to lose their job.
Nurses who wanted to testify on Lucy's behalf, were told not to do so by their superiors. Many experts were unwilling to testify on her behalf as they feared losing their reputation, their license, their job, etc. They probably all hoped it would end well, but it did not. Now some have found the courage to come forward.
Evidence about her presence on the ward (by herself) turned out to be in part faulty. The security/access system had at least one malfunctioning door om the ward for an unspecified time, causing exits to become entries, and entries to become exits.
I don't think it was Lucy's responsibility to explain the deaths. She was a nurse, not a microbiologist, a neonatal doctor, etc. Again, autopsies done at the time the events happened, found natural causes: NEC and/or pneumonia.
Did she realize how one of the Consultants went from a clinic for children with Cystic Fibrosis, known to often be carriers of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa, to the ward with premature babies - who have no immune system yet. Probably not, but someone in management should have.
Parents did complain about nurses coming to work with a cold and a full nose of snot.
When a NICU in the US had similar issues, they tested everything and everyone. They found what killed the babies: deadly bacteria under the nails of two of the nurses.
Something not taken into account, was the condition of the mothers, how the deliveries happened, and the immediate aftermath. For some of these very premature babies it took hours before they were administered antibiotics, blood, medications, glucose, etc., because the junior doctors had trouble inserting lines and NG tubes.
Lucy was hounded for years, arrested twice (eventually three times), interrogated, accused, lost the job she loved, was pictured as a criminal in newspapers and other media. This devastated woman scribbles and you take that seriously ? Nowhere on these post-it notes does she "confess".
The note was written in July 2016, according to Letby, long before anything you mention in the final paragraph happened, apart from losing her job. There was no talk of a police investigation at that time and yet the note clearly suggests that she fears going to prison. Curious.
She was at that time accused by the Consultants, as a result she was removed from the ward and put on administrative duties. In other words: she had lost the job she loved and was accused of heinous things.
How much she added later to the notes, we have no idea. I think that the prosecution did a good job at cutting her down and confusing her. But, apparently in the UK that is what they are supposed to do. How that brings us towards the truth, I fail to understand.
It's gracious of you to open by admitting your bias and motivation.
For evidence that even the most distinguished KC can be blinkered by process, ideology and expedient adherence to the prejudices of the judge, we need look no further than our Prime Minister.
I'll say again what I've said before - a great deal of this very much is because she is young and pretty. No one ever questioned Beverley Allitt's verdict.
Anyone who has seen the quantity of evidence against this woman would be in little doubt.
I've never heard anyone describe her as pretty. Wonky-faced and dead eyed more like.
A big reason why no-one questioned the Allitt verdict is that she was convicted before the total and complete collapse of trust in elite establishments occurred. The trust we once - perhaps naively - had has been torn asunder over the last 25 years or so, by documented failure after documented betrayal.
Of course, another reason is that bampots didn't have a voice that extended beyond the local pub 30 years ago.
Scribblings based on the advice from a therapist. A known method for release of mental issues. Like writing notes to dead partners.
You really believe that a woman so devious that she managed to make a large number of babies sick, even murdered some, using different methods, in the few moments someone had their back to her, of was gone for a few minutes to get a coffee, but she was so stupid as to write confessions and keep them ? Nope.
You want me to believe that there is a school of therapy that encourages patients to write horrendous lies about themselves? “Nope.” (I have to say that the “Yep… Nope… Who’d’ve thunk it?” good-old-boy style of rhetoric is fashionably patronising among self-appointed contrarian skeptics.)
There are plenty of schools of therapy that encourage patients to tell themselves pretty lies. What's the difference really? Lies are lies. The pretty lies are just less obviously insidious and damaging.
There is a chance she is not a serial killer. Just a hardworking nurse.
Reading the transcripts of the trial and the accusation, she must have been a master criminal. Many of the methods she used to kill, had never been seen before ! And she managed to do this undetected for many years. Probably already when she started her nursing career. Dr. Evans stated in one interview he was evaluating about 250 occurrences. Although in other interviews he mentioned different, lower, numbers.
The police thought the notation LO in her diary meant Lucy intended to make a baby crash that day. They even told so to reporters. It turned out to be LD, a normal way for medical personnel to indicate a Long Day.
You remind me of the David Lawrence character on X trolling Conservatives and trying to shore up support for some of Labour's policy decisions.
No amount of Olympic-grade mental gymnastics is going to overturn the weight of evidence that you haven't seen personally that ended up convicting her. Twice.
Write something to broaden the discussion, and you are accused of" trolling". There was a time that differences of opinion were seen as a good thing. Healthy even.
I cite a lot of facts. On those facts I base my opinion re. the Lucy Letby conviction. Mr. Zorn knows the "weight of evidence" he refers to does not exist. Hence he calls my remarks trolling - for lack of proper arguments.
“The deaths were investigated and found to be natural (five, the sixth was uncertain). The pathologists found NEC and/or pneumonia as causes of death.”
Since you have some secret source of information proving that the Times report is a tissue of lies, I suggest you pass it to the Enquiry. Lacking such resources, I give up.
Notwithstanding the good points made here, I almost didn't read past "What possible motive could the police have to frame an innocent woman anyway?", realising I could think of 10 reasons off the top of my head, and 10 examples of where they've done exactly this in the past (albeit not necessarily to women).
I came in with this assumption also, but elected to put it to one side and see what he has to say. I'm glad I did.
The habit of only entertaining the views of people with whom we have previously agreed is how we got to where we are today as a divided, dogmatic and irrational society.
He did none of that during COVID, so rather precisely the point! He simply enjoys going against the grain of issues which demand far more scrutiny. Such as COVID, the lockdowns over which wrecked many lives because the state needed to be overbearing and adopt a patrician standpoint.
There is plenty of evidence so suggest the trial like that of the cot death mothers, is unstable. It at least deserves a review. This whole thing is about protecting the NHS. Again patrician worldview.
I have doubts about the safety of the conviction but really recommend the podcast CS refers to in this post. Hull and Cheetham come across very well, the statistician does not. It does not help those who have concerns to have their arguments represented by someone who presents as a statistician but who pivots to concerns about the conduct of Letby’s legal representation.
I've taken to using the phrase "The Blind Sharpshooter", because people have wrongly understood the fallacy to necessarily require that the Sharpshooter actually realises he's drawing the target around the cluster of bullet-holes.
With that in mind, one query on the below:
"When Dewi Evans first identified suspicious collapses and deaths by looking at the medical records, he did so without knowing who was on duty."
Was Dewi only given cases to review that were "suspicious", or all deaths an collapsed in the unit over a period of time? Because, if you recall, the police were called because Letby was ALREADY SUSPECTED, by the very people that had classified (post hoc) the deaths as "unexplained". So whether Evans did or didn't know who was on duty is - surely - irrelevant, because the police had already drawn the target for him?
Dewi was given all collapses and deaths over a period and asked to review them and identity any suspicious instances (believe there were 60+ he had to review). He himself insisted to police before receiving the files that he shouldn't be informed of any already suspicious cases or any suspects in order to avoid bias in his findings. His findings were then peer reviewed by other medical experts and only then did they overlay the shift rota to identify if any staff were consistent across all of the identified suspicious incidents.
Any idea whether the dates were redacted; or if they seeded the sample with cases from another hospital, or from after (or before) Letby worked on the unit? It would absolutely have been possible construct a proper control.
It is hard to compare units because they all have different issues. The CoCH ward had plumbing problems, pipes with waste-water leaking, staffing shortages, was too small, cots too close to one another, had management issues, and also junior doctors hesitant to call the Consultants when having problems. (Remarks in the review done by RCPCH in 2016.)
Dr. Evans knew Dr. Gibbs, a pediatrician who worked at CoCH NICU, and was (also) retired. They talked about the issues at CoCH NICU and the suspicions regarding one of the nurses. Dr. Evans decided this was just the case for him, so he contacted Chester PD to offer his services.
The Consultants who had voiced suspicions re. nurse Letby, were asked to help find evidence.
Bytheway, Dr. Evans - who is a pediatrician, not a neonatologist - never saw an air-embolism IRL either. He knew about a case where during a surgery the lines got confused and air was pushed in the wrong one, causing an embolism.
Furthermore, if Lucy caused embolisms by administering air in the naso-gastric tube, why was no air-embolism seen during the post-mortem of baby Noah ?
I am still wondering how that "blind investigation" was done. Original notes ? That would mean he could recognize the handwriting. Notes mad in a computer would also have been recognizable based on writing style, etc.
The Consultants - who should have been persons of interest - were allowed to rummage through the files to "help with the investigation".
That is how Dr. Breary found the test results for the babies with the insulin/sugar issues. These were at the time these problems happened, not looked at - because the babies had recovered before the results came in. Dr. Breary (not an endocrinologist) thought the numbers looked high. That the tests came with a disclaimer "Not Suitable for Forensic Purposes" apparently meant nothing to him. Neither did it for Dr. Evans.
In total there were THREE suspected "insuling poisonings". Lucy attached the bag for ONE baby. Yet was convicted for trying to murder TWO (different) babies. Can someone explain ?
Exactly. Lucy Letby's fate was sealed when one of the doctors decided that there was a baby-killer nurse on the ward. This decision effectively closed off any attempt to show other, more plausible, explanations for the seemingly high number of infant deaths.
That one the cheap arguments used against people who wonder about the verdict. If you put a woman in prison for the rest of her life, you better make damn sure you have it right. Currently many scientists, experts, have doubts.
What we did see is that if you have a business being a witness in court, and you have been doing that for about twenty years, you get really good at it. (In answer to Paul Cassidy).
Thank you for this. I have taken no interest in the trial but have been aware of a slight furore over the outcome. Better informed now.
Being a trial lawyer made me sensitive to post-verdict critics who pop up to say the result is obviously wrong. These critics need to ask themselves a basic question: Hang on, why wasn’t my point raised by the trial actors themselves? We see this failure in two ways with Lucy Letby. One is the key point made in your letter—namely, Letby herself conceded someone harmed children. The other is Letby’s failure to offer an alternative explanation—for example, she testified that hospital negligence was not to be blamed. Add all that to other evidence—such as testimony about Letby diagnosing an infant from across a dark room—and the truth is her defense team had limited arguments.
POINT OF ORDER: It's not the defence's job to explain the deaths; it's the prosecution job to proved she did it.
The hospital suppressed a report about contamination on the ward. It was only leaked after the trial was over. Others knew about the report but were afraid to come forward fearing to lose their job.
Nurses who wanted to testify on Lucy's behalf, were told not to do so by their superiors. Many experts were unwilling to testify on her behalf as they feared losing their reputation, their license, their job, etc. They probably all hoped it would end well, but it did not. Now some have found the courage to come forward.
Evidence about her presence on the ward (by herself) turned out to be in part faulty. The security/access system had at least one malfunctioning door om the ward for an unspecified time, causing exits to become entries, and entries to become exits.
I don't think it was Lucy's responsibility to explain the deaths. She was a nurse, not a microbiologist, a neonatal doctor, etc. Again, autopsies done at the time the events happened, found natural causes: NEC and/or pneumonia.
Did she realize how one of the Consultants went from a clinic for children with Cystic Fibrosis, known to often be carriers of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa, to the ward with premature babies - who have no immune system yet. Probably not, but someone in management should have.
Parents did complain about nurses coming to work with a cold and a full nose of snot.
When a NICU in the US had similar issues, they tested everything and everyone. They found what killed the babies: deadly bacteria under the nails of two of the nurses.
Something not taken into account, was the condition of the mothers, how the deliveries happened, and the immediate aftermath. For some of these very premature babies it took hours before they were administered antibiotics, blood, medications, glucose, etc., because the junior doctors had trouble inserting lines and NG tubes.
Lucy was hounded for years, arrested twice (eventually three times), interrogated, accused, lost the job she loved, was pictured as a criminal in newspapers and other media. This devastated woman scribbles and you take that seriously ? Nowhere on these post-it notes does she "confess".
The note was written in July 2016, according to Letby, long before anything you mention in the final paragraph happened, apart from losing her job. There was no talk of a police investigation at that time and yet the note clearly suggests that she fears going to prison. Curious.
She was at that time accused by the Consultants, as a result she was removed from the ward and put on administrative duties. In other words: she had lost the job she loved and was accused of heinous things.
How much she added later to the notes, we have no idea. I think that the prosecution did a good job at cutting her down and confusing her. But, apparently in the UK that is what they are supposed to do. How that brings us towards the truth, I fail to understand.
It's gracious of you to open by admitting your bias and motivation.
For evidence that even the most distinguished KC can be blinkered by process, ideology and expedient adherence to the prejudices of the judge, we need look no further than our Prime Minister.
I'll say again what I've said before - a great deal of this very much is because she is young and pretty. No one ever questioned Beverley Allitt's verdict.
Anyone who has seen the quantity of evidence against this woman would be in little doubt.
I've never heard anyone describe her as pretty. Wonky-faced and dead eyed more like.
A big reason why no-one questioned the Allitt verdict is that she was convicted before the total and complete collapse of trust in elite establishments occurred. The trust we once - perhaps naively - had has been torn asunder over the last 25 years or so, by documented failure after documented betrayal.
Of course, another reason is that bampots didn't have a voice that extended beyond the local pub 30 years ago.
Quantity, yes, quality, no. Reason for doubt about the verdict.
Young and pretty - yet sentenced to fifteen life sentences. Yep.
Not to mention the privately written confession…
Scribblings based on the advice from a therapist. A known method for release of mental issues. Like writing notes to dead partners.
You really believe that a woman so devious that she managed to make a large number of babies sick, even murdered some, using different methods, in the few moments someone had their back to her, of was gone for a few minutes to get a coffee, but she was so stupid as to write confessions and keep them ? Nope.
You want me to believe that there is a school of therapy that encourages patients to write horrendous lies about themselves? “Nope.” (I have to say that the “Yep… Nope… Who’d’ve thunk it?” good-old-boy style of rhetoric is fashionably patronising among self-appointed contrarian skeptics.)
There are plenty of schools of therapy that encourage patients to tell themselves pretty lies. What's the difference really? Lies are lies. The pretty lies are just less obviously insidious and damaging.
She repeated on the notes, the lies that were told about her: "they say".
Apparently you have no answer to the question I asked.
It doesn't say "they say" anywhere on that note.
She used the expression "they went".
No she didn't. She wrote "How will things ever be like they use to. They won't." Letby simps misread 'won't' as 'went' and that morphed into 'said' because most of her supporters never look at evidence. https://news.sky.com/story/lucy-letby-trial-i-am-evil-i-did-this-read-the-confession-note-written-by-nurse-accused-of-murdering-seven-babies-12718882
Very true. Also “Hate myself”, which does appear, is not a quotation or paraphrase of an accusation.
The question answered itself. A serial killer is not a rational person - not an infallible master criminal.
There is a chance she is not a serial killer. Just a hardworking nurse.
Reading the transcripts of the trial and the accusation, she must have been a master criminal. Many of the methods she used to kill, had never been seen before ! And she managed to do this undetected for many years. Probably already when she started her nursing career. Dr. Evans stated in one interview he was evaluating about 250 occurrences. Although in other interviews he mentioned different, lower, numbers.
The police thought the notation LO in her diary meant Lucy intended to make a baby crash that day. They even told so to reporters. It turned out to be LD, a normal way for medical personnel to indicate a Long Day.
You remind me of the David Lawrence character on X trolling Conservatives and trying to shore up support for some of Labour's policy decisions.
No amount of Olympic-grade mental gymnastics is going to overturn the weight of evidence that you haven't seen personally that ended up convicting her. Twice.
Write something to broaden the discussion, and you are accused of" trolling". There was a time that differences of opinion were seen as a good thing. Healthy even.
Differences of opinion on matters of fact are not productive. They are only helpful in matters of taste.
I cite a lot of facts. On those facts I base my opinion re. the Lucy Letby conviction. Mr. Zorn knows the "weight of evidence" he refers to does not exist. Hence he calls my remarks trolling - for lack of proper arguments.
You should read today’s Times. There are a lot of facts you haven’t seen or addressed.
“The deaths were investigated and found to be natural (five, the sixth was uncertain). The pathologists found NEC and/or pneumonia as causes of death.”
Since you have some secret source of information proving that the Times report is a tissue of lies, I suggest you pass it to the Enquiry. Lacking such resources, I give up.
Notwithstanding the good points made here, I almost didn't read past "What possible motive could the police have to frame an innocent woman anyway?", realising I could think of 10 reasons off the top of my head, and 10 examples of where they've done exactly this in the past (albeit not necessarily to women).
God you’re an awful human being. Realised this over COVID. You simply enjoy the contrarian position.
I came in with this assumption also, but elected to put it to one side and see what he has to say. I'm glad I did.
The habit of only entertaining the views of people with whom we have previously agreed is how we got to where we are today as a divided, dogmatic and irrational society.
He did none of that during COVID, so rather precisely the point! He simply enjoys going against the grain of issues which demand far more scrutiny. Such as COVID, the lockdowns over which wrecked many lives because the state needed to be overbearing and adopt a patrician standpoint.
There is plenty of evidence so suggest the trial like that of the cot death mothers, is unstable. It at least deserves a review. This whole thing is about protecting the NHS. Again patrician worldview.
Yes, he might have done that during covid, and I am electing to give his views a hearing nevertheless. Because I want to be better than that.
If a stopped clock is right twice a day, should you refuse to believe that it's 10 o'clock even when it actually is 10 o'clock?
I have doubts about the safety of the conviction but really recommend the podcast CS refers to in this post. Hull and Cheetham come across very well, the statistician does not. It does not help those who have concerns to have their arguments represented by someone who presents as a statistician but who pivots to concerns about the conduct of Letby’s legal representation.
I've taken to using the phrase "The Blind Sharpshooter", because people have wrongly understood the fallacy to necessarily require that the Sharpshooter actually realises he's drawing the target around the cluster of bullet-holes.
With that in mind, one query on the below:
"When Dewi Evans first identified suspicious collapses and deaths by looking at the medical records, he did so without knowing who was on duty."
Was Dewi only given cases to review that were "suspicious", or all deaths an collapsed in the unit over a period of time? Because, if you recall, the police were called because Letby was ALREADY SUSPECTED, by the very people that had classified (post hoc) the deaths as "unexplained". So whether Evans did or didn't know who was on duty is - surely - irrelevant, because the police had already drawn the target for him?
Dewi was given all collapses and deaths over a period and asked to review them and identity any suspicious instances (believe there were 60+ he had to review). He himself insisted to police before receiving the files that he shouldn't be informed of any already suspicious cases or any suspects in order to avoid bias in his findings. His findings were then peer reviewed by other medical experts and only then did they overlay the shift rota to identify if any staff were consistent across all of the identified suspicious incidents.
Thanks Winston - that's helpful.
Any idea whether the dates were redacted; or if they seeded the sample with cases from another hospital, or from after (or before) Letby worked on the unit? It would absolutely have been possible construct a proper control.
It is hard to compare units because they all have different issues. The CoCH ward had plumbing problems, pipes with waste-water leaking, staffing shortages, was too small, cots too close to one another, had management issues, and also junior doctors hesitant to call the Consultants when having problems. (Remarks in the review done by RCPCH in 2016.)
Dr. Evans knew Dr. Gibbs, a pediatrician who worked at CoCH NICU, and was (also) retired. They talked about the issues at CoCH NICU and the suspicions regarding one of the nurses. Dr. Evans decided this was just the case for him, so he contacted Chester PD to offer his services.
The Consultants who had voiced suspicions re. nurse Letby, were asked to help find evidence.
Bytheway, Dr. Evans - who is a pediatrician, not a neonatologist - never saw an air-embolism IRL either. He knew about a case where during a surgery the lines got confused and air was pushed in the wrong one, causing an embolism.
Furthermore, if Lucy caused embolisms by administering air in the naso-gastric tube, why was no air-embolism seen during the post-mortem of baby Noah ?
I am still wondering how that "blind investigation" was done. Original notes ? That would mean he could recognize the handwriting. Notes mad in a computer would also have been recognizable based on writing style, etc.
The Consultants - who should have been persons of interest - were allowed to rummage through the files to "help with the investigation".
That is how Dr. Breary found the test results for the babies with the insulin/sugar issues. These were at the time these problems happened, not looked at - because the babies had recovered before the results came in. Dr. Breary (not an endocrinologist) thought the numbers looked high. That the tests came with a disclaimer "Not Suitable for Forensic Purposes" apparently meant nothing to him. Neither did it for Dr. Evans.
In total there were THREE suspected "insuling poisonings". Lucy attached the bag for ONE baby. Yet was convicted for trying to murder TWO (different) babies. Can someone explain ?
When someone has become emotionally committed to a cause evidence is unlikely to sway that commitment.
Exactly. Lucy Letby's fate was sealed when one of the doctors decided that there was a baby-killer nurse on the ward. This decision effectively closed off any attempt to show other, more plausible, explanations for the seemingly high number of infant deaths.
That one the cheap arguments used against people who wonder about the verdict. If you put a woman in prison for the rest of her life, you better make damn sure you have it right. Currently many scientists, experts, have doubts.
What we did see is that if you have a business being a witness in court, and you have been doing that for about twenty years, you get really good at it. (In answer to Paul Cassidy).