The press conference on the case of Lucy Letby, hosted by David Davis MP yesterday, made clear that there are very good reasons to doubt the safety of any of her convictions for the murder of children at the hospital where she worked.
Those concerns have long been shared by my wife, who worked for some time in neonatology units before becoming a GP. She is qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Physicians with a speciality in children's medicine. She has never felt the evidence against Letby stacked up, and the case was more likely a cover-up. It is now clear that she is very far from alone.
But, it has to be noted, so determined is the cover-up that the government ordered an inquiry, chaired by Lady Justice Thirlwall, to examine the events leading up to the deaths at the Countess of Chester neonatal unit. As Thirlwall has made clear, her inquiry is not a review of the convictions, which she appears determined to uphold. So certain is her view that she has said that criticism of those convictions has created "an enormous amount of stress” for the victims' parents. That Letby might be servicing time for murders she never committed does not appear to be her concern.
I do not know the truth here. But I note that people with considerable expertise who have reviewed the cases could, between them, find no evidence for there being a single murder, as was explained at yesterday's press conference.
Because of the perversity of the UK legal system, that may not permit a review of Letby's case, because of mistakes by her original defence team of lawyers.
Meanwhile, the government is funding an inquiry at a considerable cost to work out how an event that might well have never happened can be prevented from happening again. It's hard to make up something so absurd.
There is very obviously reasonable doubt about the convictions in this case. The deaths may have been from natural causes. They may be the result of a lack of proper medical care. At the very least, a retrial is needed. If that cannot be safely undertaken, then a higher court will have to decide the matter. But what is very obvious is that the Thirlwall hearing should be put on hold. Justice must be seen to be done, first of all.
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It came as no surprise to me that Dr Evans the chief prosecution witnesses evidence has been undermined. The implication is (should it be accepted his evidence was / is unreliable) either his evidence was above his capacity so to offer and / or the financial incentive of being engaged on such a big case caused a distorted focus of his mind.
Those of us who have experience of engaging professionals will not be surprised by any alleged lack of impartiality coming from many professionals. My experience is he who pays the piper calls the tune.
However to lay all the blame for what now clearly looks like a miscarriage of justice at Dr Evan’s door might be too harsh, after all his evidence was supported by other ‘experts’ and the judge refused to allow the defences protestations of allowing Evans based on previous mal indicators.
All of this leaves a bad taste in my mouth as yet again our archaic systems, steeped yesterday’s traditions hurtle us to nearer and nearer to civil war as we lose faith in our institutions that are nothing less than champions of inequality.
I do not know the truth here
I do.
What passes for the “Uk justice system” is only interested in identifying culprits. I’m not even going to bother going over the long long list of justice-betrayed (Birmingham 6? – the old fool Denning would have hung them) . In every case, there is hand wringing by the establishment afterwards and a life destroyed. And for victims (of the crime or events) wonderment at “what the hell happened”.
Much to agree with
I followed the case via Private Eye (“MD” aka Phil Hammond) after my daughter (prem baby ICU senior nurse until 3 years ago) was appalled by the case and insisted ‘there but the grace of God’. There are clearly massive holes in the prosecution case. As MD wrote, Letby may or may not have killed some child, but she deserves a fair trial, which she has not had.
Much to agree with
This one left me feeling rather disconsolate about it all.
It’s a mess, within a mess, within a mess.
Reports of poor conditions in NHS hospitals and even maternity wards are legion. And none of the Tory politicians who orchestrated this are in prison, which they should be in my opinion if we were in a real democracy.
Damn them to hell. All of them. And those sitting on their hands in the Labour government are welcome to join them anytime.
Agreed
PSR, MD’s write ups in Private Eye suggest any review should consider actions of the hospital management and doctors (let’s not stop at the politicians). It seems that a poorly performing, struggling dept, has avoided scrutiny whilst Letby takes the fall. Tragic for all (the small people) concerned. A parable for our age.
I agree with that
Staggeringly, consultants did ward rounds twice a week. When my wife was in neonatology consultant ward rounds were twice a day.
Frankly I not agree.
Remember that you always follow the money.
Especially when it is not there or has been taken away? Which it has as far as the NHS itself is concerned.
You get what you pay for, right?
And what you don’t.
And that was a political decision and I stand by what the consequences should be.
I guess the buck should stop at the top – though it rarely does. But it looks like others have also failed in this one.
If there is evidence of people passing/ducking blame for their failures or inactions, we should pursue that too. That should encourage better behaviour in others – we need better accountability! I think blaming the nurse for others’ failures isn’t OK – and shouldn’t be tolerated, ignored or excused.
There are three possible alternatives for each of the crimes for which Letby has been prosecuted and convicted at two separate trials, with previous appeals dismissed.
1. Letby is guilty.
2. Letby is innocent, but someone else is guilty.
3. No one is guilty because there were no criminal acts. The hospital just had an usually high neonatal death rate in this period. (There is also the possibility that Letby or someone else is guilty of criminal acts, but the evidence is just not good enough to prove it beyond reasonable doubt.)
I don’t know. It it easy for armchair experts to opine, but the weight of legitimate criticism seems to be increasing. That said, like most of them, I was not in court and did not see the totality of the evidence, including the evidence that Letby herself gave in her own defence.
Criticism has been made of Letby’s defence lawyers not challenging the prosecution’s expert evidence, but the defence lawyers would have been acting under the instructions of their client, Letby, and in what they all perceived as her best interests. It is certainly possible that she and they thought that further expert evidence would harm her defence more than help. That is a legitimate choice for any defendant.
The terms of reference of the Thirlwall inquiry do not extend to reviewing the safety of the convictions – that is a job for the Court of Appeal – so it is a little unfair to criticise her for not doing something she is not tasked to do. At the very least I expect the enquiry will find evidence of the systems at the hospital being unsatisfactory, whether Letby is guilty or innocent.
I don’t envy the lawyers trying to persuade the Court of Appeal to choose between the different strands of expert evidence. Whatever happens, at the heart of this, we have parents mourning the unexpected death of new born babies.
The pertinent point is in this case evidence better / more experienced ‘experts.’ The case cost millions i believe so the judge may have felt ‘pressure’ not to disallow Dr Evans evidence. Possibly I could suggest improvements for future cases;
1: Have cases that rely on heavy technical evidence heard before a jury of ‘experts’
2: Reduce the maximum sentence to something like the Norwegian model of 21 years
Sometimes it is just not worth it for someone in the medical profession to give expert evidence in support of an accused. They would be challenging the medical heirarchy and the consequences can be severe. It’s treated as akin to whistleblowing.
Agreed
The statistical evidence was shot down some time ago.
Now the we learn that each of the deaths could have an alternative explanation
We will now be told that she was associated with too many deaths for it to be chance.
This is where statistics comes back in.
In a department where deaths were occurring all the time it would be inevitable that some nurse would be associated with an unusually large number of deaths. (Another nurse would be associated with unusually few deaths). This would be pure chance.
Again, each of the Letby deaths had murder as a possible explanation. But there were a far larger number of other deaths in the unit. In how many of these was murder considered as an explanation?
You are right – as usual lawyers proved themselves utterly ignorant on stats.
That’s most people. Mathematics isn’t taken seriously with most people being terrible at it and never bothering to learn. Some even take it as a point of pride. Imagine someone doing the same with illiteracy.
Was Nurse Letby also victim of a possible target-driven prosecution?
I quite like Robert Saplosky’s take on the justice system. Undermining the idea of blame seems to me a compassionate route out of these sorts of messes. If there was no / a significantly reduced incentive for a cover up then perhaps finding a scapegoat wouldn’t be necessary. Trying to completely reform the entire system based on there being no free will might be a bit of a stretch, but as a counter argument to explore improvements perhaps it is useful.
Looking at it from a broader perspective.
If you have a potential miscarriage of justice then you have a potential situation where someone has ‘got away with it’ Look at the Birmingham 4 & Guildford 6 as a ‘for example’ I suggest that where an arguable case exists then it should be looked at critically.
I might add that in both those cases there doesnt seem to have been a reinvestigation despite the obvious weakness’s of the case.
The other issue and the case of Lucy Lethby a very real one is ‘how did the deceased die?’ in many murder cases the answer is on the face of it obvious although in one recent case the Police managed to miss the fact that the deceased had been shot. In this case however we are looking at very sick premature babies where no suspicions were raised it the post mortems so my initial response might be to start there.
How sure are we that these babies were in fact ‘killed’
Once that point is addressed properly we then move onto who did it if in fact they were killed
I doubt they were killed.
They may well have been failed.
I remember a legal opinion doing the rounds about ministerial culpability for the NHS doing harm to people when I was on the 38 Degrees network.
Of course there was a barrister’s opinion that ministers were culpable and another barristers opinion that they weren’t which is what my local Tory MP joyfully pointed out to me.
The point is this: The Tory government thought about this because they knew that their cuts to the NHS were going to cause harm and they wanted to be protected. To me, its the mens rea element of the whole case against them.
If the Tories really wanted to change our health system, they could have just been honest about it and even given tax incentives or even vouchers to citizens wanting to opt into a private system. They could have done it a proper and safer way.
Instead their ‘channel shifting’ has been via the route of making the health service worse and even dangerous in doing so. This is the way the British state works – just like it did with railways lines Beeching wanted to close – they provided the most run down locomotives and rolling stock, stop maintaining the track and the stations so that eventually the user numbers dwindle as the service just deteriorates and the justification for closure was created. They manufacture change – it does not ‘just happen’.
But let us put the end user aside for a minute and think about the people working in a ‘running it down’ culture in a world where we incentivise CEOs with multi-million pound remuneration. Poor pay, long hours, short staffing, seeing agency staff coming in on more money than you, the Covid effect (badly managed by your Government), the settlement with NHS consultants undermined (read how that was dealt with in Nicholas Timmins ‘The Five Giants’ (1995) ).
When you break a system – and the 2010 Tories went all out to break it all – you also break the human beings trying to operate in the system – that is what I have seen in the NHS and the public services since 2010. Those of you coming here and even benignly suggesting that those people are also culpable miss the whole point I think which is why I am certain that culpability goes right to the top.
Somethings should not ever be compromised – and one of those things is medical care and safety – and this has been compromised by rancidly ignorant politicians who had no right whatsoever to do what they did in the way that they did it. It was reckless, thoughtless and totally lacked a duty of care which was placed instead on the shoulders of the medical teams alone – the very people being undermined to deliver it by ministers underfunding the service. There should be a civil case against the government under Tort law.
I rest my case.
Were post mortems carried out at the time of death, in each case? All of the babies were very poorly. No suspicions were raised at the time of death, so PM’s may well not have been carried out. Ascertaining cause of death without a PM, based on medical/nursing notes and test/scan results must be fallible.
Without a certain cause of death, proving murder, based on the very basic doctrine of ‘proved beyond reasonable doubt’, is very difficult.
I think most had PMs. None suggested murder.
Ex ITU here (with iver a decade in crit care).
Only Letby knows the truth, but certainly now, and at the time, much of the evidence would have condemned 99.99% of clinical staff across the UK, and demonstrated that appalling ignorance of ,’real practice ‘, as opposed to ‘hypothetical, TV drama practice ‘.
The lack of professional, expert witness defense,due to fear of reputation was an utter mockery of our legal system, just as some of the clinical evidence for the prosecution, was beyond embarrassing.
The background on the staffing, and category of patient taken, utterly inappropriately , on that unit is shocking to read as ex clinical, but sadly indicative of a situation I walked out on.
I feel truly sorry for the families, it must be a constant rollercoaster of emotion, with absolutely no end in sight, or feeling of justice done.
Upon further reflection I fear yet again I have had second thoughts over this case and i will briefly explain why.
Firstly we would all agree unexplained deaths are worthy of being initially investigated.
The case the prosecution made medically is IMO fair as no expert offered alternative explanations. Now Lucy Letby is not so toxic given the huge innocent camp publicity and the experts are coming out of the woodwork. But the causes of the collapses are in reality not now provable, they are just opinions and I am sure you could get now many arguing on either side.
For me the point that leaves me tipping still to her guilt is what was the likelihood that the nurse so accused would turn out to have all those hand over sheets under her bed etc and spent I believe 2000 times over the period looking up the family. This plus other such incriminating details do add up not only in my mind but in the juries I am sure, unless I am wrong and you could have searched any of the nurses homes and found similar out of the ordinary ‘evidence’ but I just for whatever reason doubt that.
So my opinion for what little it is worth is she still may be guilty but I suspect some of the evidence that was used against her was in error. Does that warrant a retrial….given the gravity of the case, I hope so.