I have listened to the press conference again, and also read the Private Eye reports. (I have a fair bit of respect for these Private Eye reports, as it was their Lockerbie one that set me on the right track in my investigation into that mess.)
I realise there are two points regarding the insulin results. First there is the obvious one that the standard immunoassay is not accurate enough for the purposes of this investigation. First because it is not particularly good at identifying synthetic insulin, and second because it's subject to interference from antibodies in the sample, and these babies had a lot of antibodies. This is the point that has been made by several groups looking into this, and from what I now remember is the point that I read Vincent Marks had made too. (So why "Deb Roberts" named him as having confirmed the insulin results I have no idea.) Prof Lee made that point quite clearly, but he also said that the normal c-peptide concentrations in neonates (or pre-term infants, I think this means infants who should not actually be born yet) are not the same as in adults or older children. He mentioned a particular expert who had been studying this for many years, but he didn't elaborate further on the reason for this. Given the level of expertise of the group as a whole I am inclined to take this at face value, although I'd like to know why this is.
The explanation as to why the hypoglycaemic baby's results were as they were, in the context of the i/v line infiltrating the tissues and the bolus administration of glucose and the i/v bags being changed when they were made absolute sense. The rest of it made perfect sense too.
Although I hadn't looked at the case in detail, and so wasn't prepared to debate it in this thread (I had enough abuse when I was using the forum to discuss the problems with the Lockerbie case, thankyouverymuch), my gut feeling from what I heard was that this was at bottom another Lucia de Berk case, probably triggered because of an unconscious desire to find someone to blame for the high neonatal mortality rate rather than facing up to the fact that it was due to substandard care. It could have been anyone, but a nurse who often took on extra shifts would be a prime candidate to be singled out. If you take all the deaths in the unit, then pick the ones where Letby was on duty at the time, then choose these ones to claim as suspicious, you've got your dodgy stats right there.
Several doctors seem to have had a thing going about blaming her, so when a baby was in trouble and she was around, that was automatically suspicious. As several professionals have said, if they genuinely suspected she was killing babies they behaved very strangely, not reporting her through proper channels, and letting her go on working. I don't think this was conscious, I think it was a mental defence mechanism against the unthought thought that they were responsible through their incompetence.
Once the police were involved, the next disaster was Dewi Evans. He's another Roy Meadow. He put himself forward as a volunteer to take on the case as soon as he heard about it. His name was passed to the police, who contacted him, and he came in to the police station. Apparently it was he himself, in a podcast, who boasted that he had identified definite evidence of murder in one of the babies' notes while he was having a cup of coffee. But these were babies who had had post mortem examinations done, and experienced pathologists had not found any such evidence. Some of them had been the subject of inquests which returned verdicts of natural causes, I believe. How on earth did these other professionals miss what Evans could see almost instantly over a cup of coffee?
I've done medical expert witness work in animal welfare and wildlife crime cases, and I've met his type. He's not even coy about it, boasting that he has only ever lost one case, when he was working for the defence, and that that one loss really rankles. My own late business partner could be a bit like that, but I saw him select the cases he was prepared to act for, and he had solid grounds for taking the position he did, even though he sometimes seemed to take the cases on as a personal crusade after that. I've done it myself in a couple of cases, where I was fairly outraged at the way someone had been treated. But Evans was manufacturing the case to order from a pile of straw and horse-droppings. He comes across as the professional expert witness who has made this a lucrative hobby of his retirement, relishing both the thrill of the chase and the money, and they're the most dangerous ones. Even when I was first exposed to some of the details of the case, the way he was prepared not just to make stuff up but to change his mind and find another explanation (that also involved foul play by Letby) struck me as quite bizarre.
Then there's the strange passivity of the defence. Several expert commentators have expressed surprise that the defence put up no expert witnesses of their own, but seemed mainly to be taking the "no case to answer" line - which is always dangerous, see Lockerbie again. Nobody has criticised the expertise or experience of the defence team, so it's a bit odd. As one of the other experts said, a barrister can stand up and try to shred an expert witness himself if he likes, but all the witness has to do is to say that he rejects that point of view, and without another expert to put the shredding case, the jury will only remember that the expert rejected the criticism. One expert actually approached the defence during the trial, but although they acknowledged her correspondence they never got back to her.
Another issue has been the sub judice rules. Letby was charged with another count of murder after the original convictions, which put the case back sub judice, and none of the experts who had doubts about the convictions were allowed to talk about it - whereas people were free to discuss the case from a guilter perspective all they liked.
It does make me wonder if there is a case for referral due to defective representation here, but the SCCRC and presumably also the CCRC are extraordinarily reluctant to refer on that ground. Evans needs to be stopped, but he himself has announced his retirement, presumably seeing the writing on the wall, so he'll probably get away with it.
The law needs a better system of expert witnesses who are truly impartial, rather than everything hinging on the enthusiasm of one guy the prosecution happens to favour. And it needs a better way of dealing with serious cock-ups than declaring, well, you had your chance, why didn't you call these experts in the first place?
At least Letby had serious experts come to her aid. I've done much the same thing with the Lockerbie evidence, but in that context I have no clout, I'm just some meddling busybody, so all they did was say "If this theory were accepted it would fatally undermine the Crown case" then declare that (a) they knew something I didn't know that allowed them to ignore my work, and no they weren't going to reveal what that was, and (b) they didn't think the circumstances amounted to defective representation either. So shut up and go away.
None of it is satisfactory, either side of the border. It need a thorough overhaul.
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Hoist by your own petard. Calling Christopher Snowden names instead of addressing the points raised in his article yet Peter Hitchens, right -wing Marxist Mark II contrarian extraordinaire is your go-to opinion provider.
