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Merged Concerns over baby killer ignored? / Nurse Lucy Letby killed babies in her care
Rolfe
Adult human female
Rolfe
Adult human female
Were the blood tests in Lucy Letby's conviction flawed?
Lucy Letby’s conviction and whole life sentence for attempting to murder the infant known as Baby L rests on a test on a single sample of his blood taken at 3.40pm on 9 April 2016, the second day of his life. A vulnerable twin who had failed to thrive in utero, he weighed just 3.2lb, [...]Read...
unherd.com
catsmate
No longer the 1
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Jesus, I hope that any other cases relying on tests done at that lab are re-examined.Were the blood tests in Lucy Letby's conviction flawed?
Lucy Letby’s conviction and whole life sentence for attempting to murder the infant known as Baby L rests on a test on a single sample of his blood taken at 3.40pm on 9 April 2016, the second day of his life. A vulnerable twin who had failed to thrive in utero, he weighed just 3.2lb, [...]Read...
Rolfe
Adult human female
I've been in NEQAS. I introduced it into two labs where I work. That result is definitely out of control and should have been investigated internally.
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
At the risk of being shown a fool for jumping in on something I know very little about, perhaps they did such an investigation and satisfied themselves it was a legitimate result.
Rolfe
Adult human female
That NEQAS result wasn't legitimate. This calls into question results obtained shortly before the QA sample was analysed, which apparently includes the result presented to the court in the Letby case. There are a number of things you can and should do, like recalibrating the assay and re-running recent patient samples. What is disturbing is that no evidence of anything like that was presented in court.
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Which certainly supports your contention that an internal investigation was not done. Not good.
Rolfe
Adult human female
It's possible they thought that if any doubt about the assays was admitted to, the jury would simply reject the findings. These things can be difficult for a layman to understand, particularly if a barrister is trying to misrepresent the situation. Which they do.
But a NEQAS result like that within days of the tests in question is a serious concern.
But a NEQAS result like that within days of the tests in question is a serious concern.
catsmate
No longer the 1
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I see Cheshire police is getting very defensive.
www.theguardian.com
That was after the revelations regarding the immunoassay test and the Liverpool laboratory.
Evidence used to convict Lucy Letby is flawed, leading experts say
Former neonatal nurse’s legal team to hand over 86-page report which they say casts ‘serious doubt’ on guilty verdict
www.theguardian.com
Rolfe
Adult human female
There's a real issue there of relatives of victims being over-invested in the original guilty verdict to the point where they lose all objectivity. They are not biochemistry experts and their opinion has no greater legitimacy than that of anyone else who has followed the case. Perhaps less, due to the lack of objectivity.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Two of the parents are doctors.
One of the parents saw blood pouring out of her baby's mouth, another a vivid embolism rash racing around his kid's stomach. Another saw her kid doing well but as soon as she left to pick her other kids up from school the baby suddenly collapsed and died under Letby's care.
Perhaps the parents of Holly and Jessica are sentimental idiots as well as nobody SAW Huntley kill them.
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Matthew Best
Penultimate Amazing
Lucy Letby barrister to submit 'fresh evidence' to review body
Letby's barrister Mark McDonald says he will hand over detailed medical reports to the CCRC.
www.bbc.co.uk
The barrister representing convicted child serial killer Lucy Letby has said he will hand over "fresh" medical evidence to the body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is reviewing an application by Letby's legal team.
Mark McDonald said he would travel to the CCRC's offices to hand over the full findings of a panel of neonatologists and paediatric specialists who said their analysis found no evidence that Letby harmed any babies.
catsmate
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This. It's a classic psychological stance.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Good. Hopefully now we'll have some peace and quiet from the never-ending publicity stunts (yes, a marketing firm has been handling this!).
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Why do you write this sort of naked appeal to emotion? It's not how you determine facts.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Because Letby campaigners argue along such lines, that the jury are too stupid to understand medical issues or that the parents were somehow too stricken by grief to be rational and that they only believe in Letby's guilt because they, too, do not understand medicine. So I pointed out re the parents, far from being poorly educated people, one of the victim's mothers was a doctor, so yes she did understand medicine. Plus, Chester is quite a middle-class town so it is incorrect to patronise the parents as being somehow manipulated by the evil Dr Evans and the courts. As in the case of the Soham murders, there was no need for the jury or the parents to know exactly how their child was killed or injured (Huntley claimed it was 'accidental' but the jury decided it was murder and we will never know exactly how Huntley murdered them as their bodies were found burnt out, and he's never going to change his story). In his summing up, Justice Goss at the Letby trial, told the jury, rightly, that they did not need to know exactly how Letby killed the victims or attempted to kill them, they just needed to be absolutely sure that it was an intentional act she did led to their harm. So the parents and the jury did not need to be experts in insulin.
As a matter of fact, the woman who wrote all that stuff for the Washington Post and is the main cheerleader claiming the insulin evidence is rubbish (Demitrova) claimed to be a PhD from 2015 but recent research shows she only got her PhD in 2024. In addition, she wrongly claimed that Liverpool Hospital only performed a partial test as it then had to be 'sent off' for the next part. This woman clearly got her half-baked information from a youtube about insulin tests in which the consumer is advised that the test must 'be sent off'. What she didn't realise is that Liverpool Hospitals have all the testing facilities on site. The youtube was aimed at over-the-counter private customers off the street NOT NHS hospitals with their own specialised in-house facilities. In addition, Dr Taylor of Canada wrongly claimed that the insulin test tube label showing '9999' for glycaemia indicated all sorts of medical issues, not realising that '9999' was the default code for when gyclaemia was NOT being measured in that particular result. (Putting '0' would accord a value.) Taylor at the first 'press conference' was rattling on about how such a reading was incredibly dangerously high!!! We didn't see Dr. Taylor again at the second one.
As for the insulin test, another 'world renowned expert' of McDonald's was claiming the high level of antibodies was due to the child having an infection. The child DID NOT have an infection and the hospital notes clearly shows this. Yet here we are, causing great distress to the grieving parents in deeming Letby as the one who has suffered injustice, not their kid. I bet if these ghouls could see photos of the life-long cerebral palsy and serious damage Letby caused to one of the twins, not to mention loss of her sibling, people such as Hitchens and Hammond would stop being so cruel with their horrible lobbying. Imagine if they carried out a similar campaign on behalf of Ian Huntley. You would call it utterly grotesque.
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When you have so many good data points and facts to present I have no idea why you nevertheless want to pepper in these broad appeals to emotion. Unless you think that seeing something horrible happen to a child puts a parent into a good state for objective reasoning? Or makes a third party more likely to seek out a difficult truth instead of a convenient scapegoat?
What if someone DID THIS and might escape justice? Okay, but what if no single person DID THIS, not even the person we've pinned it on?
Let's track down the truth about these tests and leave the baby blood out of it.
What if someone DID THIS and might escape justice? Okay, but what if no single person DID THIS, not even the person we've pinned it on?
Let's track down the truth about these tests and leave the baby blood out of it.
SpitfireIX
Philosopher
Thank you for posting this. Over the years, I've wondered why so many British convictions that have been discussed here that seemed so obviously unsafe haven't been overturned. The following excerpt explains a lot about why that is.
Whatever the reason, in hindsight the result was unfortunate. In some jurisdictions, such as France and Italy, an appeal is a whole new trial. In most jurisdictions of the United States the rules about fresh evidence on appeal are very liberal. In England, however, the power of the Court of Appeal is essentially limited to reviewing what took place in the trial court. Fresh evidence is not normally allowed if it could have been obtained before.
Letby’s only hope now is the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The commission’s job is to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and refer them to the Court of Appeal. The court must then quash the conviction if they consider it “unsafe”, in which case they will usually order a retrial. They do not have to be satisfied that Letby was innocent, but only that the jury might well not have found her guilty beyond reasonable doubt if it had seen the whole picture.
Unfortunately, the commission has a poor record. Notoriously, it refused to refer the case of Andrew Malkinson after he had served many years in jail, when DNA evidence conclusively proved his innocence. It refers fewer than 3 per cent of the cases that it reviews. The main reason is that it can only refer a case if there is a “real possibility” that the Court of Appeal will overturn the conviction.
The Court of Appeal is extraordinarily reluctant to overturn convictions entered at a regular trial. It is afraid of allowing criminal trials to become a mere “dry run”, with another chance later. It has power to receive fresh evidence that could have been obtained for the trial, but normally requires a “reasonable explanation” for the failure to produce it first time round. It takes a narrow view of what explanations are reasonable, especially in the case of expert evidence. The Court of Appeal has already refused once to admit new evidence in Letby’s case and the danger is that they may do it again. However compelling the scientific criticisms of the prosecution case at trial, there is no guarantee that they will even be considered.
Letby’s only hope now is the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The commission’s job is to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and refer them to the Court of Appeal. The court must then quash the conviction if they consider it “unsafe”, in which case they will usually order a retrial. They do not have to be satisfied that Letby was innocent, but only that the jury might well not have found her guilty beyond reasonable doubt if it had seen the whole picture.
Unfortunately, the commission has a poor record. Notoriously, it refused to refer the case of Andrew Malkinson after he had served many years in jail, when DNA evidence conclusively proved his innocence. It refers fewer than 3 per cent of the cases that it reviews. The main reason is that it can only refer a case if there is a “real possibility” that the Court of Appeal will overturn the conviction.
The Court of Appeal is extraordinarily reluctant to overturn convictions entered at a regular trial. It is afraid of allowing criminal trials to become a mere “dry run”, with another chance later. It has power to receive fresh evidence that could have been obtained for the trial, but normally requires a “reasonable explanation” for the failure to produce it first time round. It takes a narrow view of what explanations are reasonable, especially in the case of expert evidence. The Court of Appeal has already refused once to admit new evidence in Letby’s case and the danger is that they may do it again. However compelling the scientific criticisms of the prosecution case at trial, there is no guarantee that they will even be considered.