Merged Concerns over baby killer ignored? / Nurse Lucy Letby killed babies in her care

Several former executives at the Countess of Chester hospital have said for the first time today that they believe there is a "real likelihood" Letby is innocent, as part of their submission to the investigation.
 
unherd.com

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 unherd.com
 
Rolfe said:
unherd.com

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 unherd.com
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Jesus, I hope that any other cases relying on tests done at that lab are re-examined.
 
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.
 
Rolfe said:
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.
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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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
I see Cheshire police is getting very defensive.
The force said on Wednesday that much of the criticism of its investigation was “ill-informed and based on a very partial knowledge” and that its inquiry had been “detailed and painstaking”.
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That was after the revelations regarding the immunoassay test and the Liverpool laboratory.

www.theguardian.com

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 www.theguardian.com
 
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.
 
Rolfe said:
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.
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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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www.bbc.co.uk

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 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.
 
Rolfe said:
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.
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This. It's a classic psychological stance.
 
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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Lithrael said:
Why do you write this sort of naked appeal to emotion? It's not how you determine facts.
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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.
 
Rolfe said:
www.thetimes.com

Latest news & breaking headlines

The latest breaking UK, US, world, business and sport news from The Times and The Sunday Times. Go beyond today's headlines with in-depth analysis and comment.
www.thetimes.com www.thetimes.com
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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.
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Oh, this issue is absoutely pernicious, both with the CCRC and the SCCRC. I have read that far far fewer appeals get to the appeal court now than did before 1999 when the SCCRC was founded, in the time when the Lord Advocate (or someone) had to give an appeal the go-ahead. They seem to regard their function as keeping uppity convicts in jail and shielding the appeal court from any actual work, rather than to serve the possibly wrongfully convicted by giving them a fair hearing.

Please, please, don't ding me for "intentionally derailing the thread", this is just an example. I did manage to get my Lockerbie work in front of the SCCRC, in the end. Their report was published on 11th March 2020, just as the first covid lockdown was coming into force. Here is what they said.

1743721125689.png

Note the "If accepted, this would fatally undermine the Crown case." That is crucial. They acnowledged that what I presented in my book destroys the Crown case, if my argument is correct. So how did they get out of that? First they said, in effect, "We know something you don't know, that makes your conclusion not certain." But they won't say what that is. Nobody has ever produced any additional evidence that casts doubt on my conclusions, and nobody has ever pointed to a flaw in my reasoning. Just "we know something you don't know, so there."

But then they had a second argument. All the evidence in my book was available at the time of the trial or the first appeal. Therefore the only way to get a second bite at that cherry is to allege defective representation. It's an open secret that the SCCRC is extraordinarily reluctant to allow defective representation as a ground of appeal (although in reality that seems to be an element in most miscarriages of justice I have studied), and in fact gets pretty annoyed with a legal team that even suggests it.

It's sleight of hand, in a way. They have acknowledged that my thesis kills the Crown case stone dead, if it's correct. So how do they get out of that? Because all the evidence was already before the court the only way you can argue that is defective representation, and we've decided that however negligent the defence team was in not sussing out that the Bedford suitcase was the bomb, it was all perfectly reasonable tactics. However, if that's all they'd said, this could have blown up further. What do you mean, there is a thesis here that destroys the Crown case but you're not going to let it go before the Appeal Court? So they add the rider that there's more information (which they're also not going to bother the Appeal Court with) that casts doubt on it anyway.

This is absolutely par for the course, and it's actually quite encouraging to see Letby's advisors try to challenge it head on.

(If anyone wants to discuss the Lockerbie situation further, take it to that thread. Please, with sprinkles on.)
 
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They're just the ones we've been examining. Sandra Lean has a book called No Smoke! in which she details quite a few really distressing cases. I can't honestly bear to read it again.
 
Here's a turn up for the books! Mark McDonald confirmed to mainstream crime writer journalist, Liz Hull, that Letby hasn't given up client privilege*. This means his much-touted '[insert impressive number here] renowned experts' reports from all over the world' is going to be a non-starter with CCRC. Why? Because far from requesting an appeal on points of law, Letby is expecting the case to be tried from scratch.

Why is this an issue? You'll recall, Letby called no expert witnesses at all, which has caused some puzzlement, given she had £1.5m in legal aid plus a team of four very expensive barristers. One can assume that Letby's team did canvas their own 'renowned' experts 'from around the world' in preparation for the trial. Why not used? Well, firstly, it could be that the experts they consulted basically agreed with the court-appointed experts on salient issues. Dr. Mike Hall was the only one who turned up in court expecting to be called and was baffled when he was not. Dr. Hall later explained to Moritz & Coffey for their book, his defence testimony, which was focussed on how Dr. Brearey resuscitated Baby O. Letby advised Ben Myers KC, or his team advised her, that it would be risky to call Dr Hall because under oath he might have to agree with the key points of the Court expert witnesses. We can only guess the reasoning - as this will be covered by client privilege (i.e., the court has no right to know the reasons for defence decisions). The other possibility under Bar Standards, which prevents a barrister knowingly misleading a court. So, suppose theoretically a client confesses something incriminating to their counsel. Under such circumstances, the counsel has two options: the first, is to stop representing that client. You can no longer represent them because you no longer believe in their innocence. The other acceptable option is rather than walking, the barrister can instead just 'sit back' and let the prosecution prove its case, which is its onus and burden of proof anyway.

So, is the reason Letby called no expert defence witness to do with not finding adequate counter experts to the court's, or was it because she confessed to some kind of culpability?

What I am getting at here, albeit in a rather long-winded way, is that the CCRC has the regulatory and statutory power to see the client-privileged materials, so McDonald claiming he hasn't been given Letby's client privilege won't wash if CCRC demand to see it, as they surely will, to understand why Letby is only now offering an 'expert defence'.

Here cometh McDonald's conjuring act to an end.

*When a client changes lawyers - in Letby's case a firm called Thomas - the client folders containing all legally privileged stuff must also be handed over, as per solicitor protocols. Now, McDonald is not a solicitor, he is a barrister. In effect, he is claiming to represent Letby blind of what is legally privileged** in her files.

** This refers to exchanges between the client and solicitor or courts which are confidential and legally protected from being referred to or used in court.
 
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catsmate said:
Interesting piece in The Guardian about Michael Naughton and his work around miscarriages of justice.

www.theguardian.com

‘We thought we could change the world’: how an idealistic fight against miscarriages of justice turned sour

When a no-nonsense lecturer set up a radical solution to help free the wrongfully convicted in the UK, he was hopeful he could change the justice system. But what started as a revolution ended in acrimony
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Thanks. Long but interesting read. I wasn't really aware of any of it.

Leaving aside the personalities and the pursuit of questionable cases, what struck me was what has struck me repeatedly when discussing all this. The tension between the lawyers' point of view which is all about legal technicalities and if I may put it that way, gamesmanship, and what I would call the scientists' point of view (though it tends to be the ordinary person's point of view as well) which is about objective truth and whether it can be ascertained. There's a real disconnect there and the two groups tend to find themselves talking past each other.

Once again the Lockerbie situation is a good example. I say, look at this evidence that the original investigation failed to interpret properly, it proves the alleged crime (the insertion of the bomb in Malta) didn't happen, and the crime in fact happened at Heathrow. The SCCRC says, be that as it may, the choice of the defence to go for obfuscation and uncertainty and bigging up reasonable doubt was entirely reasonable, so you have no case for defective representation. That being so, since the evidence you base your thesis on is not new, tough luck.

That is pretty blatantly a complete outrage to natural justice, but that's what the law says. I think the SCCRC themselves recognised this, and slid in the "we know something you don't know" to deflect criticism. But even there, they didn't say that in their opinion the secret evidence proved that my thesis was wrong, merely that it wasn't certainly correct. I think the real outrage is that this is not allowed to be tested in court, and that they can get away with pleading secret evidence nobody is going to be allowed to know about. Unfortunately we're a long way out from the start of this case now, the man who was wrongfully convicted is dead, and getting public outrage stirred up at this stage isn't realistic.

The Letby case is a different matter. Whereas there's no doubt whatsoever that a crime was committed in the Lockerbie case, that is a terrorist got as suitcase on board with a bomb in it, the critical issue in the Letby case is whether any crime was committed at all. That is a difficult line to take given that the court already decided that crimes were indeed committed. On the other hand there is a decent chance of stirring up public outrage, and public outrage is going to want to look at the evidence, not legal gamesmanship. It's encouraging that those involved with the case seem prepared to take on the gamesmanship and denounce it as contrary to natural justice, because it's about time somebody did.

However the SCCRC/CCRC started out, they are now firmly on the gamesmanship side of things, which again the Lockerbie decision points out. Proof that destroys the Crown case? But there's no new evidence and we've decided that the defence team having plumped to argure the original case on gamesmanship rather than objective truth was a perfectly reasonable tactic, so too bad. Any push to get them back(?) on the side of objective truth would be good.
 
Rolfe said:
Thanks. Long but interesting read. I wasn't really aware of any of it.

Leaving aside the personalities and the pursuit of questionable cases, what struck me was what has struck me repeatedly when discussing all this. The tension between the lawyers' point of view which is all about legal technicalities and if I may put it that way, gamesmanship, and what I would call the scientists' point of view (though it tends to be the ordinary person's point of view as well) which is about objective truth and whether it can be ascertained. There's a real disconnect there and the two groups tend to find themselves talking past each other.

Once again the Lockerbie situation is a good example. I say, look at this evidence that the original investigation failed to interpret properly, it proves the alleged crime (the insertion of the bomb in Malta) didn't happen, and the crime in fact happened at Heathrow. The SCCRC says, be that as it may, the choice of the defence to go for obfuscation and uncertainty and bigging up reasonable doubt was entirely reasonable, so you have no case for defective representation. That being so, since the evidence you base your thesis on is not new, tough luck.

That is pretty blatantly a complete outrage to natural justice, but that's what the law says. I think the SCCRC themselves recognised this, and slid in the "we know something you don't know" to deflect criticism. But even there, they didn't say that in their opinion the secret evidence proved that my thesis was wrong, merely that it wasn't certainly correct. I think the real outrage is that this is not allowed to be tested in court, and that they can get away with pleading secret evidence nobody is going to be allowed to know about. Unfortunately we're a long way out from the start of this case now, the man who was wrongfully convicted is dead, and getting public outrage stirred up at this stage isn't realistic.

The Letby case is a different matter. Whereas there's no doubt whatsoever that a crime was committed in the Lockerbie case, that is a terrorist got as suitcase on board with a bomb in it, the critical issue in the Letby case is whether any crime was committed at all. That is a difficult line to take given that the court already decided that crimes were indeed committed. On the other hand there is a decent chance of stirring up public outrage, and public outrage is going to want to look at the evidence, not legal gamesmanship. It's encouraging that those involved with the case seem prepared to take on the gamesmanship and denounce it as contrary to natural justice, because it's about time somebody did.

However the SCCRC/CCRC started out, they are now firmly on the gamesmanship side of things, which again the Lockerbie decision points out. Proof that destroys the Crown case? But there's no new evidence and we've decided that the defence team having plumped to argure the original case on gamesmanship rather than objective truth was a perfectly reasonable tactic, so too bad. Any push to get them back(?) on the side of objective truth would be good.
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The thing is, if there is evidence there were no crimes committed, then the question arises, why didn't top drawer defence KC, Ben Myers, bring that evidence before the court? If the tactic was to bring that particular evidence to appeal later, then you can see why the Appeal Court decrees it must be 'fresh' evidence that was not known of as of the time of the trial, for it to be permissible. Otherwise, every wily defence lawyer is going to hold back key evidence as a tactic (or what could be considered key) in order to have a second bite of the cherry, as it were, which would be an abuse of due process.

As Letby has not given up her legal privilege to junior barrister McDonald (not a KC) then the question CCRC will ask is why not, given this is supposed to be standard practice. This leads to two possibilities:

  1. McDonald has had sight of what went on between Letby and Myers plus any expert evidence they decided not to call but because it would be breaching Bar Standards to knowingly mislead the court, he has to pretend he hasn't got legal privilege thus is free to make any claim he likes being ignorant of any incriminating legally privileged stuff.
  2. or, It is true that Letby has refused to give him legal privilege, which leads to another two scenarios:
    1. She is concealing key evidence from him which she knows to be detrimental to her 'appeal'.
    2. It is a tactic to get the case heard again from scratch, as a second bite of the cherry.
The CCRC are not stupid and will want to understand why McDonald doesn't have client privilege, given he is supposed to be representing her.





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SpitfireIX said:
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.​
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Google "appaling vista" sometime. It's still the guiding principle in the UK courts.
 
Sorry to bring up Lockerbie again here, but I think that's a huge issue there. That the police and the forensics could have got a major terrorism case so wrong is something that must not be admitted. (It was some of the same actual forensic scientists in both cases too.)

The Letby case isn't in the same category, but when any case becomes a public cause célèbre, it tends to attract the same defensive reaction.
 
Rolfe said:
www.currentaffairs.org

Lucy Letby Should Be Released Immediately

The nurse branded Britain’s most notorious serial killer is clearly not “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” And it looks like she may even have taken the blame for neoliberalism’s gutting of the public health system.
www.currentaffairs.org www.currentaffairs.org
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That's a good summary of the evidence. Dubious, cherry-picked, stats. The oft overlooked medical status of the deceased babies. The dubious media hyperbole. Evans' issues with awkward statisticians (and his personal profits from the case, his business earned over a million from the case) and his history of dubious pronouncements.
 
Matthew Best said:
That all seems like a lot of legal scrambling around to keep Letby in prison by any means necessary, regardless of the facts.
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So will you also be campaigning for the release of Beverley Allitt and Benjamin Geen, another of Mark McDonald's clients, as well, or are they different? If so, how does their case differ from Letby's?

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Matthew Best said:
Stop trying to change the subject. If you want to discuss other cases, do so in another thread.
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You seem to be claiming that 'by keeping Letby in prison' that this somehow subverts the legal system. She was convicted of murder and attempted murder via the conventional legal process. Why are you demanding she be freed? That is simply not rational.
 
Vixen said:
You seem to be claiming that 'by keeping Letby in prison' that this somehow subverts the legal system. She was convicted of murder and attempted murder via the conventional legal process. Why are you demanding she be freed? That is simply not rational.
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Reading comprehension fail, as usual. Nowhere did I say or imply that it was "subverting the legal system". It's the legal system that is being criticised, because it doesn't respond well to legitimate claims of actual innocence, and instead hides behind "procedure".
 
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