Lucy Letby Case #76

[Cack_Conroe]

It definitely surprised me they could have challenged the original convictions in the retrial. I’d love to know more about the law around this when her appeal was denied. Was it because the jury were allowed to be formally told of her convictions so she had a right to prove she didn’t? There was discussion about the burden of proof being on her now.

Could they have presented the evidence they tried to get in for the appeal? So called Dr Lee after all?

I know we all know why she had nothing to present but I wish someone in the media would pick up on this huge ‘opportunity’ she had 9 months after her first convictions and she did nothing about it. How many opportunities does one need to present her own medical evidence - original trial, appeal hearings, retrial, another appeal hearing.

It must be that because her prior convictions were used as evidence, she would have been allowed to dispute them.

It's easy to see why they didn't go down that route, because all this purported "evidence" wouldn't stand up in court (experts are not allowed to lie or mislead, their duty is to the court).

The prosecution countering with all their evidence would have made her look terrible. It would have only informed the jury of the solidity of the case against her and her monstrous crimes, at a time when the vast majority of the public are still unaware of the mountains of evidence, and when Letby was benefiting from positive propaganda in the media.

It was much better to focus on discrediting the eyewitnesses, which the whole charge is based on. Sadly for poor BM, Letby tanked her own defense, by going against her defense statement that Dr Jayaram was acting in bad faith, and by essentially agreeing with the anonymous nurse's eyewitness account that Lucy was present at the third tube displacement and was the first to raise the alarm.

 

[Apostate]

Lucy Letby barrister Mark McDonald banned from Thirlwall Inquiry

archived 31 Oct 2024 01:29:23 UTC

archive.ph

Mr McDonald said: “What seems to be happening here is an attempt to blame her for every single thing that has ever gone wrong in the neonatal units at Chester and without taking the opportunity to look at the reality of the situation.
“We felt it was necessary to have her voice in the inquiry. It wasn’t part of the application that she would be present, just that she would be legally represented.
“We knew from the outset and the opening speeches that they were going to be bringing a lot more evidence and a lot more issues in relation to things that occurred outside of the trial.
“But they are concerned about disruption. We cannot see how it would disrupt it, we would mitigate any form of disruption.”
Barrister Mark McDonald applied last month for core participant status to the inquiry

What was he thinking? Guy comes across as a total clown.

 

[scantysandwich]

Hello! I have followed these threads since early last year because of the excellent wiki and the balanced and intelligent commentary, though I haven’t posted on this thread in a long time.

After Lucy was sentenced I largely moved on but could be heard grumbling to anyone in my life who professed she seemed innocent or that she hadn’t had a fair trial. Anyone following the carefully laid out evidence here can easily see her guilt.

The media coverage and the experts coming out of the woodwork for their 15 minutes of fame has been predictable and disheartening in equal measure.

I didn’t follow the retrial much but in the last week or so I have been trying to catch up on the Thirlwall Inquiry. Thank you for your snapshots, commentary and summaries which have been invaluable in speeding up that process. My oh my have there been some revelations and they all further point to Lucy’s guilt.

I have so many thoughts, but I think the overriding one is horror that so many people seemed to accept that babies just died. Or that mistakes happen (e.g. the morphine error). To the point about babies dying unexpectedly it seems the consultants had the knowledge and clinical experience to realise just how unexpected these deaths and collapses were. Some of them were curious as to what was happening and actively trying to piece it all together. Some of the nurses were shocked and disheartened by the number and nature of the deaths but they weren’t empowered to raise concerns in the same way as the consultants. The admin staff and hospital management were blocking any investigation or paying lip service to it.
There were so many red flags around Lucy from the outset but putting them all together in the environment of a hospital full of people who wanted it all to go away and who weren’t considering the babies at all, was very difficult.

If you work with vulnerable people then surely it is imperative that you are able to take responsibility for your mistakes, learn from them and have the ability to explain how you would avoid that same mistake in future. So many of these people (Lucy, Dr. Noname, Eirian Powell) had no idea how to do this and in fact their instinct was to blame others or try to offer some BS platitude. I don’t think I will ever get over Lucy saying the antibiotic error was unavoidable! That was her whole attitude to the baby deaths and collapses too with all her talk of fate and luck of the draw. I find that deeply disturbing in a healthcare setting.

Anyway, it’s so nice to see so many of the original commentators are still here, though I miss Della!

 

[Tomi2015]

That Christopher Lloyd needs a bleeping smack. He’s deranged. I honestly don’t know if he says what he does just to get a rise out of people or he is genuinely sick in the mind.

 

[Refracton]

Has anyone read the book? How is Dr Cockeye spelled? The doctor re the liver injury. It sounds like Dr Cockeye in the audio book.

 

[Hazara04]

Has anyone read the book? How is Dr Cockeye spelled? The doctor re the liver injury. It sounds like Dr Cockeye in the audio book.

Is that George Kokai?

 

[Refracton]

Is that George Kokai?

Thank you!!! I did wonder.

 

[Tilly Kister]

I'm not sure that 15 views in 4 hours is indicative of a popular opinion on a platform with about 2 billion users, tbh.

Yes I have subbed to him. He's one of the few bright spots in this travesty. He's the most entertainingly harmless gobshite on YouTube - and that's a very low bar to get under.
So well done him. I guess.

 

[Tomi2015]

I'm not sure that 15 views in 4 hours is indicative of a popular opinion on a platform with about 2 billion users, tbh.

Yes I have subbed to him. He's one of the few bright spots in this travesty. He's the most entertainingly harmless gobshite on YouTube - and that's a very low bar to get under.
So well done him. I guess.


View attachment 3249159

God is he still at it? It’s getting pathetic now. He’s really a sad little man who’s not only attention seeking, he’s grifting money of the gullible head cases who still say she innocent

 

[craftypudding]

I finished reading 'Unmasking Lucy Letby', I did like it as a thorough account of the matter and it was helpful that they addressed some of the 'for and against', which would hopefully lead any rational reader new to the case, to realise it isn't about statistics or a conspiracy etc. But I didn't feel that I learned anything new about the trial or about Letby, really.

I was hoping for some good psychological insight into the making of this serial killer, because I think that is the most mystifying part of the story, but even though they spoke to experts, they didn't really explain it. If I understood correctly, the experts were saying she wasn't like a typical killer. They compared her and other thrill seekers, such as base jumpers - most of us don't need to take huge risks to be satisfied in life, some want to jump off buildings. Was Letby's killings thrill seeking? Also, there was a comparison to Harold Shipman in that apparently most of his murders were in the afternoon shift when he was bored, and they were saying was Letby doing it when she was bored too.

I think the experts had poor analysis of Letby because they were basing their opinions on flawed data - what we knew about Letby at the trial vs some of the things coming out at the Inquiry, paint her in a different light:

• The book cites her school friends saying they will never believe Letby is a killer, but we now know she was such a liar that her work best friend didn't even know Letby was in contact with Dr Noname, let alone not realising that she wasn't Letby's only confidante.
• The book also mentions that lots of nurses still support her, but I wonder if that is true. Maybe her best friend did at the start of the trial? Clearly not now. I think a lot of people who supported her from work (at least those at the Inquiry) have now realised they were 'played' or they are only loyal because to believe in her guilt will cause them psychic distress because they totally failed to do their jobs properly and they have to justify it to themselves
• we knew she had overprotective parents, but the apparent hysteria on a phone call by her mum and her parents blatantly writing her monologue statement, takes all that to another level
• The book still thinks she was a perfect and conscientious student because the authors wrote it before we found out she failed her final year, gave wrong drugs and an overdose

Anyway I am happy with my purchase, enjoyed it, its not perfect, but hopefully they are writing some new chapters now based on the Inquiry and I hope they will go back and get some more criminologists and psychiatrists or whatever, to reconsider their views on what caused Letby to be like this

 

[Tomi2015]

I finished reading 'Unmasking Lucy Letby', I did like it as a thorough account of the matter and it was helpful that they addressed some of the 'for and against', which would hopefully lead any rational reader new to the case, to realise it isn't about statistics or a conspiracy etc. But I didn't feel that I learned anything new about the trial or about Letby, really.

I was hoping for some good psychological insight into the making of this serial killer, because I think that is the most mystifying part of the story, but even though they spoke to experts, they didn't really explain it. If I understood correctly, the experts were saying she wasn't like a typical killer. They compared her and other thrill seekers, such as base jumpers - most of us don't need to take huge risks to be satisfied in life, some want to jump off buildings. Was Letby's killings thrill seeking? Also, there was a comparison to Harold Shipman in that apparently most of his murders were in the afternoon shift when he was bored, and they were saying was Letby doing it when she was bored too.

I think the experts had poor analysis of Letby because they were basing their opinions on flawed data - what we knew about Letby at the trial vs some of the things coming out at the Inquiry, paint her in a different light:

• The book cites her school friends saying they will never believe Letby is a killer, but we now know she was such a liar that her work best friend didn't even know Letby was in contact with Dr Noname, let alone not realising that she wasn't Letby's only confidante.
• The book also mentions that lots of nurses still support her, but I wonder if that is true. Maybe her best friend did at the start of the trial? Clearly not now. I think a lot of people who supported her from work (at least those at the Inquiry) have now realised they were 'played' or they are only loyal because to believe in her guilt will cause them psychic distress because they totally failed to do their jobs properly and they have to justify it to themselves
• we knew she had overprotective parents, but the apparent hysteria on a phone call by her mum and her parents blatantly writing her monologue statement, takes all that to another level
• The book still thinks she was a perfect and conscientious student because the authors wrote it before we found out she failed her final year, gave wrong drugs and an overdose

Anyway I am happy with my purchase, enjoyed it, its not perfect, but hopefully they are writing some new chapters now based on the Inquiry and I hope they will go back and get some more criminologists and psychiatrists or whatever, to reconsider their views on what caused Letby to be like this

I actually think that she got some kind of twisted kick out of seeing the parents grief and utter despair. Like you I wonder how she became this person. What was it that caused her to do it? By all accounts she had a happy childhood. Two parents who doted on her. I’m thinking she’s maybe it’s started with a baby who had died of natural causes and she’s been involved with the parents. For some reason she’s got off on it and it’s spiralled from there. It became like a drug to her then. Didn’t someone on the unit say that she was “bouncing round like an excited puppy” when she was putty a memory box together. Also she was intruding on the parents all the time, in and out of the room. She needed to do that to see the results of what she’d done

 

[Tofino]

I finished reading 'Unmasking Lucy Letby', I did like it as a thorough account of the matter and it was helpful that they addressed some of the 'for and against', which would hopefully lead any rational reader new to the case, to realise it isn't about statistics or a conspiracy etc. But I didn't feel that I learned anything new about the trial or about Letby, really.

I was hoping for some good psychological insight into the making of this serial killer, because I think that is the most mystifying part of the story, but even though they spoke to experts, they didn't really explain it. If I understood correctly, the experts were saying she wasn't like a typical killer. They compared her and other thrill seekers, such as base jumpers - most of us don't need to take huge risks to be satisfied in life, some want to jump off buildings. Was Letby's killings thrill seeking? Also, there was a comparison to Harold Shipman in that apparently most of his murders were in the afternoon shift when he was bored, and they were saying was Letby doing it when she was bored too.

I think the experts had poor analysis of Letby because they were basing their opinions on flawed data - what we knew about Letby at the trial vs some of the things coming out at the Inquiry, paint her in a different light:

• The book cites her school friends saying they will never believe Letby is a killer, but we now know she was such a liar that her work best friend didn't even know Letby was in contact with Dr Noname, let alone not realising that she wasn't Letby's only confidante.
• The book also mentions that lots of nurses still support her, but I wonder if that is true. Maybe her best friend did at the start of the trial? Clearly not now. I think a lot of people who supported her from work (at least those at the Inquiry) have now realised they were 'played' or they are only loyal because to believe in her guilt will cause them psychic distress because they totally failed to do their jobs properly and they have to justify it to themselves
• we knew she had overprotective parents, but the apparent hysteria on a phone call by her mum and her parents blatantly writing her monologue statement, takes all that to another level
• The book still thinks she was a perfect and conscientious student because the authors wrote it before we found out she failed her final year, gave wrong drugs and an overdose

Anyway I am happy with my purchase, enjoyed it, its not perfect, but hopefully they are writing some new chapters now based on the Inquiry and I hope they will go back and get some more criminologists and psychiatrists or whatever, to reconsider their views on what caused Letby to be like this

Thanks for this analysis. I don’t know why they rushed to get it published knowing there was an inquiry but maybe they can see more money in releasing one now and then a second book at a later date. But it feels almost immediately out of date. The paperback is released next summer so I’m sure there will at least be some bonus chapters for that publication.

 

[scantysandwich]

I thought it was interesting that they spoke to two professionals who work or have worked with killers and neither seemed to think she displayed characteristics of being a psychopath.

Lucy is certainly an unusual killer who seems to have lead a normal life for the most part. I think a lot of the people who see her as innocent can’t reconcile that someone so beige could do this.

A lot of what we have seen in the inquiry confirms that she has disordered empathy for the babies and parents and an overblown sense of her own importance but on the face of it that could describe a lot of people. She had so much to lose, what made her risk everything? She wasn’t impulsive in the rest of her life, so it is odd. She must have somehow weighed up what she was gaining from the harm she was causing (attention, sympathy, excitement, being seen as calm and collected, able to spot deteriorating babies and good in a crisis, playing god…) and it seemed worth it to continue.

I think one of the experts, or perhaps the author, concluded it wasn’t important why she killed, what was important was how it was allowed to happen. That was striking for me because in terms of risk there is actually something tangible society can do about prevention if we look at closing down the opportunities and improving the pathways to escalating concerns. The fact is that Lucy could have and should have been stopped much earlier.

 

[Apostate]

Reading through Judith M's book one really telling section is when Letby is discussing with a friend by text the death of Baby O and how an open port in the catheter is a "risk of air embolism". Then she later tells police she was only aware of air embolism in adults.

 

[sebanna]

Reading through Judith M's book one really telling section is when Letby is discussing with a friend by text the death of Baby O and how an open port in the catheter is a "risk of air embolism". Then she later tells police she was only aware of air embolism in adults.

That must have been lies. She's been trained to give IV medicines and injections. Every neonatal nurse must be given this training.

None of the experts interviewed in the book know how she is now.

 

[LittleMy]

Reading through Judith M's book one really telling section is when Letby is discussing with a friend by text the death of Baby O and how an open port in the catheter is a "risk of air embolism". Then she later tells police she was only aware of air embolism in adults.

Yep, I remember this from the trial. Absolute liar.

 

[Apostate]

That must have been lies. She's been trained to give IV medicines and injections. Every neonatal nurse must be given this training.

None of the experts interviewed in the book know how she is now.

In the same chapter the book says just prior to beginning her killing spree she'd been on training on intravenous procedures which emphasised the dangers of air embolism. I expect this was what gave her the idea of how to kill the babies in a way that would be difficult to detect - all she needed was a syringe and 5 seconds.

 

[AllieBee]

Reading through Judith M's book one really telling section is when Letby is discussing with a friend by text the death of Baby O and how an open port in the catheter is a "risk of air embolism". Then she later tells police she was only aware of air embolism in adults.

Yep. And I think she did a Datix for this as well, she's an out and out liar

 

[Tofino]

I’ve just listened to the latest Mail podcast. They cover the appeal and then they have an inquiry expert on which is interesting in terms of how it functions. Bit depressing that so little recommendations from many major statutory inquiries are never implemented. Feels such a waste of money.

Oh and they touch on Ian Harvey being in France. They can’t force him back to the UK from France but if he doesn’t attend and comes back to the UK at a later date he could potentially be arrested for being in contempt of the inquiry. If he has no plans to come back to UK ever then I guess a possibility he might not show?? He would be an idiot not to though surely.

 

[craig84]

I’ve just listened to the latest Mail podcast. They cover the appeal and then they have an inquiry expert on which is interesting in terms of how it functions. Bit depressing that so little recommendations from many major statutory inquiries are never implemented. Feels such a waste of money.

Oh and they touch on Ian Harvey being in France. They can’t force him back to the UK from France but if he doesn’t attend and comes back to the UK at a later date he could potentially be arrested for being in contempt of the inquiry. If he has no plans to come back to UK ever then I guess a possibility he might not show?? He would be an idiot not to though surely.

I don't think that he will show up. It's why he's ducked off to France

https://www.archive.is/oldest/https...ster-Hospital-neonatal-nurse-free-murder.html

Another former employee added: 'Around the time he retired, I asked Harvey whether he thought there could be a public inquiry into what had happened and his words were, "They would have to find me first", which bothered me.

'He was implying he would be long gone. The paediatricians definitely forced his hand - they told him if you don't go to the police we will. There was a lot of dragging of feet. They were frustrated.'

The former hospital boss is now enjoying his retirement in France, where he lives with his second wife in a picturesque farmhouse surrounded by acres of land.