Nurse Lucy Letby - guilty of murdering 7 babies - whole life sentence

[horsechoker]

Anyway I hate that the Americans on social media have discovered this case. In true Yank fashion, they’ve applied their own laws and judicial process to this to explain why it should be declared a mistrial and are genuinely baffled as to why ANOTHER COUNTRY doesn’t follow practices present in AMERICA.

"why was she represented by a barista?!"

 

[Wibble]

Exactly, it's kind of back to front. "Look at all the babies who died when Letby was on duty, see if any other nurse was on duty for every one - no, only Letby". However, if you included deaths where she wasn't on duty, you might have found another nurse's name who was present for (say) 5 of the deaths attributed to Letby, but who was also on duty for some of the other deaths.

I'm not saying the conclusions were wrong, but if this was in fact the way evidence was presented, it's very clearly inaccurate.

edited to add - it may be that they only looked at unexpected and unexplained deaths. In a neonatal unit it's an unfortunate fact that babies die, due to prematurity, respiratory problems, infection etc.

I believe she was the only person who was on duty for all of the deaths in question wasn't she?

 

[berbatrick]

I believe she was the only person who was on duty for all of the deaths in question wasn't she?

Not finished reading the article, but the point made there was that
1. there were other deaths during that time
2. she was the neonatal specialist, in many of the deaths, she was called in specifically for that reason.

 

[Wibble]

some interesting stuff but it seems quite biased in favour of her innocence doesn’t it?

Nothing there convinced me of her innocence now that she has been convicted. There is of course a danger with simply correlating things with events when causation isn't established. Using the frequency of rare events as evidence also needs to be used carefully. For example, state that something doubled from a previous year sounds very significant but if (for example) something doubled from 3 to 6 then that is likely not to be statistically significant as the variance will likely be huge. Typically relying only on correlation becomes a problem with cases involving mothers convicted of murder when an unusually large number of their kids die from SIDS. In a few notable cases where this resulted in a miscarriage of justice the concern about correlation not necessarily being causation was largely removed when experts gave evidence that there were no causes for death possible, other than the mother's actions, to kill them because SIDS doesn't kill so many in a single family. It then turns out years later that there is a genetic trait carried in the family that can explain the deaths. However, I don't think this is the case here. Letby being the only staff member on duty for unexpected deaths may have been the trigger for suspicion but there seems to be far more evidence than that.

 

[Wibble]

Not finished reading the article, but the point made there was that
1. there were other deaths during that time
2. she was the neonatal specialist, in many of the deaths, she was called in specifically for that reason.

Yet since there was evidence of air or insulin injections and other medical intervention occurred in the deaths then someone must have done it. To do it they had to be there.