It’s difficult to read the following article (13,000 words) and not think she’s probably the victim of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in history.
I expect there’s a very good chance this will blow up seriously as a major issue in the UK quite soon, but there are extremely powerful forces ranged against the conviction being overturned, just as there were with the Birmingham Six et. al., and there is also currently a UK media embargo on the case.
Too many cooincidences for me to make the odds of her being innocent very very large.
When she went on holiday, there were no incidents. She messaged a friend she wanted to ‘come back with a bang’, rake of dead babies the same week.
A doctor actually found her standing over a dying baby just watching and asked her’what are you doing? why aren’t you doing something?’
Her writing, the way she photographed the cards she sent bereaved parents, there is also the bit where she was having a fling with a married Doctor in her unit and he ghosted her. She was possibly originally creating these incidents so that he would be forced to interact with her and then subsequently became addicted to the attention. She totally lost the plot in court when he testified agaonst her and had to be restrained.
To me, this one is safe.
These are all assumptions that you would assume if you wanted to believe she is guilty.
There are serious questions as regards the integrity of the statistical evidence used to convict her, that it was designed to arrive at the conclusion people wanted it to arrive at, regardless of reality. Her writings seem to me to be personal journal entries of a woman in turmoil because of the deaths of the babies, taken completely out of context. I’m not surprised she “lost the plot” in court. Wouldn’t you if you if you were at risk of being framed as one of the most evil people in British history?
Other nurses in Europe have previously been convicted of being “angels of death” and later acquitted after the statistical evidence used to convict was found to be deeply unsafe.
I think a lot of people find it easier to accept the explanation that there was an “angel of death” than to confront the reality that NHS care was deeply underfunded and understaffed as a result of government choices, and as a result, was shit - literally shit in this case as sewage was even coming through the sinks and toilets at the hospital in question.
At the hospital in question, several women had to have unplanned hysterectomies in 2021 after they each lost more than two litres of blood. Yet the explanation in this case was much more mundane and put down to the systemic failings of care at that hospital, rather than some evil schemer lurking within.
Also there are enough people I would have some respect for raising questions. John Sweeney did so from the get go. David Robert Grimes is also doing so.
I’m not much of a fan of David Davis but fair play to him for using parliamentary privilege today to raise questions about this.
I must read it but it is some job they have done to link the deaths together and then attach it to her. The Tory government are a disgrace but to me it is a stretch.
It’s not a Tory government conspiracy. Wrongful convictions happen because a range of people follow their own narrow self interest.
Some people working at the hospital may point a finger at somebody else because it helps them avoid any blame for their part in systemic failings.
Police want a conviction. It is in the rational self interest of detectives to secure a hugely high profile conviction.
It’s also in the interest of the government to have a conviction secured because it masks drastic policy failure, but they aren’t a direct part of a conspiracy.
It’s in media’s interest for there to be an easily understandable “angel of death” who murders babies, rather than more mundane systemic failings. That generates far more engagement.
It’s in the interest of prosecution barristers to secure a conviction by outpointing a petrified and by now mentally ill, almost helpless defendant in court.
Jurors have a propensity to get bored, to want to get the trial over with. They have a propensity to be idiots, and to not actually give a fuck about what they are deciding on. The jury system, like democracy, is only the “least worst system” we have.
I would advise people to read the article with an open mind. That’s how I approached it having not followed the original trial. I would have assumed that the conviction was surely safe through my ignorance of the case.
I don’t mean it in terms or conspiracy, I mean attributing it to Tory underfunding.
I’ve never heard that before, what are you basing that on?
It’s a well known propensity of human beings to get bored, to lose concentration, to want to be somewhere else.
Often experienced during Dublin games in the Leinster championship.
From the article:
Toward the end of the trial, the court received an e-mail from someone who claimed to have overheard one of the jurors at a café saying that jurors had “already made up their minds about her case from the start.” Goss reviewed the complaint but ultimately allowed the juror to continue serving.
Twelve Angry Men wasn’t real.
This was much closer to the truth.
Absolutely nothing then.
You seem to think juries are made up of some sort of class of philosopher kings rather than being a cross section of Mr. and Mrs. Average.
That’s rather naive.
It was a sweeping hot take with absolutely nothing to support it. We’ll leave it there.
I gave a very reasonable, common sense opinion which you haven’t done anything to rebut.
Neither have you argued with anything in the article including the bit about the jury I quoted for you.
I wasn’t interested in arguing with anything in the article, I just picked up on your stupid hot take.
No. A decidedly poor article by New Yorker standards.
So much for fact checking. The piece conveniently omits the piece of testimony in which LL conceded that someone had deliberately poisoned at least two infants but insisted that person is not her:
I followed closely the original trial. LL is as guilty as sin.
Tony Kelly has racked up some great scores but his inconsistent performances at Croke Park mean you have to rate Cian Lynch’s body of work higher.
There are serious concerns over the insulin evidence.
Nearly a year after Operation Hummingbird began, a new method of harm was added to the list. In the last paragraph of a baby’s discharge letter, Brearey, who had been helping the police by reviewing clinical records, noticed a mention of an abnormally high level of insulin. When insulin is produced naturally by the body, the level of C-peptide, a substance secreted by the pancreas, should also be high, but in this baby the C-peptide was undetectable, which suggested that insulin may have been administered to the child. The insulin test had been done at a Royal Liverpool University Hospital lab, and a biochemist there had called the Countess to recommend that the sample be verified by a more specialized lab. Guidelines on the Web site for the Royal Liverpool lab explicitly warn that its insulin test is “not suitable for the investigation” of whether synthetic insulin has been administered. Alan Wayne Jones, a forensic toxicologist at Linköping University, in Sweden, who has written about the use of insulin as a means of murder, told me that the test used at the Royal Liverpool lab is “not sufficient for use as evidence in a criminal prosecution.” He said, “Insulin is not an easy substance to analyze, and you would need to analyze this at a forensic laboratory, where the routines are much more stringent regarding chain of custody, using modern forensic technology.” But the Countess never ordered a second test, because the child had already recovered.
Brearey also discovered that, eight months later, a biochemist at the lab had flagged a high level of insulin in the blood sample of another infant. The child had been discharged, and this blood sample was never retested, either. According to Joseph Wolfsdorf, a professor at Harvard Medical School who specializes in pediatric hypoglycemia, the baby’s C-peptide level suggested the possibility of a testing irregularity, because, if insulin had been administered, the child’s C-peptide level should have been extremely low or undetectable, but it wasn’t.
The police consulted with an endocrinologist, who said that the babies theoretically could have received insulin through their I.V. bags. Evans said that, with the insulin cases, “at last one could find some kind of smoking gun.” But there was a problem: the blood sample for the first baby had been taken ten hours after Letby had left the hospital; any insulin delivered by her would no longer be detectable, especially since the tube for the first I.V. bag had fallen out of place, which meant that the baby had to be given a new one. To connect Letby to the insulin, one would have to believe that she had managed to inject insulin into a bag that a different nurse had randomly chosen from the unit’s refrigerator. If Letby had been successful at causing immediate death by air embolism, it seems odd that she would try this much less effective method.
The reality is that LL would have got away with the muders and attempted murders if molten ego had not led her to submit a grievance claim, so as to be allowed back on the wards from the office job where she had been parked. Far from wanting her as a scapegoat, the hospital administrators – culpably – wanted to sweep LL under the carpet and let the unexplained infants deaths hang.
Only when LL won her grievance claim, and was about to resume ward duties, were the police consulted.
If LL had stayed quiet, she would now be a free woman.
Seems very naive to assume that jurors don’t display the most basic of human qualities.
What’s the evidence that her grievance claim was ego driven?
You made a really stupid hot take. You should just accept that and take it back.
