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There’s difference in interpretation. That is ok for one or two isolated cases but there seems to have been a series of not only fatalities, but also adverse incidents related to her shifts dating back a good while. But this argument is deeply saddening, and nobody will change their views. That’s just mine.
David Davis is a hateful creep though.
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Babies the former nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering were in fact the victims of “bad medical care” or deteriorated as a result of natural causes, an expert panel has concluded.
Outlining what the senior Conservative MP David Davis described as “one of worst injustices of recent times”, the international team told a press conference there was “no medical evidence” to support claims of deliberate harm.
A panel of experts, chaired by Dr Shoo Lee, examined the cases of 17 babies whom Letby was charged with murdering or harming at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.
What is the new challenge to the evidence used to convict Lucy Letby?
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Lee, an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, said the 14 experts had found “so many problems with the medical care” of the babies and nothing to support the claim they were attacked. “In summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murders,” he told a press conference in Westminster on Tuesday.
The press conference came as the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice, announced it had received a “preliminary application” from Letby’s legal team.
A CCRC spokesperson said it was not possible to say how long it would take to come to a decision on whether to refer the case back to the court of appeal, which it can do if it believes there is a real possibility the convictions will be quashed.
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From left: Prof Neena Modi, Mark McDonald, David Davis and Dr Shoo Lee announcing the findings in London on Tuesday. Photograph: Ben Whitley/PA
Letby, now 35, is serving 15 whole-life prison terms after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another seven at the Countess of Chester hospital. She has twice been refused permission to appeal against her convictions by the court of appeal. A public inquiry is under way on the basis that she is guilty.
Letby was convicted of murdering four of the seven babies by injecting air into their bloodstreams and attempting to kill several others by the same method.
She was also convicted of harming two babies by poisoning them with insulin, pumping air into their feeding tube, force-feeding one with milk, and causing trauma to the abdomen.
Lee, who chaired the expert panel, said the prosecution’s claim that Letby had injected air into babies’ bloodstreams had “no evidence in fact”.
For the first time, experts suggested what they described as plausible alternative explanations for the deterioration of the infants – but ruled out deliberate harm.
A 31-page summary report, published on Tuesday, concluded that the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit was overworked, understaffed, had plumbing issues and was staffed by “inadequate numbers of appropriately trained” clinicians. It said there were “numerous problems” in the care of the 17 babies, including a failure to properly carry out “basic medical procedures, delays in their treatment and the misdiagnosis of diseases”.
Lee said: “If this had happened at a hospital in Canada, it would be shut down.”
In one example, he said the panel had concluded that Child 1 – a one-day-old twin boy Letby was convicted of murdering by injecting with air – had in fact died as a result of thrombosis due to a failure to begin his infusion until four hours after he was intubated, risking the development of clots.
Another baby, a 10-week-old girl whom Letby was convicted of murdering on her fourth attempt, in fact died as a result of complications linked to respiratory distress syndrome and chronic lung disease, the panel concluded.
Lee claimed doctors had failed to respond to routine warnings about her deterioration and did not treat her with appropriate antibiotics. He added: “This was likely a preventable death.”
The panel also cast doubt on the supposed insulin poisonings, which were the foundation of the prosecution case. Jurors in Letby’s original trial were told that the insulin and c-peptide levels of two infants meant they must have been deliberately injected with insulin. Letby’s original legal team did not contest that claim, yet the jury was told that Letby was the only person who could have poisoned both babies.
Mark McDonald, Letby’s new barrister, said the report had “demolished” the medical case against her and was “overwhelming evidence that this conviction is unsafe”. He said the failure of Letby’s original legal team to produce any medical experts to give evidence in her defence meant that “all you were left with was the evidence of prosecution experts”.
He said: “This is fresh evidence. This is new evidence. It’s compelling evidence because of the nature of people who are giving that evidence – and it wasn’t heard by the jury.”
Lee said the expert panel included “some of the most experienced and distinguished paediatric specialists in the world”, from the US, the UK, Germany, Sweden and Japan.
One of the UK’s most eminent neonatologists, Prof Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, is one of the 14 experts who analysed the cases of 17 babies Letby allegedly harmed.
Modi said there were “very, very plausible reasons for these babies’ deaths” and that, across all 17 cases, there was a combination of babies being “in the wrong place, delivered in the wrong place, delayed diagnosis and inappropriate or absent treatment”.
She should be freed immediately
And allowed back to work while they look into it a bit more.
The panel also cast doubt on the supposed insulin poisonings, which were the foundation of the prosecution case. Jurors in Letby’s original trial were told that the insulin and c-peptide levels of two infants meant they must have been deliberately injected with insulin. Letby’s original legal team did not contest that claim, yet the jury was told that Letby was the only person who could have poisoned both babies.
“cast doubt”
It seems strange to me that “the foundation” of a prosecution case for serial murder would be two particular cases where the babies in question survived and, I think (correct me if I’m wrong), made full recoveries.
Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think any of the babies were that were deemed to have been murdered died by insulin poisoning?
Also I’m fairly sure this thread contains pieces which seem to cast very reasonable doubt on the insulin evidence.
It seems quite plausible to me that a skilled prosecution barrister could trap a scared witness into agreeing with a statement that is not actually true, through misrepresentation of facts or presentation of a case which lacked context.
The job of the defence is to cast a doubt on the prosecution case.
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What relevance does the fact that the infants did not die have to the question of whether they were poisoned with insulin?
And?
Those individuals are not LL’s defence, by the way. And LL herself agreed that those two infants had been poisoned by insulin injection. Her claim? That someone else had been the poisoner.
I would imagine that if a medical professional actually wanted to kill babies with insulin they’d probably succeed.
None of the babies who died due were poisoned with insulin the best of my knowledge.
As I say, it just seems strange that non-fatal insulin poisoning would be the foundation of the case used to convict somebody of serial murder.
Evidence from somebody who it seems to me is of dubious character.
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.
I never said the experts are part of LLs defence. They were however, introduced by LLs defence.
Has all the hallmarks of another Roy meadows convictions as I said way up thread
Would you not address the key point that LL herself conceded that two infants were poisoned by insulin injection?
I somehow doubt “bad plumbing” could be responsible there.
Have you no appreciation of how ridiculous the ‘logic’ of this statement is?
Link?
No because it isn’t ridiculous. What does seem ridiculous is cherry picking cases where there were high but non-fatal levels of insulin in infants, cooking up a case on this on the word of one paid gobshite and convicting a nurse for the murders of other infants on this basis.
What is also ridiculous is the defence claim that the hospital would have been shut down if it were in canada. The paediatricians are very good in that unit. Letby left and the adverse incident rate fell back to the norm.
You can get any medical expert for hire to say whatever you want. These “independent” witnesses are far from it. David Davis is a window licking creep, a proven liar and fantasist, and there is direct eye witness testimony that she was calmly watching a baby die and doing nothing.
The water has been well muddied, but I think she most likely is guilty as charged.
The air embolus evidence always seemed a major stretch though.
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