I’ll say no more on the matter.
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Appeal rejected
Permission to appeal rejected.
This week Leslie O’Looney looks at the Lucy Letby case and wonders – is she really guilty?
It can be dangerous when people don’t understand mathematics or logic. But you know what’s really, really dangerous? Working in a hospital that is massively under-staffed. How dangerous, you ask? Well… you might end up getting charged with murder.
If I mention the name ‘Lucy Letby’ there is a strong possibility that even you, reader, might think that the English nurse who was convicted of killing seven babies, and attempting to kill six more, is worthy of nothing but contempt.
And perhaps that’s true.
But there is also another ‘appalling vista’ – that she is innocent. That she is a scapegoat for under-staffing and reduced resources in UK healthcare. And that the police were idiots again.
Could that ever happen? If a situation arose whereby a surprisingly large number of babies died in a specific time and without a definable reason, which is more likely – that hospitals authorities would explain it as a mathematical anomaly, actual policy, or would they offer up the ‘evil mind’ of a lowly staff member as the reason?
It’s a relevant question for Irish HCPs, because of our similarity to the UK – this situation could easily happen here.
Letby was convicted without any direct evidence of her having committed the murders. I think that’s worth dwelling on for a few more seconds. Letby was convicted without any direct evidence of her having committed the murders.
Lucy Letby being arrested on suspicion of the murder of seven babies
Like many people, I had assumed that an English Court of Law would not convict someone of murder if there was a reasonable doubt that they hadn’t done it, but having looked at some of the evidence compiled by The New Yorker magazine, I have serious doubts about Letby’s conviction. (And perhaps my own mental processes when I think of the history of the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four – as my old journalism Prof used to say: “When you ‘assume’ you make an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me’).
The New Yorker recently did a piece which casts serious doubt on Letby’s guilt and is well worth a read. The first thing in her favour is that she had no motive. She was a normal person, with a large circle of friends. A detective on the case said: “There isn’t really anything in her background we have found that’s anything other than normal.”
Normal people don’t kill babies. She has always acted and behaved normally, and there’s no evidence of emotional disturbance or mental problems.
Then there’s the fact that no-one ever saw Letby harming a child, and that the coroner did not find foul play in any of the deaths for which she was allegedly responsible.
What they did have, and what turned investigators towards Letby was a chart which showed 24 suspicious events on the vertical side and the shifts of 38 nurses on the horizontal axis. On each of the suspicious events, Letby’s name was present.
Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the ‘one common denominator’, or, as one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in an opening statement, the ‘constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse’.
“If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination,” he claimed.
But, like many things in our modern world, it’s a lot more complex than that, and even though the chart may look like convincing proof, there are some questions that need to be asked about its compilation. Like how many shifts did she work in relation to her colleagues? Was she typically working shifts at night when there was less doctors available? But let’s get to that later. There are some other disturbing, yet familiar-sounding facts.
I mean, why did they even presume it was murder? Was the fact that Harold Shipman – the UK’s most notorious medical murderer who happened to have lived 40 miles down the road – putting murder in their minds?
The neonatal unit in the Countess Hospital in Cheshire where all this happened was built in 1974, and was outdated and cramped. The Countess began a campaign to raise money for a new one in 2012.
The head of the unit, Stephen Brearey said at the time: “The risks of infection for the babies is greater, the closer they are to each other.”
Well, duh. They were closer than they had been in the past, and getting closer each year.
There were also problems with the drainage system: the pipes in both the neonatal ward and the maternity ward often leaked or were blocked, and sewage occasionally backed up into the toilets and sinks.
Also, the staff were over-worked. Seven consultants, for example, did rounds on the unit, but only one of them was a neonatologist. Only one.
In 2014, an inquest found that doctors had inserted a breathing tube into a baby’s oesophagus rather than his trachea, ignoring several indications that the tube was misplaced. The boy’s mother said at the time that ‘staff shortages meant blood tests and X-rays were not assessed for seven hours and there was one doctor who was splitting his time between the neonatal ward and the children’s ward’.
All of this indicates a hospital in crisis. A hospital where things could easily go wrong.
Underfunding by the Conservative government since 2010 has devastated the NHS. In 2015, the infant mortality rate in England rose for the first time in a century. A survey at the time found that two-thirds of the country’s neonatal units did not have enough medical and nursing staff. Enough staff became the exception.
That year, the Countess treated more babies than it had in previous years, and they had more complex medical needs and lower birth weights.
Letby – who lived in staff housing on the grounds of the hospital had just finished a six-month course in neonatal intensive care. She was one of only two junior nurses on the unit with that training. Her parents lived miles away. You can imagine the pressure that would be on her to pick up shifts.
You can read the detail of how her shifts and the deaths aligned in the New Yorker piece, but that evidence is only tenable if you presume that there was deliberate murder here, and not death caused by a reduction of government resources, doctors and nurses.
Here’s one of the cases for which Letby was later charged. A woman came to the hospital after her water broke. She was sent home and told to wait. Twenty-four hours later, she noticed that the baby was making less movement inside her. She returned to the hospital because she was concerned about infection and hadn’t been given any antibiotics. She still wasn’t given antibiotics and felt ‘forgotten by staff, really’.
Nearly four hours passed before she was given the antibiotic medication. She had a C-section 60 hours after her water broke and a limp and dusky baby was born. The next night, the baby’s oxygen alarm went off. A nurse called Letby to help, but the baby continued to deteriorate and couldn’t be revived.
Later, a pathologist found pneumonia in the baby’s lungs and said it was a professional opinion that the infection was likely present at birth. And a lot of the other deaths are similar – there was plenty of evidence that there could have been causes of death other than murder.
The question then is did Letby really commit all these murders, or, were they, in fact, murders at all? Several of the seriously ill children would not have been at the Countess had places been available in hospitals with better and more sophisticated care. Would these babies have survived in the better facilities they might have been in, in say, 2005, thereby destroying the mathematical ‘proof’ of excessive death?
In the case cited above, it’s difficult, in my view, to blame Letby for the cause of death. She wasn’t the one who sent the pregnant woman home, wasn’t the one who failed to prescribe her medication, wasn’t even the nurse in charge, but simply came in at a later stage to help.
In 2015, a team from the Royal College of Paediatrics found that nursing and medical staff levels were inadequate at the Countess. They also noted that the increase in the mortality rate was not confined to the neonatal unit – stillbirths on the maternity ward were elevated too.
There are also some serious unanswered questions about the police investigation, and the causes of death.
But what if she really is innocent? What if these babies died because of under-funding and the lack of properly trained staff? What does that say about under-staffing and under-funding in the NHS? Maybe that ‘appalling vista’ had to be covered up and instead, the blame put on a junior member of staff who hadn’t the resources to properly fight her case in both the courts of justice and public opinion?
“She has thrown open the door to Hell,” the Daily Mail wrote about Letby, “and the stench of evil overwhelms us all.”
When Hitler’s cheerleaders are that certain about something, the rest of us should at least entertain some doubts about its veracity.
And now it is being reported that the article is not available in England as it might ‘undermine confidence in the justice system’.
No kidding.
This case stinks worse than the drains in the Countess Hospital.
Evil cunt.
https://twitter.com/irishexaminer/status/1808143985976004618?t=DCqORSUsdqizFwsnbbMX8A&s=19
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Given she was convicted in the other cases it was an inevitability she would be convicted in this one. The same concerns about the safety of all these convictions apply.
Some people say that those who question the convictions are desperate for her to be found innocent because they are refusing to confront the grotesque possibility of a nurse being a serial murderer. I don’t buy that at all.
Others try to bring it down a culture war rabbit hole and say that people are questioning the convictions because she is white. Total nonsense.
I think people are much more afraid to confront the possibility that somebody could be put away for life for something they didn’t do based on unsafe evidence, other people trying to protect their own reputations, a media witch hunt and juries being influenced by that media witch hunt.
It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.
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Do you actually think she didn’t do it? Or just that there’s reasonable doubt? Obviously it isn’t beyond the British justice system/media to destroy an innocent person’s life, but that doesn’t mean they did it here.
What’s the problem with the statistical evidence?
It’s a couple of months I’d say since I read the New Yorker article but it definitely sowed reasonable doubt in my mind. Reasonable doubt means that yes, I have doubts that she did what she was convicted of. I think there’s a right possibility she’s innocent.
The prosecution got a paid witness in who seemed sketchy. The statistical evidence seemed dodgy as hell. The whole thing seemed to be based on two cases, in which the babies not just survived but survived perfectly healthily after. The hospital was in rag order. Short staffing was chronic. Hygiene was woeful. There were asses to be covered. Evidence which could have been beneficial to Letby seemed to be disallowed on spurious grounds.
The New Yorker article was suppressed because of the case in which she has just been convicted. David Davis MP used parliamentary privilege to raise the issue of the article in parliament. It will be interesting to see if attention returns to the article given it will presumably no longer be subject to restrictions in Britain.
The existence of previous miscarriages of justice is obviously not proof that this one is, but it is to say it can happen. Nobody seems to want to even remotely acknowledge that possibility. We also know that the Brits are very keen to suppress the truth when it suits them, when the alternative is that a mighty shitstorm would be whipped up with massive consequences for the judicial system, the police and the media.
There’s just a stink off the whole thing. My gut tells me something is off about this case. And it isn’t headbangers who are raising concerns.
It seems to me like you’ve been caught hook, line and sinker pal.
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What struck me about the case was the lack of strong evidence. No one saw her do anything nor was there anything forensic. A lot seemed to be placed on her writings about being evil which on the face of it seems weak.
I didn’t follow the case closely but it seemed to me that if you’re going to find someone guilty of killing a pile of babies then the evidence needs to be very strong.
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In this case a doctor walked in on her doing nothing while the baby’s blood oxygen levels collapsed, so she was seen doing nothing rather than something.
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That’s basically what the expert on Sky News said after the first trial - no concrete evidence.
And apparently the doctor didn’t do anything about it until much much later.
That’s me told so
Standing watching doing nothing while a baby dies strikes me as suspicious, particularly for a nurse whose job is to look after babies and generally do things to make sure they don’t die.
Suspicious?
Needed to be a bit more than that.
I was being facetious, it sounds criminal to me.
There are a finite number of possibilities about the infant deaths and injuries in Chester:
1 These deaths and injuries were a freak set of events, tragic but ultimately a set of chance coincidences.
This scenario was flatly contradicted in LL’s sworn testimony when she conceded that someone in the unit attacked at least two infants – via air injections – but stated that this someone was not her. That New Yorker article glosses over said LL concession in a telling way.
2 These deaths and injuries were due to medical negligence and understaffing in the unit (LL’s defence, in effect). No evidence was presented in this regard,. The submission about sanitation in the unit proved entirely irrelevant in this regard: namely, how could such a sanitation scenario, even if accurate, have caused the deaths and the injuries in question? Not a scree of evidence was presented in this regard. The workman called by LL’s defence team dismissed out of hand, in fact, such a scenario.
3 Someone else in the unit other than LL murdered and maimed these infants. There is zero evidence in this regard.
- LL murdered and maimed these infants. There is an abundance of compelling evidence in this regard.
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But is a process of elimination sufficient to convict someone for murder?
In this case yes
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