Lucy Letby was never seen to harm any babies, and almost all the babies who died had autopsies that identified natural causes or raised the possibility of accidents. The medical evidence against her started to be constructed only after her supposed killing spree had ended, by which time evidence was limited to what could be found in the medical notes or could be recalled by the four doctors who took their suspicions to the police.
The murder methods attributed to Letby were many, but the explanations followed three patterns.
The first pattern started by identifying a commonplace symptom and then arguing that this symptom was explained by deliberate harm. This explanation pattern was initially developed to allege that Letby was attacking babies by injecting air into the vein to cause an air embolism. This then became the template for explanations using other commonplace symptoms, such as bleeding, as their starting point.
The second pattern was much more specific. Test results, it was said, showed the presence of artificial insulin. Here, it was argued, there was direct evidence of poisoning.
The third pattern took a baby’s sudden, unexpected and (supposedly) unexplained collapse as evidence enough of foul play: the very fact that a baby had collapsed, even in the absence of evidence of commonplace symptoms, including air, was sufficient to diagnose that air had been deliberately administered to the baby. This diagnosis used a process of elimination. As Dr. Dewi Evans, the main expert witness for the prosecution, put the matter when looking back on the trial:
These are cases where your diagnosis is made by ruling out other factors, and you end up with the diagnosis where this is the only explanation. You’ve ruled everything out; what’s left is the diagnosis.
This medical evidence has now been so thoroughly discredited that it appears, almost literally in some cases, to have been conjured up out of the air. On May 13th 2024, a long article by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker set out many of the problems in all of the evidence against Letby, including the medical evidence. (The article was censored in the U.K. due to ongoing trial but was easy enough to find online.) Then, on July 9th, two substantial articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph focused on flaws in the medical evidence. Both articles cited numerous medical experts, including neonatologists, who explained that there are any number of natural and accidental explanations that might account for the symptoms said to be evidence of murder or attempted murder. None of the supposed murder methods were viewed as more than possibilities, and unlikely ones at that.
The idea that babies were being murdered by forcing air into the stomach came in for particular criticism. The insulin evidence, superficially more convincing, was immediately invalidated by the testing facility explicitly warning that the test could not be used as evidence of poisoning. But even leaving this aside, several experts explained how the test results had been misinterpreted. As for Dr. Evans’s methods of diagnosis, no one amongst the experts had a kind word to say about them, and some were more or less openly contemptuous. More generally, the articles highlighted shortcomings in the state of the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital where Letby worked, ones which suggested that insofar as the collapses and deaths of the babies were not the inevitable result of natural causes, they were the result of substandard care.
Given that the medical evidence against Letby is so poor, why was it that, on May 24th 2024, Dame Victoria Sharpe, Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Lambert announced they would not allow Letby to appeal against her convictions?
To find the answer we need to look at the reasoning that underlies their judgment, published on July 2nd 2024. However, before entering in to this reasoning, I first rule out three explanations for why the judges denied the appeal.
- Were the judges so constrained by the laws on appeal that they could not do otherwise? No. I rule this out with the general observation that judges have considerable flexibility. The Appeal Court judges could have easily come up with reasons to grant leave to appeal if they had wanted to.
- Did the judges realise that Letby should never have been found guilty, but decide to deny her leave to appeal anyway for reasons of their own? No. I rule this out on the grounds that the judges were mistaken rather than evil.
- Did the judges arrive at their decision by knowingly drawing on the reasoning in comparable cases in the past? No. I rule this out because there are no references in the judgment to such cases. There have occasionally been cases that seem closely comparable to Lucy Letby’s, including the Lucia de Berk case in Holland, when a paediatric nurse was convicted of multiple murders and attempted murders, and was only some years later found not to be guilty after all. Obviously the judges did not consider this case. However, there are also a large number of U.K. cases, including civil cases, that are broadly similar to the Letby case insofar as: (a) babies or children have died or have signs of injuries; (b) the evidence that the death or injury has been caused by the suspect (typically a parent or step parent) is circumstantial; (c) the question of whether natural or accidental explanations for the deaths or injuries are plausible is critical to the outcome of the case; and (d) there is contested expert medical evidence.
There is surely much wisdom contained in the judgments of these other cases. And had they considered them this might have helped the Appeal Court judges in their reasoning over what is needed, in these types of circumstances, to get at least some way towards certainty of guilt (civil cases are decided on the balance of probabilities). Whether the accumulated wisdom to be found in these cases would have supported the judges in upholding Letby’s guilty verdicts is another matter. But all this is bye the bye, as the Appeal Court ignored the whole lot.
So what explains the reasoning of the judges? In part they simply took a view diametrically opposed to those of the medical experts cited in the New Yorker, Guardian and Telegraph articles. Thus, they argued that Dr. Evans had been maligned by the defence and, they implied, by a judge who had called his opinion in another case “worthless”. Dr Evans, they argued, had a sound holistic method of diagnosis. Furthermore, it was Evans, they said, who had discovered the insulin evidence (although Dr. Stephen Brearey emphatically claimed that he had); this insulin evidence provided proof of poisoning, and so on. However, the judges’ reasoning also explicitly followed a legal pattern of argument that had been developed particularly when dealing with fraud cases.
Fraud cases are notoriously complicated for jurors to understand, so to make things as easy as possible for them, judges draw the distinction between (a) what is essential to secure a conviction and (b) what is a mere matter of ancillary detail. “Concentrate on the essentials,” the judge tells the jury. “If you are sure that the defendant is guilty on the grounds of these essentials, you do not need to agree over the matters of detail.” The Appeal Court took this distinction and applied it to the medical evidence in the Letby case. The medical evidence contributed to the evidence as a whole, but it was only as part of this whole that it could be said to be essential. Considered in isolation, the medical evidence was a matter of detail; it was not essential to the prosecution case.
This argument comes out when the Appeal Judges explain that Judge Goss was quite right to tell the jury that it could convict Letby of murder and attempted murder even if it was unsure of precisely how she killed or tried to kill the babies. Goss had said:
If you are sure that someone on the unit was deliberately harming a baby or babies you do not have to be sure of the precise harmful act or acts; in some instances there may have been more than one. To find the defendant guilty, however, you must be sure that she deliberately did some harmful act to the baby. (para 155)
Letby’s defence argued that this was a misdirection: that without knowing how Letby killed or tried to kill the babies, one could not be sure that she had done so at all, given the possibility that deaths and injuries might have natural and accidental causes (including substandard care).
The prosecution countered that “they did not have to prove the precise – or any – mechanism by which death was caused or attempted” (para 159). After reminding the Appeal Court judges of famous cases in which murder convictions had been obtained without a body, the prosecution then brought up the distinction so useful to fraud cases, between matters which are essential, “an ingredient of the offence”, and those that are “a merely evidential – or ancillary – issue”.
The appeal judges agree with this distinction (para 160). They explain it using a hypothetical example that if a jury were sure that someone caused actual bodily harm by having “unlawfully punched and/or kicked his victim”, it was a mere matter of detail as to whether it was a punch or a kick or both that caused the injury; there is no need to be precise about it. But then (para 163) they seem to have second thoughts, raising a well-known complication in a real case involving a fatal attack. In this case, the defence’s argument is different according to “whether the fatal blow was a kick (to which the defendant’s defence was identification) or a punch (to which his defence was self-defence)”. Here a punch or a kick is not a mere matter of detail because the jurors might find one defence plausible and the other not. In such a case, therefore, the jury have to decide on the precise blow before they can be sure whether to convict.
The Appeal Court was quite right to raise this complication, as the medical evidence is clearly of this type. The various alleged ways in which Letby killed or harmed babies each had different alternative natural and accidental explanations put forward by the defence. For example, the defence argued that liver damage in the case of Baby O might have been caused inadvertently by CPR, or by insertion of a cannula, whereas air in the stomach may have been an inadvertent side effect of CPAP, and so on. The jurors might find at least some of these accidental or natural explanations plausible. Therefore, in order to be sure to convict, the cause (or causes) of death or of harm for each baby had to align precisely with ones where the jurors agreed that the specific alternatives put forward by the defence could be ruled out.
It is at this point that the Appeal Court judges make a bizarre mistake in their reasoning. They argue the opposite, that the medical evidence in the Letby case was akin to the hypothetical situation where whether it was a punch or a kick did not matter. The jury, they claimed, could exclude all the possibilities put forward by the defence without needing to agree “on the precise act or acts which the applicant committed” (para 165). The judges asserted that the jury could exclude these possibilities by considering not just the medical evidence but the evidence as a whole, including things such as the apparent confession on the post-it note and the “trophies” (meaning the handover notes) (para 164).
How such non-medical evidence rules out the possibility that, say, bruising on the liver is the result of CPR, the judges do not explain. But perhaps this lacunae helps to explain their own thinking. The judges sound rather tired of trying to get their heads around the case. They write virtuously of having to read “a vast volume of material” (para 17). No wonder it was tempting, even if mistaken, to categorise the medical evidence as an ancillary matter; the tiresome business of going through all the medical evidence bit by bit could thereby be disposed of by the Appeal Court judges, just as it could be by the jury at the trial. It was just a matter of detail. It was the whole thing that made Lucy Letby guilty.
In a case involving so many alleged victims, this reasoning would be highly suspect even if the non-medical evidence was strong. In fact, the other evidence was remarkably weak: the handover notes, the Facebook searches, the roster chart, all were cherry picked. The swipe data, on who was and who was not present at each incident, has had its accuracy called into question by the retrial.
The only substantial evidence against Lucy Letby is the post-it note, in which she wrote “I am evil I did this.” This, the prosecution claimed, provided the case against her “in a nutshell”.
The post-it note provides real evidence, but what this evidence means is ambiguous. When isolated individuals are remorselessly pursued by powerful authorities, they often do confess to things, as ‘witches’ confessed to flying on broomsticks. And if we are to believe the note, which part of it are we to believe? It cannot all be true, because in the very same note, Letby said that she had done nothing wrong, and that the police investigation was founded on slander, discrimination and victimisation. Given all that we now know, it is surely far more likely that it is this part of the note that puts the case against Letby in a nutshell.
Dr. Peter Hayes was for many years a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sunderland University. With academic research interests cutting across medicine and law, he authored numerous publications in both medical and legal journals.
Stop Press: Several former Cabinet ministers have expressed concern over the conviction, with the issue likely to be raised in Parliament, according to the Telegraph. The Royal Statistical Society has also announced it will “convene a meeting”, stating that it is aware of “concerns” from RSS members and the wider community regarding the use of statistical evidence in the case.
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I’m beach ready for Antartica.
LONDON -~TOMORROW
Sat, 26 June, 1pm
The Next Big One!
Freedom from Vax Passport Enslavement
Hyde Park, North Carriage Drive Entrance
https://t.me/londonrallies
https://www.standupx.info/
It reminds me of the fabulous new trade deals due to Brexit: they are not a one way street and won’t happen if the other side says Njet!
Go figure.
Yes – just think of our joy were we suddenly embedded back in the vile and very smelly EUrinal.
I hate Johnson. But today I am hating MerCow too. What brass neck does she have to swan about Cornwall last week and break all the protocols like the other numb nuts and today lobby to ban British people from the EU. What a fucking cunt (sorry) every day of this nightmare is just ridiculous move after ridiculous move. I have a U.K. and an EU passport and still can’t fucking live a free life after doing nothing wrong. While this mob let the dinghy divers and refugees do what they please where they please. Where is the riot ? The world wanted to riot over much less important things than personal Liberty. Ahhhhhhhh. And I have been trying to
Ring BA for two weeks now about my travel plans and every single time I get told how busy they are and then they drop my call. Pathetic all of them. Pathetic
Covid gives Meerkat a bee-yooo-tiful opportunity to work off some spite over Brexit. Bear in mind that most EU bills were paid by Germany and Britain as net contributors. Now it’s only Germany.
As is always the case, their high level arguments shit on the lives of “normal” people. I completely see this current policy is spite for not being in the EU. But I can’t see how Johnson gets a free pass on the Indian Variant and she gets a free pass on ruining lives of not just U.K. citizens but EU ones too. I feel like running them all over with a tank and reversing over them to make sure they are dead.
Bringbacksanity – have you got room for me in the tank?
I don’t know how you didn’t hate Merkel before this. That woman has done more damage to Germany and all of Europe than even Hitler. Been in office longer than he was, too
A reward to the vaxxtards: ten days of your holiday (if you’re very lucky) go by, and on the eleventh they switch your destination back to amber and you spend 36 hours in hell, jamming sticks up your nose and fighting to get home in time so’s they don’t bang you up when you get there.
Oh, what jolly fun. Worth risking death for.
…and paying a fortune to airlines for the pleasure of switching to an earlier flight.
What actually happens if you don’t quarantine from a Red list country, i.e. you refuse to pay it (or can’t) – would they take you to court? would they be able to imprison you? I think the legality would fall apart in court given it wasn’t even passed in Parliament properly
I don’t think you would be allowed on the plane to the UK without the proof that you’d booked a hotel and you will have to pay up front.
Gestapo come and break down your door and cart you off to a quarantine hotel, at your expense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIiGUj-JMMg
That’s 1930s Germany. Hope they sent the bill for the front door to 10 Downing Street.
All islands. Is that because they don’t want us to escape?
It’s grotesque. They are making it up as they go along. And expecting us to take any of it seriously? These people are properly possessed. Though whether simply very stupid or actively conniving for a new Orwellian future is the key question. For a long time, I presumed the former, stupid always a more likely explanation than sinister, which can be very hard to maintain. I am seriously wondering now if some vast new future of active suppression is being attempted, freedoms deliberately denied, state powers impersonally imposed, the whole amounting to a despotic inversion of the liberties any free-born man or woman knew as a birth-right. I am still inclined to believe that stupid is the more likely explanation. If I am wrong, on the other hand, I suspect I am far from alone in asserting that I will do whatever I can to resist what would by then have become a new and very nasty tyranny.
I don’t know but so many of the conspiracy theories are now becoming conspiracy fact, that I’m starting to believe they were right all along. I’m beyond angry now. I’ve never bought into the fear – I’m like the Amish guy who when asked why there was no Covid cases amongst them, replied “we don’t watch television” – Build Back Better is a truly appalling idea and I don’t want to survive to see it anyway, and the thing that frightens me is how easily the majority of people have been duped.
“And expecting us to take any of it seriously?”
How can you not take it seriously? The Covid tests at the airport (or elsewhere) before flying is perhaps the biggest obstruction. It is very difficult to match the test, perhaps 3 or 2 days before a flight, and then make that flight. There is no guarantee that the private testing company, such as Collinson at Heathrow, will even have your results ready on time. What do you do between taking the test and waiting 3 or 2 days before the flight – just hang around around the airport or the streets of London/Manchester?
And if the test result is ‘inconclusive’ or ‘positive’ then what? These Covid tests between countries are the biggest block to free travel. As has been pointed out, now that the virus is (allegedly, as it’s all fake anyway) all around Europe, what’s the point of trying to limit its distribution any more?
Why not have road blocks all around Bolton, or stop people from travelling from Cornwall now that Cornwall has ‘gone red’?
Here are reviews about Collinson if you want to see what you’re up against. And, hey, if your Passport number / name is on someone’s ‘black list’ then they may just give you a ‘positive’ result just as a punishment for having said the wrong thing somewhere:
Here’s one typical reply to a complaint:
“Hi Helen, thanks for the review and I’m disappointed to hear about your experience. I have noted your comments regarding your booking journey and this will be shared with the rest of the team. Keep safe, Amy”
Why not just say “Thanks for your money you mug, now fuck off.” If you go to these testing stations and see the type of people working there, your heart sinks straight away. You can smell the con.
Funny how NHS ‘negative’ results aren’t good enough to be able to be used to leave the country – no, it has to be a private profiteering company, doesn’t it? And are they giving backhanders to the people who gave them the permits to operate?
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.collinsongroup.com?stars=1
No they are not stupid just plain Evil.
To put it bluntly … this government is fucking with you.
These are little psychological games and tricks to mess with your mind and reduce you to gibbering wreck who doesn’t know whether their coming or going and will be pleased for even the tiniest morsel – some tiny glimmer of hope that there will some return to normality once again … but it never quite gets back to normal does it? There is always a catch somewhere – a price to be paid for your normal life back again.
This government is using age old psychological abuse techniques to control people – isolate people and you can control them – once you control them then they will do anything for you – offer them the promise of a return back to normal in return for their total compliance and they will gladly comply … only for those promises to be broken time and time again by the abuser who will never let you go because they enjoy the power they have over you..
This is a sick and twisted government.
Yep, and you can bet they are pissing themselves laughing at us plebs. You can see it on their faces, even when they’re trying to be serious. Just can’t hide it.
what will happen when all the jabbed people start flying to all these destinations and then we begin to get reports of people having adverse reactions during flights – probably because of the clot problems??
Don’t worry, the inevitable adverse reactions will be blamed on new, imaginary variants of covid and therefore all air travel will be suspended again to keep us ‘safe’……
I’m on a Greek island seeing my family, sorting out my little house here, and struggling with post Brexit bureaucracy. Thanks to the clown Bojo I’m near to losing my residency as I haven’t been able to get here to do so and therefore haven’t spent the required time in Greece. If I lose the residency, I won’t get it back now that the UK has left the EU as I won’t qualify. I say this just to point out that travelling isn’t all about holidays – and even if it was, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m fed up of hearing folk saying “holidays don’t matter, we’re in the middle of a dreadful pandemic” (yes they do, and no we aren’t). They matter to those who will lose their jobs, they matter to pilots who have paid thousands of ££ for their training and are now delivering for Amazon and may lose their pilots licences, they matter to the lovely people of this island who rely on tourism to feed their families. To say I loathe this government is an understatement. My mental health is shot to pieces. If the appalling smarmy Hancock comes anywhere near me, I won’t be responsible for my actions. This island has zero Covid cases so why isn’t it Green listed? The system is utter tripe.
We are in a similar position having a canal boat in England but we live in Finland and it’s the Covid tests that are making travel not impossible but so very risky and difficult – difficult to match Covid tests and times, and if a ‘positive’ result is thrown up – what then? Also the expense of the tests.
This is deliberate and nothing to do with a virus. If it was to do with a virus, why not have free testing stations near your home or at the airports? Why is it always private companies with staff that just smirk at you as they know they are fleecing you. The whole thing is a gigantic con.
It looks as if this is not going to stop anytime soon – if ever. Here we have the boot stamping on our faces forever.
It looks as if we will have to sell our boat… we had intended keeping it and going round the English waterways for another 5 years or so, before selling it, but it looks as if we are trapped, and it’s not going to be easy to sell it if we can’t get to England. My partner tells me there must be thousands of other people in this kind of situation, Brits who can’t get to their properties abroad.
I would ask why people aren’t angrier – but, as we see, it’s all masks and fear of ‘The Virus’ (that doesn’t even exist) and vaccinations. So many people have turned into gibbering jellyfishes.
Yes, I have 5 friends who are unable to get to their properties on this Greek island from the U.K. 3 of those friends rely on holiday rentals to pay for their properties, which they were planning on living in come retirement. They cannot get to the properties to do maintenance, open up for rentals, anything, as they still work in the U.K. and cannot get the time off to quarantine. They aren’t wealthy, this is just the way they chose to spend their retirement monies, looking on it as an investment and a place to live in retirement. It took me many cancelled flights and a lot of persistence to get here, losing a lot of money in the process. Flights disappear before your eyes just as you are about to book them, or you book one and then get a cancellation email 3 hours later (I’m looking at you British Airways). This government don’t care. They are perfectly happy raking in £££ with their fingers in many pies such as testing, genome sequencing (Hancock) and suchlike. Yet others like myself and my friends, who have saved all our working lives to fund our dreams abroad and to support ourselves, just get trodden on. I loathe the government.
You’re quite right it’s nothing to do with the virus, the virus hoax is a means to ending travel for the plebs whilst the self appointed elites continue their lifestyles. The Green Lobby will be overjoyed.
You are so right. There are many millions inside and outside the UK with close ties to loved ones and homes, communities and businesses. People who just think it’s about holidays are ignorant sods.
It makes my blood boil Julian. As do people who say virtuously “oh we aren’t going abroad this year, we’re going to keep the islanders safe by not going.”. Safe?! How safe is it when you don’t know how you will feed your family come winter because of the lack of visitors? Greece don’t have a furlough scheme. These same virtue signallers will expect their favourite taverna to still be there next year or the year after, with low prices. Well, it won’t be. Sorry, I know I ranting, but I’m at ground zero here and can see the harm done to these lovely people. My cost of many cancelled flights and hotels at various airports just to get here, pales into insignificance. Plus people deserve holidays. They have been screwed over by this government for months, stamped on underfoot, been led on a dance of fear and exhaustion – they need their time in the sunshine, relaxing. Now Shapps is muttering about allowing the jabbed to return without quarantine “but not for some weeks because . . . you know . . . we have to be careful”. It’s cr*p. They’ll find a reason not to do it once all the sheep are vaccinated.
I haven’t seen my family in the flesh for over 18 months now – I am resigned to the fact that unless things change I may never see them again. It is nothing to do with holidays for me
For anyone who has reasons to travel to and from those countries, I am glad for them that it is now a little bit easier.
But in general, until all restrictions are lifted and there is no “list” of any kind, I am not impressed. These lists are just another part of lockdown and the corona madness.
Yep the Knob Hancock playing Hitler and enjoying it throughly. He’s got to be the first for THE CHOP and I mean THE CHOP!
And, of course, they are mostly on their green watchlist – all ready to be sent back to the sin bin to screw with anyone who dares to leave our wondrous cuntry!