David Davis MP has declared he is 90 odd per cent certain that Lucy Letby is innocent and will campaign for a retrial. This is very bad news for the Thirlwall lnquiry, whose chair brushed off the growing number of expert voices as “noise”, and who has conducted the inquiry on the axiom of the truth of the conviction, refusing to hear witnesses who do not think Letby is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. My reflection on this falls into two parts, firstly an attempt to state where this rapidly unravelling prosecution case now stands, and secondly to ask whether the full legal procedure for assessing scientific witness quality was observed through the trial.
The case against Letby is an “hypothesis to account for a difficulty”, to steal John Henry Newman’s phrase. The hypothesis was developed by senior doctors in the Countess of Chester Hospital neonatal unit to ‘explain’ a spike in deaths. There is no need to rehearse the narrative leading to her arrest and two convictions, this has been forensically set out in Rachel Aviv’s famous and judicially censored article in the New Yorker; it really is a core text, and was censored even while a hysterically hostile press coverage was allowed to remain available. It has not received a rebuttal, just been ignored. Statistician Richard Gill has compiled a rehearsal of useful websites. Dr. Phil Hammond, who writes the ‘MD’ column in Private Eye, is also essential reading, taking us through the second trial and into the equally skewed Thirwall Inquiry and he is getting letters from nurses who want to testify on behalf of Letby but have been blocked.
The hypothesis for deliberate human agency being responsible for neonate deaths because Dewi Evans, lead expert witness for the prosecution, opined that there was “no other explanation”, has been crumbling. His controversial handling of nurses’ shift rosters, excluding doctors and other staff on the unit, pulled out Letby as on shift when many critical incidents happened, and so made her the target for the police investigation. Evans cited two insulin cases, not leading to deaths, for which better science has emerged showing a non-murderous cause for the high insulin level, to sit alongside Rachel Aviv’s counter-evidence. The BBC’s latest coverage of the case has sought to defend the prosecution case for the reliability of the insulin immunoassay tests.
But subsequently yet more top quality scientific evidence has emerged to counter the prosecution’s evidence in the neonates alleged to have overly high levels of insulin. Five top experts have agreed that the prosecution case for Babies F and L fails. ‘Insulin tests used to convict Letby cannot be relied upon, scientists say‘, reports Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph. Specialists argue results are notoriously unreliable as antibodies can cause “interference”. “Without confirming the integrity of the results then you are entering into the land of guessing,” Dr. Adel Ismail, a retired consultant in clinical biochemistry and chemical endocrinology who was the head of an NHS pathology lab for 25 years, told Knapton. And that is precisely what the prosecution barristers, and their expert witness Dr. Evans, gave to the jury, the land of guessing. This is what the vastly long and tendentious trials offered by way of evidence against Letby: guessing and a hypothesis spun like Ariadne’s web out of fresh air. This torpedo holes the case against Letby, but the legal establishment will seek to ignore it, brush it aside and continue to deny her the appeal demanded by the flow of damning criticism of the prosecution case. The Criminal Cases Review Commission is notoriously unwilling to act and will even keep a victim of miscarriage of justice locked up despite compelling evidence while it dawdles and delays.
Hypotheses, for scientists, are put up to be challenged by counter-evidence, and this Letby hypothesis continues to weaken as the weeks go by and major errors appear in the prosecution hypothesis, errors which undermine the trustworthiness of its method and deduction. For example, the X-ray on which Dewi Evans relied for the alleged killing of Baby C proved to be dated on a day she was not present. She was not there – and the whole hypothesis is based on her ‘being there’ – so this should seriously vitiate the theory. But no, the establishment virtually ignores this rend in its allegation. Likewise, when it turned out that Letby was not even present when an I.V. bag she had supposedly poisoned with insulin was given to a baby, the prosecution stuck to its guns, putting forward the utterly improbable hypothesis that Letby had left the poisoned bag in the fridge for another nurse to pick at random and inadvertently use.
Like a medieval witch, if she ‘was there’ her very presence could kill, and even if she was not. The start of the second trial for attempted murder of baby K, where Dr. Jayaram famously “looked at his watch” and recalled the exact time when she was supposedly alone with the neonate, vitiated his testimony since the door swipe data backing up his story was after all wrong. Another nurse had come into the unit, not gone out, Letby was not alone – so surely the case against her was bust. But no, the jury convicted her despite this torpedoing of the timing and solo opportunity for our assassin. The jury must have been befuddled to convict on the attempted murder of baby K as once again, there was no evidence of her harming any baby at all.
We are forced to ask, given that Evans’s X-ray proved nothing against Letby even on his own “must have been murder” axiom, and the court’s ignoring of this flat contradiction of his allegation by date and by method, would anything have sunk Evans’s evidence in their eyes? It seems to be invested with a holy impregnability in the eyes of the judge, barristers, jury, the Appeal judges: the logic is “she must have been an assassin, so never mind the dates and methods, she must have killed Baby C”. The logic is a deduction from the hypothesis, not from witness evidence of crime, nor forensic evidence.
We need to note that the defence failed to take up this golden opportunity in court, just as it had astonishingly agreed with the prosecution in the insulin cases that insulin must have been injected exogenously, thus helping the hypothesis of the prosecution entirely unnecessarily. The defence failed to put its own expert, Dr. Hall, in the witness box, despite the fact he sat through the trials and regards them as simply unfair. The adversarial trial system depends on the defence being equally funded as the prosecution, and we can only speculate why it proved to be so ineffective.
The Thirwall Inquiry is turning out to be rather like the Post Office Inquiry with its Fujitsu fundamentalism and the Covid Inquiry, predicated on lockdowns being utterly necessary and vital to saving lives, refusing to heed any counter-evidence which has grown louder and louder. Thirlwall is operating on a similar axiom which the establishment is desperate to maintain: that Letby the brilliant killer hypothesis is now proven. There is no reasonable doubt whatsoever, and the gainsayers are “noise” who were not at the trial. On 17th October, Eirian Powell, the neonatal unit manager, told the inquiry that there never had been any evidence showing Letby had harmed anyone. Letby the silent assassin was indeed a hypothesis, not a witnessed wrongdoer. No forensic evidence was ever produced against her. She was on duty more than other nurses as more experienced with neonates and keen to develop as a nurse, plus she was said to be saving for a house. On October 18th barristers, acting as if inquisitors in Seville, bullied Powell into saying what she clearly did not believe, that Letby was guilty, despite lack of evidence. The “inquiry” is anything but fair and rational. This inquiry will surely become a matter of shame for the legal profession in future years when Letby is finally exonerated, as seems to be becoming increasingly inevitable.
The hypothesis looks weaker and weaker by the day. The post-it notes of anguish have subsequently been found to have been written on the advice of a counsellor when she was being constantly pressed to admit guilt. This is not evidence of anything but a persecuted soul. She had taken home handover notes and shoved them under her bed, wrong but explicable in rushed world of nursing with paper put into pockets at the end of shift, certainly nothing to do with a cunning assassin’s behaviour. As the counter-evidence to the hypothesis grows, so does the determination of the establishment to prevent any further scrutiny of this case. They don’t want to hear ‘the noise’; the fall of this judicial temple is damaging to contemplate. Appeals have been denied.
The case is a standout example of confirmation bias: how do we pin this on Lucy? The case reversed the burden of proof, she ended up having to prove her innocence, and the mass of reasonable doubt was barely mentioned in the judge’s summing up. The jury itself was accused of having made its mind up before the trial began by a jury member. The judge let it carry on. He also ignored the excoriating condemnation of Dewi Evans’s expert testimony in another case by Lord Justice Jackson, damning it as worthless, one-sided and aimed at a particular result. Evans has subsequently been forced to admit he was wrong in embolism evidence over triplet baby R because Letby wasn’t present at the time, but for those up to their necks in this case his reputation seems invincible. The jury, uninformed and no doubt confused, seemingly did as it was told. The seething hatred of Letby in the media surrounding the case and both trials will have seeped through. The outcome of this theatre of the absurd, with all its flummery and stress on procedure over truth finding, is the scapegoating of a nurse to save the face of a unit and its doctors.
Dr. Timothy Bradshaw is a retired Lecturer in Theology at the University of Oxford.
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The BBC has another article on their webpage today (superseding the ‘BBC’s latest’ in the article above) that says, “New evidence seen by the BBC suggests more babies in Lucy Letby’s care were harmed – and in one case poisoned with insulin”. Why are the BBC so useless at challenging things these days?
Why are the BBC so useless at challenging things these days?
The BBC is the globalists’ captured creature (captured and corrupted), and what has happened as a consequence is that honest journalism no longer matters to it.
The Beeb have clearly been instructed to ramp up public feelings in support of a horrible, cruel and malevolent guilty verdict.
No surprises here.
They are Socialists. So obvious you may as well ask why the sky is up and not down.
If the BBC has seen new evidence, they should report it, not merely report having seen it. For the BBC consumer, it is no more than hearsay. If they are prevented from reporting it, they should say nothing. What happened to BBC Verify?
It was a rhetorical, tongue in cheek question.
Sounds sadly familiar to poor Sally Clark. Expert evidence and Judges….
https://evidencebasedjustice.exeter.ac.uk/case/sally-clarke/
Hopefully a much better outcome for Lucy Letby.
Totally off-topic but speaking of injustices, this is very tragic news indeed;
”A 61-year-old man who called asylum seekers “child killers” and shouted racist comments at police during a riot at a South Yorkshire hotel has died after reportedly taking his own life in a Doncaster prison.
Peter Lynch was jailed for two years and eight months earlier this year for his part in the disorder at the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers in August.
The court was told Lynch went to the a hotel with a placard which called police officers, MPs and the media “corrupt.”
https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/crime/grandad-jailed-over-asylum-seeker-hotel-riot-dies-in-doncaster-prison-4832145
Not sure what that does to somebody’s spirits who has never been in jail before or on the wrong side of the law and with Christmas just round the corner, being stuck inside. It would test anybody’s mental health. But factor in the knowledge that Starmer saw fit to let out actual criminals early just to make room for these patriots that feel strongly that Britain is fast going to the dogs, then there’s all the paedophiles escaping jail altogether…It’s unsurprising that some of those wrongly imprisoned are going to give up hope;
”Peter Lynch, a 61-year-old grandfather, recently passed away in HMP Moorland after being sentenced to two years and eight months for his involvement in a protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham During the protest, Lynch, who had no history of violence, was filmed shouting abuse at riot police. His remarks included accusing the police of protecting individuals who were killing and raping children. Although Lynch did not physically attack anyone, the court found that his actions incited others to behave violently. The protest resulted in numerous injuries to police officers and damage to property.
Lynch, suffering from several health issues, including diabetes, angina, and recent heart problems, was heavily criticized by the judge for setting a “disgraceful example” as a grandfather. His involvement was part of a broader disorder that saw over 20 men sentenced for their roles in violent protests.
Peter Lynch is no longer with us. He could no longer handle being un prison with the Muhammad’s of Rotherham. We all know what they did.
We need to hold the government accountable for their actions.
Enough is enough.”
https://x.com/10MarXmen/status/1848323676430643676
Just watched this ‘latest Panorama’ and underwhelming: the new insulin case involves a neonate suffering from a condition which makes the child produce insulin
congenital hyperinsulinism (CHI). The child recovered, so lousy poisoning technique from our assassin, again. Panorama did not revisit the reversed door swipe evidence etc
I’m not positive she is guilty or not guilty and there is the real point of this case: there is simply no evidence. I’ve followed all the DS coverage and I’ve read loads of other reports too. Every single piece of evidence I have seen is faulty.
For me one of the most startling things was that the Prosecution maintained there was only one door and it was monitored. they knew there was an un-monitored door and claimed it didn’t matter. Their main point of evidence was the number of times she was there on her own. That is absurd; there could have been a football crowd come in through the other door.
Absolutely nothing stands up from the disgusting standards of the unit to the deliberate omission of evidence. For all any of us know she may have done it but when the evidence is deliberately misused how can anyone be convicted?
In my view the most likely murderers are the NHS who allowed that dire mess of a hospital anywhere near patients.
As to the Admission of Guilt, words almost fail me. Anyone who ever had depression or has been accused of something they did not do (I have had both) it is a clear “I must have done if they all say I did” desperate plea. You are reading the words of a desperate mentally traumatised person not the confession of a serial killer.
Just like the “rioters” (= British Patriots protesting against mass immigration) were badly advised by their useless lawyers to plead guilty in order to get a lesser or suspended prison sentence.
Exactly. Just I have been pointing out to people who have been saying that Mr Lynch pled guilty, so he admitted that he was violent etc. How naive can someone be?
Excellent article by Timothy Bradshaw, and well done to David Davis.
When I first read about the case against Lucy Letby, I thought it was strange that no one was investigating the Ethnic Indian doctor Ravi Jayaram who first accused her, then gave contradictory evidence against her, and would have been held responsible for the deaths if he had not succeeded in deflecting all blame onto Lucy, since he was in charge of the unit.
‘The outcome of this theatre of the absurd, with all its flummery and stress on procedure over truth finding, is the scapegoating of a nurse to save the face of a unit and its doctors.’
Or is it to save the face of English criminal justice?
No direct evidence was brought against Nurse Letby. Babies died on the unit while she was on duty and while she was off duty, and continued to die after she left.
The rate of neonate deaths on her unit in 2016 and 2017, the years she was accused of the murders in, was 3 deaths per thousand live births. In the same 2 years, the NHS ‘comparator unit’ average, as Prof Fenton has shown, was 2 deaths per thousand live births. In statistical terms, that is not, again as Prof Fenton has shown, a significant difference.
The spike in neonate deaths at County of Chester in 2016 and 2017 was actually non existent.
Solicitors presenting Lucy Letby’s appeal asked for the parallels of the Angela Cannings case of 2004 to be considered. Judges Rafferty and Pitchers had in that case overturned the conviction of Angela Cannings for the murder of her infant son, and had said that repeated deaths (another infant of Angela Cannings had died a decade earlier) could not in themselves be considered evidence of crime.
Hearing Nurse Letby’s appeal, Judges Sharpe, Holroyde and Lambert did not agree. They applied the presumption of guilt based on repeated association, rather than clear-cut evidence, that Judges Rafferty and Pitchers had specifically warned would one day put an innocent woman in prison for life when she should not be there at all.
Somehow the original jury was directed that the sheer weight of circumstantial evidence of heinous multiple crime was damning.
Somehow the appeal court judges applied the same thinking.
Let’s keep shouting this from the rooftops. Could happen to any one of our wives, mothers, or sisters. Who’d be a nurse after this travesty?
It seems to me that the age old, and founding principal of the British justice system in that you are innocent until proven guilty has been sacrificed for some reason in this case.
Guilty until proven innocent. If CV19 taught us anything that must be that medical experts are few and far between yet most folk put vastly too much faith in their over ripe proclamations. I have more faith in a QuickFit fitter.
“The post-it notes of anguish have subsequently been found to have been written on the advice of a counsellor” WTF?! Incredible. So this never came out in court? Her defence team were c**p.