Lucy Letby - innocent?

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mudman

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The background noise that there has been a huge miscarriage of justice and Lucy Letby is innocent is becoming a clamour.

Press conference by a panel of leading neonatal experts stating every baby death in this desperately sad case can be explained as either natural or medical negligence in a failing baby unit.
 
It's an unsettling case, whatever the truth of it turns out to be, on many levels.
A good reminder of why we don't have the death penalty. Had I been a juror, I think I'd have been very likely indeed to find her guilty.
Also, yet another example of how alarmingly badly managed the NHS is - that it was apparently not possible to find out with any degree of accuracy what had actually been going on.
I think I'd rather see the management of the unit, and the hospital thoroughly examined in court. Whether Letby committed murder or not, there was an excessive number of deaths and the people responsible appear to have been unable or unwilling to provide a full and accurate account of what happened and why.
Letby seems something of a scapegoat whatever her guilt.
 
Until you've been involved in either a defence or a prosecution you have no idea how our British adversarial system of justice sees prosecutors cherry pick which information that gets presented to the jury and how evidence that is "inconvenient" to a guilty verdict is not.

The defence ought to pick this up but the tactic then of the prosecution is the "shotgun" approach. That is bring as many charges together as one single case. As shooting folk we should understand the analogy well enough.

Prosecute but one charge at a time (but similar alleged offences) is like firing a single bullet at a target. You might miss. Fire another shot (as in then prosecute as a separate case on another charge) and you might miss again. And so one one "shot" by "one" shot.

Prosecute on all the charges at once (all similar offences) is like firing a shotgun. There's so much lead being sent downrange all at once that you are bound to hit, and the more lead the more hits. As the jury thinks there's so much all the same that it has to be true.

I think if she had been prosecuted one charge at a time then likely she would...one charge at a time...have walked free. But as others say there will always truly be doubt because there were so many charges. Which is why the "shotgun" approach is used by the prosecution.

Is it "justice" or merely, to now mix my metaphors, a verdict achieved by the tactic of slinging enough mud so that some will always be bound to stick?
 
From what I have read and heard there is considerable as to the safety of the conviction.

Our whole system of justice is based on “beyond reasonable doubt”, and there is definitely “reasonable doubt” in this case and its need to reexamined.

I rather suspect there is much much more going and Letby is the scape goat that was put forward to cover it up.
 
The SD members will decide where the blame lies.
Ken.
That's a fair Comment to some degree, we do not know all the information, the real question is whether the court was provided with all the evidence relevant?

IMHO it is reasonable to ask if that was the case or not, as @enfieldspares highlighted, there is a duty of disclosure placed upon parties involved, and at least in my limited experience of such matters, disclosure is often not complete.

FWIW as part of my work i act as an expert witness for both civil and criminal matters, so i am not a lawyer or a police officer, but have some understanding if what disclosure means, and it is not always 'managed' properly.

The end restful is that when 'new' evidence comes to light subsequently it turns out the prosecutors knew of the relevant evidence but failed to disclose it.

I have no idea whether Letby is guilty or not, but it is reasonable to ask the questions in light of what is taking place currently imho.
 
I would not like to be the one who says who guilt or innocence lies but the question that I would like answering is "Why did these expert witnesses not come forward earlier when there was so much being said about the trial while it was happening"! It strikes me as a little odd that this panel of experts have just come forward!
Having said that I for one am not prepared to be the "judge, jury and executioner" as I have very little faith in the British judiciary system!
 
This has been rumbling on for months in Private Eye...... The defence had not thought to call other "expert" witnesses or challenge the prosecution "expert" witnesses with sufficient rigour.
One of the main issues seems to have been the Unit was accepting critically ill neonates that they weren't sufficiently experienced or staffed for. After all the Letby investigations, critically ill babies were moved to more experienced units and lo and behold the death rates went back to the normal level.....
I do fear that this is the medical establishment finding a scapegoat to cover up for more deep seated issues regards staffing and capability......I'm sure there is much more to come out in this tragic case.
 
I am not sure we will ever get a definitive answer she did lose at court and then at appeal but that could also be a reflection of the quality of her defence team. The “ Experts” coming out recently are tending to use medical probability and stats to explain an alternative reason for the deaths. The part of the case that seems very damming is the notes by her found in her house handwritten

 
This has been rumbling on for months in Private Eye...... The defence had not thought to call other "expert" witnesses or challenge the prosecution "expert" witnesses with sufficient rigour.
One of the main issues seems to have been the Unit was accepting critically ill neonates that they weren't sufficiently experienced or staffed for. After all the Letby investigations, critically ill babies were moved to more experienced units and lo and behold the death rates went back to the normal level.....
I do fear that this is the medical establishment finding a scapegoat to cover up for more deep seated issues regards staffing and capability......I'm sure there is much more to come out in this tragic case.
I have to agree! From what I understand and have heard on the news this "panel of world experts" that have come forward are now saying that the babies that died did not in fact die from the causes that were given at the time of the trial! How and why did the "experts" (At the time) get things so wrong?
 
I would not like to be the one who says who guilt or innocence lies but the question that I would like answering is "Why did these expert witnesses not come forward earlier when there was so much being said about the trial while it was happening"! It strikes me as a little odd that this panel of experts have just come forward!
Having said that I for one am not prepared to be the "judge, jury and executioner" as I have very little faith in the British judiciary system!
1st appointing experts is not a matter.of right. An application has to be made to the court who determine how many and what sort of experts the parties can instruct. In a murder case I doubt there were any significant restrictions, but it's not a free for all.

Once an expert is instructed if the instructing party wishes to change or get additional experts the court has to agree.

This is to avoid shopping around for the expert most favourable opinions.

It's also worth saying that experts owe their primary duty to the court and not the instructing party, their role is to aid the court understand the matters within their expertise.

Experts generally in my experience do try to fulfill that primary role. Those who don't get.critiscised formally by the court and risk not getting get further work.
 
As a student in Leeds in the 1970s we used to go and attend trials (just like any other members of the public can...so we got no special access). One of the three I remember still was of Stefan Kiszko. SD members can use Google. On the evidence presented he was clearly guilty. Yet of course later on...

I have been, mostly, against the death penalty ever after the truth came out but what I have now always strongly felt for is this. If you lie under oath either as a normal witness or as an expert witness (or are selective in your testimony your give) then the full force of the law should fall upon you.

Poor Kiszko would never see any of those who gave false or misleading account brought to book. So the ever present thread of British justice is that if a witness effectively lies and a person is wrongly convicted that witness is never themselves in subsequent peril of their own liberty for their own misconduct.
 
The part of the case that seems very damming is the notes by her found in her house
I agree. But can they really be taken as a written confession as the prosecution seemed to have done? I'm no legal expert so I really don't know. I seem to remember reading they were part of an exercise she was given while undergoing counselling for stress 🤔

Personally, I believe she's innocent and is the victim of bad timing, circumstantial evidence, and selective evidence produced by the prosecution. I hope I'm right.
 
This was one of the other two cases that I saw. I remember the evidence about the poor lad's blood vessels in his eyes and the judge saying that if they were burst or not showed if he had been throttled or if he had been killed (these were the words of the judge) by a James Bond type karate chop to the neck. Vagal inhibition versus petechiae being present in the eyes.


The other was a woman who stabbed her husband in the kitchen and although, I think, was convicted of manslaughter was sentenced by the judge to probation as he believed it to have been unintended and accidental. That he had crept up behind her, so the story was told, to surprise her and she had turned around and stabbed him with one, single, fatal thrust.
 
Amazing, 14 babies commit suicide and the nurse who was responsible for their care gets found guilty of murder, obviously a miscarriage of justice.
 
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