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Convicted child killer Lucy Letby was told by a judge “she will be in court” for her sentencing after she previously refused to attend.

The 34-year-old was found guilty of attempting to kill a premature baby girl by dislodging her breathing tube while she worked a night shift at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit in February 2016.

Last August, Letby was convicted of the murders of seven babies and the attempted murder of six others between June 2015 and June 2016.

There’s some controversy concerning this case as a whole. Has there been, perhaps, a misunderstanding about statistics on the part of the prosecution?

In his closing speech to the jury, Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, said: “Lucy Letby is an extraordinary person, not in a good way. She has murdered seven children and also tried to murder six. Thirteen separate children.

“And you now have to consider whether she also tried to murder [Baby K]. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the shocking and dreadful context of this case.”

As the prosecution here used those earlier convictions that unease isn’t going to go away just yet, is it?

13 thoughts on “Hmm”

  1. Apart from the statistical evidence, there is also the witness statement:

    Consultant paediatrician Dr Ravi Jayaram told the jury he saw Letby standing beside the infant’s incubator doing nothing as her blood oxygen levels fell to life-threatening levels. An alarm that should have been sounding was silent.

    After the baby recovered, her tube was displaced two more times that night, the prosecution said, alleging Letby had tried to make it appear like the infant habitually displaced it herself.

    That’s quite a leap. Seems plausible that the infant had actually displaced the tube; or that Letby was incompetent and hadn’t attached the tube securely in the first place; or that she was tired from working many shifts (she regularly took on extra shifts as she lived in on-site accommodation and was saving up to buy a home of her own). Either way, it’s barely enough evidence for manslaughter; let alone murder.

    As for the statistics, nobody asked the obvious question: did the rate of baby deaths drop when Lucy Letby was assigned admin tasks?

  2. Wasn’t there some talk that a leaking sewer pipe in the baby unit could have been causing the rise in deaths, through infections? Which coincidentally was then fixed around the time she was taken off the unit?

  3. The issue of whether a baby could repeatedly dislodge a tube raises an obvious question regarding the use of technical experts in court. As does the statistics issue regarding the likelihood of so many deaths.

    Should we bring in a couple of “super experts” and let them duke it out with quick-minded non-experts in the form of barristers? Should we conduct a poll of randomly-selected experts, asking them to comment on a hypothetical situation which is abstracted from the actual case and the results fed back to the court? Or should we leave the jurors to flail around in a welter of “common sense” and prejudices?

  4. Letby is a creature previously unknown to psychiatry. Both a neurotic and a psychopath.
    Also a first: a serial killer using many different methods to kill. Even Dr Harold Shipman, a real expert, used only one.

  5. There are echoes of the shaken baby cases from the 1990s, a heavy reliance on numbers which are not well understood by the declared experts let alone the wider public.

  6. I doubt this is actually how it was argued, but here’s a way you could reasonably make use of the prior conviction.

    *If* the prior conviction had demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that Letby was a baby murderer, e.g. by showing a) babies died from clear human intervention (injection of artificial insulin, etc) and b) Letby was the only person who had access to the babies and drugs at the relevant time…

    Then *if* for this additional baby, you can similarly show human cause of death, and Letby had appropriate access, then you need not show that she was the only one who could have caused death, because the odds of having two baby killer nurses attending to the same child are (hopefully) infinitesimal.

    As I said, I doubt it was argued like this, but that’s how you could do it IMHO

  7. I remember a flawed case where the argument was: first baby unexpectedly died, that’s a 1:1million chance, second baby died unexpectedly, two dying is a 1million x 1million chance, MUST BE MURDER!!!!

    Sigh. If your body spawns one faulty child, it’s *MORE* likely to spawn a second faulty child. It’s actually something like 1:1thousand that you have two babbies die unexpectedly.

  8. @Andrew M – “Seems plausible that the infant had actually displaced the tube; or that Letby was incompetent and hadn’t attached the tube securely in the first place; or that she was tired from working many shifts”

    The infant might have displaced it the first time, but then morphine was administered, making it pretty unlikely that it should be repeated. Letby probably did not perform the intubation (though the news reports are not clear) since she was not supposed to be caring for this infant – she was supposed to be caring for two different infants. And it does seem a pretty large coincidence that on three occasions when the two nurses who were responsible for caring for Baby K were both absent, Letby just happened to check just at the point where the tube had been dislodged by the baby was not yet dead. The reports do not explain why the alarm never sounded, but it seems to be implied that this would have required it to be deliberately disabled.

    Letby’s evidence that she does not remember what happened was probably considered highly suspicious by the jury. It certainly seems very odd that a nurse who saved a baby’s life three times in one night would have no memory of it – especially if there were defective alarms or she had to act because the two nurses who were supposed to be caring for Baby K were absent. However, it is entirely consistent with her being guilty and not wanting to be specific in case an invented story could be disproved.

    – “did the rate of baby deaths drop when Lucy Letby was assigned admin tasks?”

    That may help answer the question of whether she was mudering babies in general, but for any one specific death it could have been a coincidence.

    The problem with trying to assess guilt from media reports of trials is that you only get a very brief summary containing what journalists think is the most important parts. The jury hears far more, so is in a better position to decide.

  9. The Pedant-General

    “The problem with trying to assess guilt from media reports of trials is that you only get a very brief summary containing what journalists think is the most important parts. The jury hears far more, so is in a better position to decide.”

    This. The MSM narrative can be wildly at odds with the actual information being thrashed out in court. See Kyle Rittenhouse for example. The reporting was entirely, directly, completely and almost universally in direct opposition to what was actually happening in court – thank the lord that it was being streamed live so we could see what had actually happened rather than what had been reported (or not as was equally as importantly the case).

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