Lucy Letby Part 9: Questions and (absent) Answers
Lucy Letby Part 9: Questions and (absent) Answers
A discussion with Prof Norman Fenton
Following on from our previous post here.
As I continue to read transcripts and investigate complicated issues such as how bacterial infections can cause an increase in both insulin and insulin resistance, I paused to have a discusion with Professor Norman Fenton1 regarding some of the many questions arising out of the prosecution and defence evidence and resulting verdict in the Lucy Letby trial - questions which defence counsel, the judge or the jury may have omitted to ask during the trial, or questions that were asked but which the prosecution case failed to answer.
Professor Fenton became interested in the case after seeing the various media versions of this chart that was presented to the jury by the prosecution:
He tweeted about this:
Other academics and scientists have raised concerns regarding the evidence, verdict and defence provided to Lucy in court, including Professor Richard Gill:
Richard is concerned that the errors in previous 'killer nurse' cases may have been repeated here.
Relevant to that, here is a video Professor Fenton made about the whole issue of the probability that the same nurse will be on duty during a series of unusual events (this was related to the Ben Geen case):
Another scientist has also documented a number of issues with the medical evidence in the case on the Science on Trial website.
My subscribers can continue to follow the LawHealthTech analysis as I resume reviewing the medical evidence, statements and transcripts presented in court here on Law, Health and Technology.
The next article in this series can be found here.
Prof. Fenton categorises me as having ‘qualified’ in nursing. When I completed the last units I undertook in my nursing studies, and as a result of both (a) the pressure that was still being brought to bear by many senior female nursing lecturers and matrons to push out male nurses and (b) my having seen in cases similar to Lucia De Berks’ how nurses can become the scapegoat when things go awry and how even after acquital or having their record expunged their lives remained destroyed, I moved sideways into computer science and health IT and never actually completed the final requirements to qualify and recieve a practicing certificate. Sadly, there may be a lot of young people reconsidering their nursing and midwifery studies as a result of the verdict in the Lucy Letby trial.
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It takes enormous courage to speak out on such a delicate matter when, as usual, the weight of popular opinion is dogmatically against you. Kudos to you both.
A reader of mine asked me to check this case out.
I'm still in the early days but what I've so far read leads me to believe that, had I been on the jury, I could not have come to a guilty verdict because, in my view, the case has not been established *beyond reasonable doubt*.
I don't know what they're trying to 'prove' with that attendance chart, but to put it rather crudely, they're picking cherries out of their ass! Of course you can get such a strong association if you *only* focus on the data that shows a strong association. Jeez - it's like Whitty and Vallance and their cherry picking of the covid data all over again.
The fact that this chart wasn't utterly demolished in court (and we'd need to see the *full* data in order to be able to establish anything like a correlation - and, except if your surname is Letby, remember that correlation does not equal causation) further enhances my suspicion that she had an extremely inadequate defence team.
The main piece of damning "evidence" appears to be the notes. They could be interpreted to be a confession, but equally (and probably more likely) they could be the doodlings of someone in extreme distress trying to jot things down to collect her thoughts. It's not like some carefully crafted 'journal' entry, is it?
I've written similar doodlings (although not about anything this serious) in which I've highlighted phrases I'm interested in - but don't necessarily agree with. Take the "I did it on purpose" doodle. Is she confessing, or is she writing something down that in the context of her thinking is "This is what they're saying about me"?
It could be that she is guilty as charged - but in my view that has not been at all well-established by the evidence I've so far seen. It does, as Richard Gill points out, seem to be a potential miscarriage of justice.