All I will say is that if this is your first time hearing about this case, I encourage you to read some other articles about it as well. I think, especially when it comes to criminal convictions,...
All I will say is that if this is your first time hearing about this case, I encourage you to read some other articles about it as well. I think, especially when it comes to criminal convictions, it is always important to consider all possibilities and in that regard this article plays an important role in raising important questions. However, her conviction did not rest solely on the statistical evidence presented above. And it was not based on accusations of a single doctor. Even the wikipedia page for this case documents much additional testimony that, at the very least, makes Letby a very suspicious person in this case:
After Child A's death, the parents had spent the day with Child B in the nursery with her, but were persuaded to go and rest before the baby's sudden crash. Tests later showed loops of gas-filled bowel in the child. As a result, it was later concluded that the baby had been injected with air. Letby had fed the baby 25 minutes before her collapse and the child had the same unusual rash on her skin as first seen on Child A hours earlier, indicating that she had also been injected with air.
A few days later, Child C, a boy in good condition, died. He suddenly collapsed as soon as another nurse left the nursery. Despite not being the designated nurse for the child, Letby was witnessed standing over his monitor as his alarm sounded when the other nurse came back in. Letby's shift leader had already told her to focus on her designated patient and the shift leader later testified that she had to keep pulling her away from the family room as Child C died.
The child survived and a blood test later revealed that he had been given an "extremely high" amount of exogenous pharmaceutical insulin, which he had never needed. Later, at trial, Letby did not contest that the baby had been intentionally injected with insulin, suggesting someone else must have done it. Letby searched for the parents of Child E and F on social media in the following weeks and months, and for other parents who were not part of the case.
On 7 September 2015, Child G, on her 100th day of being alive, collapsed for the first of three times in the following three weeks. After the first collapse, the baby girl was taken to Arrowe Park Hospital, but five days later she collapsed again, 15 minutes after Letby had been feeding her. [....] It was later discovered that Letby had deliberately altered the baby's temperature on her observation chart to make it seem like she was already unwell before she collapsed, and also falsified the time of the baby's collapse to make it seem like it coincided with when a colleague gave the baby a milk feed.
When the child initially became unwell, another nurse suggested he be moved to nursery 1 where the sickest children were treated, but Letby disagreed and the baby subsequently collapsed less than two hours later. He recovered, but suffered two further collapses and died almost exactly three hours later. The lead consultant noted that the child "should have responded better" to resuscitation. X-rays on a post-mortem showed he had an abnormal amount of gas in his body and liver damage that an independent pathologist later ruled had resulted from an "impact injury" similar to what would be seen in a car crash. 13 minutes after Child O's death, Letby was feeding his triplet brother Child P, who also was expected to be able to soon go home, but he collapsed after his diaphragm was somehow shattered. Doctors believed he would make a full recovery. As they prepared him to go to another hospital, Letby said: "He's not leaving here alive, is he?". The boy soon died.
It was also revealed during the trial that Letby had to be told more than once not to enter a room where the parents of one of the victims were grieving. Letby said, "It's always me when it happens."
A key piece of evidence was also given by a consultant who recounted that in February 2016 he had walked in and seen Letby standing over a baby and watching when they seemed to have stopped breathing. Letby was not doing anything despite the baby desaturating. When he asked her what was going on, she responded that he had only then just started declining. This baby went on to survive their collapse. By this stage all seven of the paediatrician consultants who worked on the neonatal ward agreed something was seriously wrong in the department.
A paediatrician testified that he and other clinicians had previously raised concerns about Letby, but were told by hospital administration that they "should not really be saying such things" and "not to make a fuss." Another doctor testified that Letby commented an hour before one victim died, "He's not leaving here alive, is he?
Letby was the only staff member on duty for every one of the 25 suspicious incidents. After her removal from duty, and the downgrade of the unit, to concentrate on lower risk babies, no further incidents were deemed suspicious. Importantly, it was discovered that Letby had falsified patient records, covering her tracks by changing the times some babies collapsed to make sure she could not be placed at the scene.
The above are just a small selection of excerpts from the wiki. I'm not trying to relitigate this case or anything. Like I said, I think articles like the linked on play an important role. That being said I just want to highlight that her conviction was heavily based on witness testimony linking her to many of the deaths, forensic reports consistent with foul play (air being injected into these infants while under her care), and her own suspicious behavior such as altering medical records. Obviously draw your own conclusions, but this does not seem so obviously as "witch hunt" to me.
Thank you for your comment. I hope I didn't give the impression that I was favoring one side over the other. As I said, I was and still am completely ignorant of the case. The article has a clear...
Thank you for your comment. I hope I didn't give the impression that I was favoring one side over the other. As I said, I was and still am completely ignorant of the case. The article has a clear bias in favor of Letby and I cannot judge it on its merits alone but given that it's the New Yorker, I don't doubt that it's been fact checked thoroughly as far as what's been put on print. As for what kind of omissions the article has, I have absolutely no idea.
I'm not necessarily interested in whether she did it or not. The UK has a court system and far better, informed minds than I have judged and will judge again the evidence. I find it a bit strange in general too, this compulsive behavior toward treating the pain actual people are going through as if it's a series. What I found fascinating about the whole thing was the investigation process, as well workings of the courts and all the other externalities around it and how each of them can affect one another.
Oh to be clear I was not targeting you specifically, just providing more context in general. I definitely agree with the latter part of your comment as well.
Oh to be clear I was not targeting you specifically, just providing more context in general. I definitely agree with the latter part of your comment as well.
I didn't feel like you were, no worries :) I kind of used your comment to write what I should've written in my original comment, which is that if you're only getting familiarized with the case...
I didn't feel like you were, no worries :)
I kind of used your comment to write what I should've written in my original comment, which is that if you're only getting familiarized with the case after reading this article alone, take things with a grain of salt before coming to a conclusion. I get that it can be exciting in a twisted way to see how well established and trusted institutions can fuck someone's life up this badly, despite having many laws and procedures to prevent exactly that, but there's clearly more here than meets the eye.
The whole thing is a witch hunt. Textbook witchhunt. Some doctor decided, completely without any medical evidence whatsoever, that "she did it, she had to have done it, she's the one." Again, no...
The whole thing is a witch hunt. Textbook witchhunt.
Some doctor decided, completely without any medical evidence whatsoever, that "she did it, she had to have done it, she's the one." Again, no evidence. No bruising, no witnesses who saw her do anything (or not do something that she should have been doing), no findings in her belongings or house, no injuries to her or the infants, nothing. No evidence.
Just a huge string of people that all track back to that one asshole doctor who decided "it has to be her." A doctor who ran around the hospital, and then later the case, repeating "it had to be her."
Somehow, this jackass gaslit not just his department, not just his hospital, not just his regional medical area's roster, but a police department, and the assigned courts.
No evidence.
I don't care how many kids died. I really don't. It's not that I'm unsympathetic, it's just that you need evidence to convict someone. Period. It's not complicated.
If you're convinced she's the one, even if you have no evidence, then you can have her reassigned. I might even agree to stand idly by as you conduct some sort of political campaign to run her out of medicine. After all, she can get another job, find another way to live her life. Yes it would suck to be innocent and railroaded out of your career, but it's just a job.
Not life in prison.
One jackass decided it has to be her, and has succeeded in destroying her life. With no evidence.
I wonder why I have such a hard time putting any faith in government or authority? What could it be? Hmm.... Oh, I know. Power corrupts. But absolute power is kinda neat, so long as you're the one with it.
One jackass went looking for power, and it turned out he had enough to destroy someone and even get applauded for doing it.
We had pretty much this exact thing happen in the Netherlands and it turned into a giant scandall. A nurse working the premature baby unit was found guilty of killing the babies, when it was a...
We had pretty much this exact thing happen in the Netherlands and it turned into a giant scandall. A nurse working the premature baby unit was found guilty of killing the babies, when it was a complete coincidence these babies died.
She was literally convicted partially because she enjoyed reading true crime stories. Yes, really.
The woman is named Lucia de B. (we do not name defendants or convicts by their last name for privacy, I know her full name is listed in the link but I'm uncomfortable regardless), and its considered one of the most shameful cases in Dutch history.
Incredibly sad to see history repeat itself with our oversees neighbours :(
(Archived link) I had no prior knowledge of anything mentioned in this long article but having read it, it's fascinating. Equally as fascinating is people's responses to it online. I've read lots...
I had no prior knowledge of anything mentioned in this long article but having read it, it's fascinating. Equally as fascinating is people's responses to it online. I've read lots of comments about how much this article proves their priors one way or the other, strongly so, but I've also seen some about the NHS and the way media and courts works in the UK. (Not surprising though, given the article itself is somewhat about all of this.) Apparently the article is not even accessible in the UK because of contempt of court laws.
Some quotes (I made some clarifications within brackets):
The police consulted with an endocrinologist, who said that the babies theoretically could have received insulin through their I.V. bags. Evans said that, with the insulin cases, “at last one could find some kind of smoking gun.” But there was a problem: the blood sample for the first baby had been taken ten hours after Letby had left the hospital; any insulin delivered by her would no longer be detectable, especially since the tube for the first I.V. bag had fallen out of place, which meant that the baby had to be given a new one. To connect Letby to the insulin, one would have to believe that she had managed to inject insulin into a bag that a different nurse had randomly chosen from the unit’s refrigerator.
Burkhard Schafer, a law professor at the University of Edinburgh who studies the intersection of law and science, said that it appeared as if the Letby prosecution had “learned the wrong lessons from previous miscarriages of justice.” Instead of making sure that its statistical figures were accurate, the prosecution seems to have ignored statistics. “Looking for a responsible human—this is what the police are good at,” Schafer told me. “What is not in the police’s remit is finding a systemic problem in an organization like the National Health Service, after decades of underfunding, where you have overworked people cutting little corners with very vulnerable babies who are already in a risk category. It is much more satisfying to say there was a bad person, there was a criminal, than to deal with the outcome of government policy.”
Schafer said that he became concerned about the case when he saw the diagram of suspicious events with the line of X’s under Letby’s name. He thought that it should have spanned a longer period of time and included all the deaths on the unit, not just the ones in the indictment. The diagram appeared to be a product of the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy,” a common mistake in statistical reasoning which occurs when researchers have access to a large amount of data but focus on a smaller subset that fits a hypothesis. The term comes from the fable of a marksman who fires a gun multiple times at the side of a barn. Then he draws a bull’s-eye around the cluster where the most bullets landed.
Dewi Evans, the retired pediatrician, told me that he had picked which medical episodes rose to the level of “suspicious events.” When I asked what his criteria were, he said, “Unexpected, precipitous, anything that is out of the usual—something with which you are not familiar.” For one baby, the distinction between suspicious and not suspicious largely came down to how to define projectile vomiting.
Letby’s defense team said that it had found at least two other incidents that seemed to meet the same criteria of suspiciousness as the twenty-four on the diagram. But they happened when Letby wasn’t on duty. Evans identified events that may have been left out, too. He told me that, after Letby’s first arrest, he was given another batch of medical records to review, and that he had notified the police of twenty-five more cases that he thought the police should investigate. He didn’t know if Letby was present for them, and they didn’t end up being on the diagram, either. If some of these twenty-seven cases had been represented, the row of X’s under Letby’s name might have been much less compelling. (The Cheshire police and the prosecution did not respond to a request for comment, citing the court order.)
Within a week [after the trial], the Cheshire police announced that they had made an hour-long documentary film about the case with “exclusive access to the investigation team,” produced by its communications department. Fourteen members of Operation Hummingbird spoke about the investigation, accompanied by an emotional soundtrack. A few days later, the Times of London reported that a major British production company, competing against at least six studios, had won access to the police and the prosecutors to make a documentary, which potentially would be distributed by Netflix. Soon afterward, the Cheshire police revealed that they had launched an investigation into whether the Countess was guilty of “corporate manslaughter.” The police also said that they were reviewing the records of four thousand babies who had been treated on units where Letby had worked in her career, to see if she had harmed other children.
Several months into the trial, Myers [Letby's barrister] asked Judge Goss to strike evidence given by Evans and to stop him from returning to the witness box, but the request was denied. Myers had learned that a month before, in a different case, a judge on the Court of Appeal had described a medical report written by Evans as “worthless.” “No court would have accepted a report of this quality,” the judge had concluded. “The report has the hallmarks of an exercise in working out an explanation” and “ends with tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside Dr. Evans’ professional competence.” The judge also wrote that Evans “either knows what his professional colleagues have concluded and disregards it or he has not taken steps to inform himself of their views. Either approach amounts to a breach of proper professional conduct.” (Evans said that he disagreed with the judgment.)
For what it's worth, I can confirm that it's inaccessible from the UK. Oddly, it shows something which looks like a 404 page, which was a bit confusing.
For what it's worth, I can confirm that it's inaccessible from the UK. Oddly, it shows something which looks like a 404 page, which was a bit confusing.
All I will say is that if this is your first time hearing about this case, I encourage you to read some other articles about it as well. I think, especially when it comes to criminal convictions, it is always important to consider all possibilities and in that regard this article plays an important role in raising important questions. However, her conviction did not rest solely on the statistical evidence presented above. And it was not based on accusations of a single doctor. Even the wikipedia page for this case documents much additional testimony that, at the very least, makes Letby a very suspicious person in this case:
The above are just a small selection of excerpts from the wiki. I'm not trying to relitigate this case or anything. Like I said, I think articles like the linked on play an important role. That being said I just want to highlight that her conviction was heavily based on witness testimony linking her to many of the deaths, forensic reports consistent with foul play (air being injected into these infants while under her care), and her own suspicious behavior such as altering medical records. Obviously draw your own conclusions, but this does not seem so obviously as "witch hunt" to me.
Thank you for your comment. I hope I didn't give the impression that I was favoring one side over the other. As I said, I was and still am completely ignorant of the case. The article has a clear bias in favor of Letby and I cannot judge it on its merits alone but given that it's the New Yorker, I don't doubt that it's been fact checked thoroughly as far as what's been put on print. As for what kind of omissions the article has, I have absolutely no idea.
I'm not necessarily interested in whether she did it or not. The UK has a court system and far better, informed minds than I have judged and will judge again the evidence. I find it a bit strange in general too, this compulsive behavior toward treating the pain actual people are going through as if it's a series. What I found fascinating about the whole thing was the investigation process, as well workings of the courts and all the other externalities around it and how each of them can affect one another.
Oh to be clear I was not targeting you specifically, just providing more context in general. I definitely agree with the latter part of your comment as well.
I didn't feel like you were, no worries :)
I kind of used your comment to write what I should've written in my original comment, which is that if you're only getting familiarized with the case after reading this article alone, take things with a grain of salt before coming to a conclusion. I get that it can be exciting in a twisted way to see how well established and trusted institutions can fuck someone's life up this badly, despite having many laws and procedures to prevent exactly that, but there's clearly more here than meets the eye.
The whole thing is a witch hunt. Textbook witchhunt.
Some doctor decided, completely without any medical evidence whatsoever, that "she did it, she had to have done it, she's the one." Again, no evidence. No bruising, no witnesses who saw her do anything (or not do something that she should have been doing), no findings in her belongings or house, no injuries to her or the infants, nothing. No evidence.
Just a huge string of people that all track back to that one asshole doctor who decided "it has to be her." A doctor who ran around the hospital, and then later the case, repeating "it had to be her."
Somehow, this jackass gaslit not just his department, not just his hospital, not just his regional medical area's roster, but a police department, and the assigned courts.
No evidence.
I don't care how many kids died. I really don't. It's not that I'm unsympathetic, it's just that you need evidence to convict someone. Period. It's not complicated.
If you're convinced she's the one, even if you have no evidence, then you can have her reassigned. I might even agree to stand idly by as you conduct some sort of political campaign to run her out of medicine. After all, she can get another job, find another way to live her life. Yes it would suck to be innocent and railroaded out of your career, but it's just a job.
Not life in prison.
One jackass decided it has to be her, and has succeeded in destroying her life. With no evidence.
I wonder why I have such a hard time putting any faith in government or authority? What could it be? Hmm.... Oh, I know. Power corrupts. But absolute power is kinda neat, so long as you're the one with it.
One jackass went looking for power, and it turned out he had enough to destroy someone and even get applauded for doing it.
We had pretty much this exact thing happen in the Netherlands and it turned into a giant scandall. A nurse working the premature baby unit was found guilty of killing the babies, when it was a complete coincidence these babies died.
She was literally convicted partially because she enjoyed reading true crime stories. Yes, really.
The woman is named Lucia de B. (we do not name defendants or convicts by their last name for privacy, I know her full name is listed in the link but I'm uncomfortable regardless), and its considered one of the most shameful cases in Dutch history.
Incredibly sad to see history repeat itself with our oversees neighbours :(
(Archived link)
I had no prior knowledge of anything mentioned in this long article but having read it, it's fascinating. Equally as fascinating is people's responses to it online. I've read lots of comments about how much this article proves their priors one way or the other, strongly so, but I've also seen some about the NHS and the way media and courts works in the UK. (Not surprising though, given the article itself is somewhat about all of this.) Apparently the article is not even accessible in the UK because of contempt of court laws.
Some quotes (I made some clarifications within brackets):
For what it's worth, I can confirm that it's inaccessible from the UK. Oddly, it shows something which looks like a 404 page, which was a bit confusing.