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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The wheels are grinding. I thought I ought to update the Medium readership on how this is done in our island home.
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How could it have happened? Sep 13, 2024
The official enquiry into how Lucy Letby was allowed to
maim and murder so many babies undetected has just opened.
The opening exchanges were given the full panoply the British state accords these solemn occasions. The judge, the courtroom, the learned counsel, the reason why the general public aren’t going to be allowed to watch proceedings as they proceed.
You can’t just come out and say, “It’s none of your business, this is state business, in this country it’s how we do business.” You have to provide a reason. The standard one about the vital importance of maintaining confidentiality won’t wash in these full disclosure times of ours. Now it is more likely to be the urgent desire not to add to the suffering of innocent victims by having everything broadcast live and in full for everyone to wallow in.
When, for example, the entire nation was transfixed and trembling on the brink because of the suicide of an Iraq weapons inspector we were told the enquiry could not be shown on TV because it might upset the widow. In the Lucy Letby enquiry, the presiding judge has told us it would add to the suffering of the babies’ parents. Their official legal representative at the enquiry spelled out why it was so necessary to keep us out of the loop
| “Everybody who recklessly promotes conspiracy theories, or parrots without questioning the same tired misconceptions about this case, should be ashamed of themselves.” |
I have to state an interest here, I am one of them. I had had no knowledge of the Letby case before the trial was over and the British media was free to air the gory details. After being alerted by a colleague to various professional issues arising from the case, I read one of these belated accounts of how the investigation into, and the conviction of, Lucy Letby had unfolded.
It was immediately (and I do mean immediately) obvious (and I do mean obvious) that Letby was innocent. I am an applied epistemologist who spends all day, every day, examining documents, artefacts, academic theories, bodies of knowledge of any kind, for evidence of fakery, forgery, false pleading, errors of any kind. So, yes, maybe pre-disposed, but it wasn’t difficult to spot the entire case against Letby was a classic rush to judgement.
There had been no murders though there had been gross hospital negligence leading to the unnecessary harming of many babies and the death of some of them. I wrote up my conclusions and published it, as it happens, right here on Medium.
I was, as far as I knew, a lone voice but that is generally the case and did not overly concern me. However soon — and it certainly had nothing to do with me — other people were expressing similar doubts. But also only giving vent to their opinions via the internet. It was, for all the world, just the usual nutters who get drawn to these sorts of things and who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
It took Private Eye, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and rapidly the MSM generally to turn the ‘Lucy Letby murders’ into a worldwide cause célèbre. They could not be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. But apparently they all are. Apparently we all are. Apparently I am. It is, I agree, thoroughly shaming.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mention of David Kelly's widow allows me a little toot on my own trumpet. When Lord Justice Hutton announced at the start of the 'public' enquiry into Kelly's death that he had decided the proceedings ought not to be televised out of feelings for Mrs Kelly, everyone nodded. "And quite right too. The poor woman."
I was the only person who immediately shrieked at the top of my voice--i.e. posted it up here--"Bollocks! Not only is one person's feelings irrelevant when we are dealing with a matter that might topple the government of this great nation, it is also presupposing what the enquiry was supposed to establish: whether it was suicide or not."
Although there were later grumblings in the MSM, this outrage is still not given the attention (or perhaps better, demands for the true explanation) it deserves.
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Grant
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I think Kelly is the only person dying in mysterious circumstances who wasn't given a proper coroner's inquest. It's happened before following accidents involving many fatalities like the Marchioness disaster, but never for an individual found dead in the way poor Kelly was.
I'm afraid the obvious explanation is that the Americans or Israelis offed him to ensure the war against Iraq wasn't derailed.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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If that's the obvious explanation I hate to think what the true one was.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is the last Letby story I posted up.
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There have been developments in the Lucy Letby case
Dec 17, 2024
At present Ms Letby is serving fourteen whole-life sentences in prison after being convicted in two separate trials of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others. She has appealed twice and been turned down twice. The developments are
(1) The chief prosecution expert witness, a Dr Dewi Evans, has changed his mind about the cause of death in the case of three of the victims (Babies P, C and I). They were not, he now says, killed by Letby injecting air into their nasogastric tubes but by Letby injecting air directly into the babies’ veins.
(2) A consultant neonatologist, Richard Taylor, has submitted a report that the death of another baby (Baby O) was actually caused by a medical error that led to a perforation of the baby’s liver.
(3) The defence team has convened a well-attended and widely-reported press conference to the effect that (1) and (2) are sufficient grounds to return the Letby convictions either to the Court of Appeal or to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Speaking as a lifelong observer of — and occasional commentator on — the vicissitudes of British justice, I doubt very much if any of this will lead anywhere. However I do think the defence team has missed a trick.
Under the British system, which tends to regard jury verdicts as sacrosanct, an appeal against conviction can only be sought if there are material new facts, facts not available to the jury at the time of trial. If the defence launch an appeal against a single conviction, say that of Baby P, nobody could possibly argue that the cause of death of Baby P being changed is not a material new fact.
| It doesn’t change anything but it is enough to get… listened to. |
Of course it makes no difference to Lucy Letby whether she is serving thirteen as opposed to fourteen whole-life sentences but it makes a great deal of difference to the British judicial system. They like things to be neat and tidy.
Nobody asked them to force everyone to undergo a second lengthy trial to make sure Ms Letby was serving fourteen as opposed to thirteen whole-life sentences so they would look foolish, vindictive even, if they refuse to the defence goose what they so enthusiastically granted to the prosecutory gander.
Once a set of judges — or a set of officials in the Ministry of Justice — are obliged to listen to arguments about the best way of murdering a single baby by air injection — NG-tube or needle in a vein — they may feel obliged to listen to the cacophony of doubts about how anyone murders any baby in any hospital.
I’m not saying it will work. In my judgement, it probably won’t. But at least geese versus ganders may be replaced by cats among pigeons.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A suitable note to finish on. I am quite proud of my work--and of the AEL's part--in the Letby case. We may not have made a scrap of difference but we were, unusually, not only on the right side but, I predict, the winning side.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Dee Winzar.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-55186711
The case has some similarities. Deborah was a senior ward sister at Kettering general hospital. she also cared for her partner, Nic McCarthy. Nic had been the victim of a serious motorcycle accident in 1984. He was left paralysed and he’d spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
Anyway, on the night of 30-31 January 1997, whilst Dee was away at friends (she had slept over after a drinks party), he had apparently collapsed and later died on 9th February. It was Dee that had raised the alarm from her work place the next day, as she had asked a friend to check on Nic. Anyway, a couple of post mortems and three years later. She was up for murder.
The case was that Dee poisoned him with insulin injection. This is again similar to Letby. Letby is alleged to have killed two babies by contaminating their feeding bags with insulin.Why are these nurses chosing insulin? Why choose a method that can be rectified by a glucose injection? Don't know, but you would have thought with their training, these nurses would be more proficient at medical murder. You then have the bizarre prosecution notion that, realising her error, Dee had attended her husband in hospital and tried to finish him off. More convoluted time lines.
Anyway Dee could not have done it beacuse she wasn't there, right, she was with friends? Wrong, the prosecution proved, much in the style of a Death in Paradise episode, that she could have sneaked out of her friends' house, gone back home, injected Nic, sneaked back to her friends again without being noticed, then set off for work the next day, to raise the alarm. She had deviously created the perfect alibi.
The prosecution mysteriously never found an injection mark on Nic. He was found in the exact position you would expect, with TV on, from someone that had lapsed into a coma (so she must have perfectly staged it as well). Professor Vincent Marks, a leading expert on hypoglycaemia, has written a book on cases of alleged insulin poisoning, https://www.amazon.com/Insulin-Murders-Vincent-Marks/dp/1853157600 he has devoted a chapter to Dee’s case.
Served her full time inside. Sill fighting to clear her name. It's properly explained here.
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2005/may/14/weekend7.weekend2
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The wonders never cease. Although I'm pleased to hear Deborah's are over, in that she's at least out and about. I'm not pleased I haven't heard of this one though. It should be left, right and centre. How did you come across it?
| senior ward sister at Kettering general hospital ... she also cared for her partner |
She shares two thing with Lucy Letby: (1) A long record of exemplary service in a caring profession and (2) A somewhat saintly character. Before losing it totally.
| she could have sneaked out of her friends' house, gone back home, injected Nic, sneaked back to her friends again without being noticed |
This reminded me of both Croydon and Chappaquiddick. There is, it seems, no such thing as a cast-iron alibi. The police can always demonstrate that a miscreant wasn't being monitored for every minute of the possible time-frame. There's always just time for them to slip out hoping nobody will notice. It's not a technique I would rely on since you can't know they won't. "Where's Mick?" "Slipped out to kill someone, I expect."
Although in the Middlesbrough babies' bottoms case, one of the babies was being monitored by nursing staff every minute of the night in question. So even that isn't enough.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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You might want to take a look at this review of Marks' book. I haven't had the chance to look at the other examples.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1925156/
Most fascinating is the recent case of Deborah Winzar, a nurse convicted in 2000 of murdering her husband by insulin injection, on the basis of a controversial immunoassay test and despite evidence of vomiting—a circumstance unheard of in insulin induced hypoglycaemia. Courageously casting doubt on the test he himself spearheaded, and indeed on the interpretation of his own colleagues who provided the critical result, Marks suggests that Winzar was wrongfully convicted.
Tellingly, with the benefit of 50 years' research on insulin measurement, Marks concludes that none of the available tests are sufficiently accurate on their own to provide a safe conviction of murder, unless backed by mass spectrometry. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Unfortunately I've got Letby fatigue. My mind is telling my brain, "You've done your bit, sonny." Or the other way round, but either way the die is cast. I can still roll along on the crest of a wave but only other people's.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Grant wrote: | | I think Kelly is the only person dying in mysterious circumstances who wasn't given a proper coroner's inquest. . |
Really?
For starters, I refer my honourable colleagues to the "suicide" of Willie McRae.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Lucy fatigue may also be a part of the "Nothing To See Here" response to a wider problem.
Which is:
| There are more… at least 9 other babies, but possibly 10 if you include Baby K, that died during this period that they haven’t been able to pin on Lucy. |
Not much mentioned?
| If, as they would lead, any more than 2 or 3 deaths on the unit was exceptional and warranted investigation why aren’t they looking for the causes for that other larger group of babies that died that ‘aren’t Lucy’? |
Which would raise a red flag of more systemic problems.
| Why can’t they possibly investigate or accept that whatever caused the other larger group to die that wasn’t Lucy, might also be a factor in the babies that died that they say are Lucy? |
Logical fallacy derangement syndrome?
And there's a septic elephant in the corner.
| And all that leaves aside the fact that there is more significant and direct (less circumstantial) evidence that bacterial sepsis and NEC was endemic in both the entire hospital and especially the neonatal unit. |
It just gets worse!
| Are we meant to ignore that, and the fact that many of these babies had signs and symptoms and commenced treatment for sepsis in the hours and days before they died? |
Yes, the hospital would prefer us to ignore that. It's so much easier to blame everything on one "rogue trader"
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Borry wrote: | I think Kelly is the only person dying in mysterious circumstances who wasn't given a proper coroner's inquest.
Really? For starters, I refer my honourable colleagues to the "suicide" of Willie McRae. |
With all these 'assisted (by the state) suicides' you have to ask yourself, 'Was it worth it?' Was it worth the candle to snuff out his candle. Self-induced wet jobs, as we in the intelligence community call them, are not easily covered up. We live in an open society, to our intense fury, and you have all manner of busybodies--from grieving relatives to Panorama--sniffing about. And sine die, if I may quote the motto of our Staged Obituary Section (SOS).
Willie McRae didn't even come close. Dr Kelly certainly did. Too much so. He disappeared off the other end of the scale. We knew we'd never hear the end of it when he took matters into his own hands. Forget coroners, official enquiries and tribunals would be queuing round the block.
It would have been better if we had done it. Then, you may be sure, no questions would have been asked. In fact that's always a good sign we've been at work. A conspiracy theory means we weren't involved.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Borry wrote: | | Lucy fatigue may also be a part of the "Nothing To See Here" response to a wider problem. Which is: There are more… at least 9 other babies, but possibly 10 if you include Baby K, that died during this period that they haven’t been able to pin on Lucy. Not much mentioned? |
News to me, certainly.
| If, as they would lead, any more than 2 or 3 deaths on the unit was exceptional and warranted investigation why aren’t they looking for the causes for that other larger group of babies that died that ‘aren’t Lucy’? Which would raise a red flag of more systemic problems. |
Not just Chester. Not just maternity units. The NHS.
| Why can’t they possibly investigate or accept that whatever caused the other larger group to die that wasn’t Lucy, might also be a factor in the babies that died that they say are Lucy? Logical fallacy derangement syndrome? |
Our phrase is 'careful ignoral'.
| And there's a septic elephant in the corner. And all that leaves aside the fact that there is more significant and direct (less circumstantial) evidence that bacterial sepsis and NEC was endemic in both the entire hospital and especially the neonatal unit. It just gets worse! Are we meant to ignore that, and the fact that many of these babies had signs and symptoms and commenced treatment for sepsis in the hours and days before they died? Yes, the hospital would prefer us to ignore that. It's so much easier to blame everything on one "rogue trader" |
I wouldn't call it 'easy'. I wouldn't even call it 'in extremis'. It is certainly not 'default'. But there are so many such occurrences in the NHS today we can be certain Bayesian statistics will dictate a nurse being thrown to the wolves from time to time.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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As you say, not easy.
It has not gone unnoticed.
| If the prosecution case is so air tight and rock solid… why are they doing everything they can to be as opaque and unwilling to broach any form of appeal or review? |
I imagine the DoH response.
| Oh God, not another enquiry | |
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