Recently issued scientific papers have shown that Richard Gill and Sarrita Adams were right to say that it was NOT certain that two babies had been poisoned with insulin.
Ron Winter retweeted
A big part of how Lucy Letby came to be seen as guilty wasn’t just the medical evidence - it was the way her character was systematically torn apart by the prosecution and rebuilt into something sinister. Normal, everyday behaviours were repeatedly presented as signs of hidden evil, and this must have had a huge influence on how the jury, and those attending court interpreted everything else about her.
Take the post it notes- instead of being understood as the desperate, self-blaming scribbles of an overwhelmed young woman, they were treated as confessions. The same happened with the parents’ impressions of her; they recalled things like Lucy was “always there” or “standing over them” or behaving strangely, but these testimonies were given years later, after they’d been informed Lucy was being investigated for murdering their baby. Understandably, with that knowledge, ordinary moments start to look sinister. But neonatal nurses often hover because they are checking monitors or just being diligent. Again the memory boxes were seen as strange but were standard practice at CoCH.
Her court room demeanour was used against her. Instead of understanding that her numb and emotionally shut down presentation is a typical response to overwhelming trauma and heavy meds, she was seen as callous and cold. Routine habits like keeping handover sheets or sympathy cards were made to look like creepy acts of a sinister serial killer.
All of this built the story of Lucy Letby as strange and dangerous, even though EVERY SINGLE point has a simple, harmless explanation. This all bears the hall marks of a modern day witch hunt where normal behaviour is reinterpreted as evidence of malevolence.
Ron Winter retweeted
Yes my concerns after 39 years of working in psychology was the presence of Dewi Evans, his defence of Southall and Meadow despite clear false evidence and proven miscarriages of justice and his use of the MSBP playbook. He was already known for negligence in Robbie Powell’s case and covering up not just his own but the negligence of others after Robbie died; engaging Southall style in collaboration with social services and the Police to remove children from mothers and even pursue them across the world with their assistance, as Southall did with Gosport social services when he pursued Suzanne McDonald nee Wilson to take her new baby through influencing Auckland social services. Evans managed to get local authorities in the U.K. and the US to collaborate to take Bonnie Lewis from her family and bring her back to the U.K. He had been negligent in that case too by missing the condition which caused illness then removing her when her parents sought second opinions.
When he was collaborating with the Police in Lucy’s case which he had inveigled himself into, he was also doing the same to Philip Peace.
Both Lucy and Philip are still in prison thanks to Dewi Evans moveable feast of false evidence influencing courts and juries.
The coalition Government really should have accepted the Law Commission’s recommendations after Clark and Cannings particularly in relation to ‘expert’ witnesses and Judge’s lack of knowledge in relation to science and medical issues.
Instead they didn’t take up the recommendations which would have prevented pseudoscience from gaining traction and innocent people being sent to prison for life.
Shame on them all. Including Thirlwall and the CCRC.
Ron Winter retweeted
...a multidisciplinary panel of other experts. His (Dewi Evans) conclusion of malfeasance leading to the multimillion pound investigation, prosecution and conviction of a single nurse (#LucyLetby) despite no objective evidence in support of her guilt.
Make it make sense! 😳
Ron Winter retweeted
A "Perjurers charter" an interesting and I suspect accurate description of the legislation that allowed several witnesses at the trial of Lucy Letby to be granted anonymity orders. Quote delivered third hand via the column of @ClarkeMicah
It is very telling that the Lucy Letby insulin tests didn't ring alarm bells.
Have I got this right? The STOCK bag given to baby L could not hv been spiked with insulin without it being obvious that the bag had been tampered with? This fact cd be firmly confirmed by further experimentation.
Before the trial, came the investigation.
It didn’t so much come off the rails as never found the rails in the first place – from inception seemingly focused on a single malevolent explanation for bad outcomes on an overstretched NHS neonatal unit. (2/4)
youtu.be/Y2Ed565aCm8
Fundamental question from Dr Dimitrova: Instead of asking "are these concerns true?", the system asks "how do we remove the person exposing those concerns and, ideally, punish them for having raised them?". #Lucyletby
Fascinating case exposing what was clearly an attempted (and luckily not successful) witch-hunt of a journalist @jgro_the, courtesy of @metpoliceuk. And how embarrassing for @Cambridge_Uni - who not only recruited someone without carrying out proper due diligence, but then doubled down on protecting him after the evidence emerged that showed he was clearly a complete fraud.
Just to point out the steps that make this a classical attempted witch-hunt:
1. An academic makes statements that a journalist begins scrutinising.
2. The journalist identifies what he believes are potential problems and starts asking questions.
3. Rather than examining those questions, the journalist finds himself referred to the police for harassment.
Now compare that with the Lucy Letby case (another classical - and successful - scapegoating case, aka a modern witch-hunt):
1. Multiple incidents exposing poor care occur at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
2. Letby submits DATIX reports, gets bullied as a consequence and files a grievance. She succeeds in that grievance.
3. The very people that were found to be bullying her (and who were responsible for the poor care the babies received) refer her to the police for a murder/attempted murder investigation.
Whether or not you have looked into the Letby case or not is almost beside the point. The striking similarity is the institutional response. In both cases, the focus moves completely away from examining the underlying concerns and towards examining the person who raised them.
Instead of asking "are these concerns true?", the system asks "how do we remove the person exposing those concerns and, ideally, punish them for having raised them?"
Once again, the classic techniques of scapegoating/ whistleblower retaliation - or, as I call it - modern-day witch-hunting. A phenomenon so well recognised within parts of the NHS that a hospital consultants' union has published an entire guide which describes the scapegoating tactics used against staff who ask uncomfortable questions:
hcsa.com/wp-content/upl…
I genuinely don't understand why more people aren't deeply alarmed that such a guide even has to exist.
And as for this happening with the world of academia? I'll say only this... Someone with my degree of curiosity who is fascinated by the many unanswered questions we have within neonatology has deliberately stayed away from a career in academic medicine. I shall say no more but curious me ought to ask one more question: @jgro_the - what do you think enabled you to come through this without a criminal conviction and still be able to expose what happened? There are a fair few people currently being witch-hunted within the NHS after speaking up on patient safety and I am sure they would welcome any advice.
@drphilhammond @PrivateEyeNews @thetimes @SpeechUnion @LucyLetbyTrials @PeterElston1 @ClarkeMicah @sarahknapton @DavidRoseUK @DavidDavisMP @Voice4theDead @MartynPitman @drcmday @alexander_minh
"This will ruin many, many careers." How far up into the hierarchy do you think this career ruining bloodbath will extend?
Unless facts supporting the verdict emerge soon, this can only be explained as a series of catastrophic systemic failures within:
—The NHS
—The Police
—The CPS
—The Crown Court and
—The Court of Appeal.
This will ruin many, many careers.
Who’d light that touchpaper, @VeraBaird?
Ron Winter retweeted
No insulin was missing
The test the prosecution used to allege insulin poisoning is known to be unreliable (high false positive rate) - they told the jury the opposite*
The means by which the prosecution linked Letby to the TPN bags had no evidence to support it - and would have worked to incriminate other nurses (probably half a dozen)
Oh... and in one of the cases the TPN bag was genuinely tamper proof - you have to snap off a piece of plastic to open it. Other nurses would have noticed this immediately. This issue was missed at trial - presumably because if you throw enough mud etc
*Post trial numerous experts have explained the unreliability of the tests and described their use in a criminal trial as reckless, dangerous etc. And since then new research has revealed the failure rate ie it happens enough to be explained by chance
PS - The very lab that did the tests also failed a quality control sample on this very test during the indictment period - with similar readings
"Must this defendant [Lucy Letby], like Mr. Malkinson and Mr. Sullivan before her, wait for decades?
Whose decision should that be?
Will they be held accountable for it?"
There have been a steady stream of tide-turnings in the Letby case. All have turned the same way.
—First were the statisticians: glib chat on the courthouse steps about “all the tiny arrows” representing Bayesian posteriors affirming guilt were swamped when it became clear that not only did the crown not perform any statistical analysis, but was actively warned off it by the CPS, but founded their case on unargued probabilities in any case.
—Then the journalists, curious to profile this apparently callous monster and surprised to find she was a diligent, popular, if somewhat mousy nurse, popular with colleagues, not given to antisocial behaviour of any kind, and fitting none of the usual stereotypes of a psychotic murderer;
—Then scientists and neonatologist, at the overt flimsiness of “expert” diagnoses, from limited medical records, of non-specific conditions as definitive evidence of murder, where not one of the ward specialists, pathologists, or coroners who’d had contemporaneous opportunities to examine the infants had noticed;
—Then lawyers, whose usual high-handed & blustery confidence in the integrity of the sainted criminal justice system came apart with the emergence of systematic disclosure failures, adverse rulings, and evidence of overwhelming confirmation bias;
—Then police veterans, whose assumption that Cheshire Police had followed established methods for murder investigations collided with the weird netherworld of Operation Hummingbird’s PR campaigns, press conferences, media training, and bizarre reluctance to do their jobs and pursue all avenues of enquiry (including the plainly obvious possibility that that these might not be murders at all)
—Then nurses, whose apparently telling refusal to speak up turned out to have been required by the NHS trust, but who all, without exception, told Thirlwall they had no concerns about Ms. Letby before her conviction;
—Then parents of children who had been on the COCH ward, with information about how they and their children were treated at the unit at the time in question.
—It makes you wonder who will be next: one of the Consultants, perhaps?
It also makes you wonder at what point does this mountain of, well, “tiny arrows” finally break the stubborn camel’s back, so that these convictions are finally referred back to the Court of Appeal for the full re-examination they so badly need.
Must this defendant, like Mr. Malkinson and Mr. Sullivan before her, wait for decades?
Whose decision should that be?
Will they be held accountable for it?
The #Lucyletby jurors should have been made aware that a single immunoassay, (as was used to persuade the jury that 2 babies were poisoned with insulin) would, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency, be insufficient to suspend a runner - a confirmatory test would be needed.
Ron Winter retweeted
Prospect's lead article - "We need to talk about Lucy Letby".....
It covers @CPMorris1234's new book "Reasonable Doubt", by the same publisher who published the Postmasters scandal book.
I wrote about Christopher Morris’s book as a tour of our bleakest national embarrassments, as well as an exposure of the cruelty of scapegoating. prospectmagazine.co.uk/cultu…
Ron Winter retweeted
We are devastated by the death of Elise Burns, a courageous, formidable and much-loved campaigner for assisted dying, who died in hospice with her mum and sister by her side on Wednesday 22 July.
Elise had secondary breast cancer that had spread to her lungs, liver and bones. In April she issued Peers a direct challenge on the final day of debate on the assisted dying bill:
“I would love Peers to look me in the eye and tell me why me and my friends, and anyone with terminal illness, don’t deserve to die with dignity and to have the choice to die as they choose, without pain.”
ALT Portrait of Elise Burns.
"Conclusion: High I/C ratios are not uncommon in NICU neonates and can be mechanistically explained by high-affinity insulin-binding activity rather than exogenous insulin administration."
Summary
Keywords
Another new peer-reviewed paper on the groundbreaking science central to the Lucy Letby case:
The Frontiers in Paediatrics’ paper shows a common, natural mechanism for the insulin test results used in the trial. (1/5)
frontiersin.org/journals/ped…
Ron Winter retweeted
This is an important point. Despite what they claimz most MPs silence on the Letby miscarriage of justice is not justified by the separation of powered. The exact opposite is the case.
open.substack.com/pub/peterh…
. @MattRodda Please read, and draw the attention of your fellow MPs to, Peter's article on "The Separation of Powers"
"The... purpose of separating powers is not to prevent but to facilitate intervention between different branches of the state when human rights are attacked."
'The separation of powers' is sometimes misunderstood to mean that politicians should look the other way when power is abused by the justice system, as with Lucy Letby. In fact, it should encourage intervention to check the abuse of power, as I explain: peterhayes572867.substack.co…
Ron Winter retweeted
The Prosecution was founded on claims that all these babies were stable and thriving until some unexpected or unexplained event.
But obstetric and maternity records will show all of these babies (and some of their mothers) had relevant medical histories before getting to the NNU.