This week Lucy Letby has been found guilty of trying to kill another baby after the jury voted the wrong way in her original trial.
The infant, known as Baby K, was born four months premature and weighed just 1.52lbs (692g) at birth.
It was alleged at trial that Letby dislodged the child's breathing tube around 2 hours after birth though no direct evidence was presented to prove that. Dr Ravi Jayaram claims to have walked in on her moments later, catching her "virtually red-handed”. The doctor said Letby was doing nothing to help the child as she fought for her life. An alarm on the baby’s monitor appeared to have been silenced, the court also heard.
The extremely premature infant died three days later with Letby initially charged with her murder, but this was later reduced to the charge of 'attempted murder' because of the lack of evidence.
However, In another bizarre twist to this case, the judge expressly told Jurors to take into consideration all the previous convictions secured against the former nurse. No judging each case on their own merits here, Letby’s ‘reputation’ as a serial killer somehow also becomes ‘evidence’ at her trial.
In a case that was just as flaky as the previous, Lucy Letby was charged with attempted murder because breathing apparatus wasn’t functioning correctly whilst she was on duty.
The supposed ‘eye witness’ Dr Ravi Jayaram didn’t actually see Letby sabotage it, or do anything for that matter, but the fact that she was in the room at the time as the apparatus wasn’t working became enough evidence to convict her.
Lucy Letby then remains a serial killer convicted without any hard evidence whatsoever, no CCTV, no DNA, no fingerprints, no eye witness, no confession, not even a modus operandi.
The entire case against Letby is based on the assumption of foul play, and as Letby was the only one working in the unit on (almost) all occasions a baby died, she must be the culprit.
It is worth remembering that there is STILL no hard evidence implicating Lucy Letby. There's hearsay, finger-pointing, character assassination, and the misuse of statistics but no actual evidence: No CCTV, no DNA, no fingerprints, no eye witness, no confession, not even a modus operandi. Letby, according to the prosecution, carried out at least seven murders, in broad daylight, in a hospital flooded with CCTV, and thousands of staff, doing each murder in a different way, using different weapons, without leaving a single trace for any of them. So good was she that the best criminal minds in the world couldn't actually find out how she did it.
The Lucia De Berk case
The Lucy Letby case has a striking similarity to that of Lucia De Berk’s, who like, Letby was a paediatric nurse convicted of murdering babies in her care entirely on the strength of staff rosters.
In 2003 Lucia de Berk was convicted of killing four babies and attempting to kill three more whilst working as a Paediatric Nurse and was sentenced to life imprisonment, for which no parole is possible under Dutch law. In 2004, after an appeal, she was convicted of seven murders and three attempted murders.
In some striking similarities to the Letby case, when babies began to die in greater than expected numbers in the hospitals where she worked, colleagues of de Berk’s started to notice that patients often died whilst she was on duty. Fingers were pointed at de Berk when a five-month-old baby died unexpectedly, only an hour after doctors had claimed that her condition was improving. A post-mortem on the child was claimed to indicate foul play.
Police investigators looked into all the deaths that had occurred between 1997 and 2001 while de Berk was working at three hospitals in The Hague: the Juliana Children's Hospital, the Red Cross Hospital, and the Leyenburg Hospital.
In a few cases, evidence of poisoning through tranquilizer overdose was found, although in most cases no firm explanations could be found for the deaths.
Lucia de Berk was charged with killing thirteen patients and attempting to kill five others by injecting them with tranquilizers, painkillers and potassium. The alleged victims included four babies, several toddlers and some elderly persons.
As with Lucy Letby, there was no hard evidence that she had murdered anyone; no cctv; no finger prints; no DNA; no eye witnesses, and no confession. De Berk’s ‘crime’ was being in those hospitals on the days those patients died.
In another parallel with the Letby case, prosecutors at the De Berk trial presented random notes in her diary as further evidence of her guilt. Diary entries, the prosecution asserted, showed that she was "obsessed by death”; a subjective statement passed into the record as if evidence of guilt. It was also noted that police had found books about crimes and murders in her home, such as Bad Blood: the Thanatos Syndrome Serial Murderer and Corpus Delicti: the 30 Most Notorious Crimes of the Low Countries. Again this was palmed-off as some type of evidence, the crime of… reading?
The prosecution argued that De Berk had killed, or attempted to kill, patients by unnecessarily increasing dosages of medicines, or giving large doses of drugs that are 'difficult to detect', something similar to what Lucy Letby was accused of. Here, the lack of evidence in itself becomes the evidence.
In Letby’s trial the judge claimed that the lack of similarities between murders was Letby cunningly covering her tracks, making both girls guilty until proven innocent at their trials with everything, even a lack of evidence, somehow confirming their guilt.
During the trial further evidence of De Berk's ‘guilt’ was for being able to spot crises quicker than her colleagues. One of the trial judges noted that the cases in question seemed to follow a particular pattern, saying: "Lucia says she believes she sees a problem and starts to alert colleagues and soon enough a crisis occurs, did you perhaps raise the alarm first so that you could then introduce death?"
The prosecutors had also claimed that de Berk’s love of Tarot Cards was another sign of guilt. So convinced were authorities that de Berk was a psychotic killer that they sent her for assessment which duly confirmed what they thought, the Psychologist testifying that de Berk was "theatrical, narcissistic, aggressive and suffering from a personality disorder”. Again, having these characteristics is not actually a crime, or proof of any wrongdoing.
The only real evidence in the de Berk case was the statistical analysis, but that too was based on the same faulty assumptions. In an almost identical way, Lucy Letby was convicted on the strength of the staff roster. Both de Berk and Letby were in the hospital on the days the babies died, and because the deaths were assumed to be murders they both became the only possible perpetrators.
However, in a 2003 television special of NOVA, a Dutch professor of criminal law, Theo de Roos, stated, "In the Lucia de B. case statistical evidence has been of enormous importance. I do not see how one could have come to a conviction without it".
Statistician Richard D. Gill became involved in the case in 2006.[2] Gill and Piet Groeneboom then showed that there was a chance of 1 in 25 that a nurse could experience a sequence of events of the same type as de Berk.[21][better source needed] Philip Dawid, Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, also criticised the prosecution's statistical evidence as unprofessional and resting on "calculations of a very simplistic nature, based on very simple and unrealistic assumptions".
In a 2007 Nature article by Mark Buchanan. He wrote:
The court needs to weigh up two different explanations: murder or coincidence. The argument that the deaths were unlikely to have occurred by chance (whether 1 in 48 or 1 in 342 million) is not that meaningful on its own — for instance, the probability that ten murders would occur in the same hospital might be even more unlikely. What matters is the relative likelihood of the two explanations. However, the court was given an estimate for only the first scenario.
In addition to these fundamental flaws in the analysis, concerns were raised about the data provided by one of the hospitals, which showed that de Berk was present at every single significant incident where reanimation (successful or not) was required. As a certain number of such cases are expected in all hospitals, there was reason to doubt the data provided, and later analysis after De Berk's acquittal showed that indeed, not all incidents were reported, and some cases attributed to her occurred when she was not present, had already left or was absent due to illness. This too has parallels with Lucy Letby's case in which one of the babies she has been convicted of murdering died after she had gone off shift. This was framed as Letby's cunningly throwing detectives off her scent, but in reality drives a coach and horses through the only piece of 'evidence' they actually had.
In the de Berk case it began to dawn on some that the entire thing was based on a faulty premise and that the trial was little more than a Witch Hunt.
At the initiative of Gill, a petition for a reopening of the de Berk case was started. On 2 November 2007, the signatures were presented to the Minister of Justice, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, and the State Secretary of Justice, Nebahat Albayrak. Over 1300 people signed the petition.
The case was re-opened and In December 2009, with new statistical analysis and medical evidence having been presented, the court accepted that the deaths had all been entirely natural.
There had been no murders, de Berk had been the victim of a Witch Hunt. All of the character analysis, innuendo, and pseudoscience presented in absence of any real evidence served to confirm the massive cognitive-bias of hospital managers and prosecutors.
Lucy Letby appears to have suffered the same fate. Like Lucia de Beck, Lucy Letby has been convicted of murder without any evidence. Like Lucia de Beck, Lucy Letby was 'guilty' because she was working on the days the deaths occurred, and, Like Lucia de Beck her accusers indulged in a ludicrous Witch Hunt where everything, including no evidence, became the evidence.
The only difference between these two cases is that Dutch authorities were smart enough to realise that this was a huge miscarriage of justice whereas Lucy Letby is set to languish in prison for the rest of her life.
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