Isle of Wight Yellow
Level: Les Phillips
(224 Apps, 15 Gls)
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Innocent until found guilty, unless we’re not sure she’s guilty cos she can’t be because she looks so nice.
The murders happened when she was on shift, she wrote horrible rambling notes about how she’d done wrong and was found guilty at trial, on a thorough basis.
What evidence is needed for the conviction to be safe?
By any measure given out by those that want capital punishment she should hang……
Just to be clear "circumstantial evidence" is still evidence and more than sufficient to conviction. Many murders have little in the way of forensics or independent witness statements, but those responsible are still convicted due to circumstantial evidence, behavioural analysis or confessions. All of these existed in the Letby case which resulted in her conviction.
It’s always slightly shocking to me how little many people seem to know about the criminal and justice system, and blindly think that because someone is found guilty they are, and if some is found not guilty they definitely didn’t do it. As anyone who has worked closely with the police, CPS and court systems will know, this very much isn’t the case!
But to address the specific points in the posts quoted above:
1. There were other nurses on shift when those babies died. Other babies died in that same unit when she wasn’t on shift:
A staffing rota also showed she had been on duty for every suspicious death or collapse between June 2015 and June 2016. The rota was a key part of the case – a striking visual symbol of the case against her. But a number of statisticians have publicly questioned its usefulness. One is Peter Green, a professor of statistics and a former President of the Royal Statistical Society. "The chart appears to be very convincing, but there are a number of issues with it," he said. "A big thing is that it only describes 25 of the bad events which happened in this period. It doesn’t include any of the events that happened when Lucy was not on duty."
The prosecution purposefully left off deaths which happened when Letby wasn’t on shift to make it look like deaths only happened when she was on. That simply wasn’t the case. They also ignored the fact that she worked so much overtime that she was on more often than she wasn’t.
There are plenty of other neo-natal units in the country with high numbers of deaths. If you looked at every one I’m sure you’d find nurses who were on for most of them, as Lucy Letby was. Are they serial killers too?
2. There was absolutely no confession whatsoever. In some notes found she had written “I am evil I did this,” “I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough to care for them and I am a horrible evil person,” and “hate.” however these were apparently written on the advice of professionals as a way of dealing with extreme stress, and also included: “Not good enough”, “Why me?”, “I haven’t done anything wrong”, “Police investigation slander discrimination victimisation”.
Notes written by a person under extreme stress which also include ‘I haven’t done anything wrong’ in no way are the same as a confession - and confessions even in a police interview don’t have a huge amount of weight in UK law anyway. Pleading guilty is a different thing, although innocent people have been known to in order to receive the hefty sentencing discount.
Again, there are plenty of medical professionals who feel a huge amount of guilt when people under their care die. It doesn’t necessarily make them murderers.
3. Circumstantial evidence is a perfectly fine aspect of evidence in a criminal trial. However, it is, in my experience, rarely the only form of evidence - and usually it can actually be proved that the victims were in fact murdered. Again, the prosecution tried to twist this: ‘Phrases such as “the baby was really, really well” were given by the prosecution expert witnesses on several occasions for several of the babies. One senior doctor has said “And it was my view and is my view that they weren't really, really well, they had signs of significant illness.”
(Anyway, Mods feel free to move this into it’s own topic as it’s not really about disorder / protests / the death penalty)