Simon Davies

Letby maternity unit faces closure telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/11…

'Well and Stable.' 3 very simple words But words that were fundamentally critical in securing the conviction of #LucyLetby for multiple murders / attempted murders. But was it true in the context of the indictment babies? My interest in this case was initially 'piqued' due..

Here is how the circularity goes: The original set of collapses, each taken individually did not have enough evidence to support a conviction or, really, even a suspicion of malice: each was a common enough collapse in an underperforming hospital. (This is why none were treated as suspicious at the time). Once the Consultants had alighted on the theory that Ms. Letby was causing the collapses—for which they admitted they had no direct evidence at all—they knew they needed to “pique”—quote Dr. Jayaram—the police’s interest, so they went trawling the records looking for more non-resolved incidents where Ms. Letby was on duty. Sure enough, they found some, naturally with nothing about them implicating Ms. Letby—and used these to bolster the “probability” that original set of charges were no accident. Linking them with the original charges in turn increased the ostensible probability that the new charges were “also” malicious. Mr. Justice Goss specifically instructed the jury they could draw inferences in this way, to shore up deficiencies in the evidence for particular charges: this is the famous “cross-admissibility” point. Mr. Justice Goss said: “... you are entitled to consider how likely it is that other babies in the case who suffered unexpected collapses did so as a result of some unexplained or natural cause rather than as a consequence of some deliberate harmful act by someone. If you conclude that this is unlikely then you could, if you think it right, treat the evidence of that event and any others which you find were a consequence of a deliberate harmful act as supporting evidence in the cases of other babies and that the defendant was the person responsible.” Unfortunately, this ushers in a variety of the “Texas Sharpshooter” fallacy. In order to demonstrate this, the Defence sought disclosure of the police’s investigation and charge selection methodology. The Prosecution opposed, and the Court dismissed the Defence’s application. The Defence was effectively barred from presenting the Texas Sharpshooter theory in Court, because it does not address any of the charged events themselves, but rather the meta-theory by which they were selected, which the court considered was irrelevant. This is just one of a series of striking asymmetries the Defence were obliged to labour under.

🚨New update to the Lucy Letby Innocence website. The transcripts page and documents have had a big overhaul! 1. There are now html versions of every transcript document, each one with clickable Contents at the top and its own search function. 2. Search button - click on this to search all transcripts for specific words or phrases, with optional filtering on on text in the transcript titles. This should make the transcripts a lot easier to navigate and use compared with the plain pdf files. lucyletbyinnocence.com/trans…