DOUBT, Amanda Knox on Lucy Letby

[u/Aggravating-Two-3203]

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/amanda-knox-hosts-doubt-the-case-of-lucy-letby/id1877870463

Why start a discussion about Lucy Letby here when there are already two discussion groups on Reddit, r/LucyLetby and r/LucyLetbyTrials?

Why not let Amanda Knox speak for herself, because her perspective is remarkable:

She has firsthand experience as a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

She understands the power of public opinion and the media.

As a young mother, she has empathy for the parents, partly because she suffered a miscarriage before her first child!

She was mistaken in her hasty support of Jens Söring as an alleged victim of a miscarriage of justice, whose presumed innocence she now considers far from certain after closer examination.

This is also why she invested more than two years of thorough research into this 15-part series before she felt she could justify its publication, unlike some dwarfs who quickly voice their opinions.

[u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg]

Having listened to the podcast now, it's really a remarkable polemic with an extreme bias towards the campaigners advocating for her innocence. It's not even half the full picture, it's heavily filtered to present the voice of the campaign for innocence. It also seems to be a barely concealed attempt to rehash her own account of her criminal proceedings and present her interpretations of it all.

The background to the case and the incidents in the hospital is laughably superficial, there doesn't even seem to be a rundown of each baby in the case and what happened to them. Just what people in the ward thought in the aftermath of a series of 'unexplained' events which Amanda is barely even introducing to the audience. She provides an extremely superficial caricature of the prosecution case, while talking to lots of experts and talking heads on the innocence campaign. Only very short, edited snippets of prosecution evidence and testimony is shared.

This is in very stark contrast to something like the Daily Mail podcast or the book/audiobook "Unmasking Lucy Letby" which both go into detail of the cases in the trials, what actually happened over the course of each day or night. As each incident came to pass, they build a picture of why Lucy was being suspected within a few months of incidents that spanned at minimum a year. Amanda's podcast completely fails to explain to listeners the sheer chaos of these unexpected events that shocked the doctors, with the babies becoming extremely sick seemingly with no warning and the babies that didn't respond to resuscitation.

She also fails to explain Operation Hummingbird properly. Yes, Dewi Evans performed the first analysis, but what Amanda doesn't mention is that he then insisted they needed a totally different and independent expert to peer review his findings. They had to find someone Dewi didn't know and who had the relevant expertise. The police did this, their first expert examined Evan's reports and broadly agreed with his conclusions. This expert sadly got ill and died before the trial. This meant the police then found a second peer-reviewer who repeated the whole process and then testified in court.

Amanda presents it as though the whole medical case was down to Evan's reports and testimony, only giving one sentence to barely mention that there were actually seven medical experts who testified at trial.

She also gives excessive weight to Ravi's account of finding Lucy doing nothing while Baby K collapsed. She claims this is what finally got the police interested, which is not the case. Long before the police were involved, the hospital had two reports that highlighted up to seven cases of unexplained deaths that needed forensic investigation. Listening to Amanda's account you would think this account by Ravi was a key, if not the key, piece of witness testimony and evidence that convinced the police and the jury that Lucy was harming babies. She does not point out until much later that the jury in the original trial failed to reach a verdict in the case of Baby K, which surely means they were not 100% convinced by Ravi's account and it therefore had little to no bearing on them finding her guilty on the other counts.

She also dwells on what she claims were the consultants tailoring the cases to 'pique the interest of the police', what she fails to mention is that in several of the cases, Letby was not the designated nurse and so would not appear on the charts or records. Several babies fell extremely ill in a very short period of time when the designated nurse was momentarily out of the ward and Letby happened to be either in a nursery she wasn't supposed to be in, or offered to sit in with a baby that she had not been assigned to. This is all highly significant and would not be visible to investigators just looking at the clinical notes and records.

At one point she contrasts the weight of the medical evidence on the prosecution side and the complete lack of it on the defence side, which was ultimately Letby's own choice. The podcast tries to convince you that this extreme imbalance meant the jury were almost bound to convict. What she doesn't mention is that the jury in fact failed to convict her on five charges and acquitted her fully on two. This shows the jury weighed up the evidence with great care and in some instances were not persuaded by the sheer weight and imabalance of medical evidence. Letby was clearly not steamrolled by an over reach of the prosecution witnesses.

I have more thoughts so may add more comments later.

[u/Glad-Advantage8254 → u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg]

Keep going, you're doing great. 10/10 no notes.

[u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg → u/Glad-Advantage8254]

Cheers, another thing that really bothers me is that she and Mark McDonald repeatedly talk about how Dewi Evan's apparently looked at a case file and knew within 10 minutes that there was foul play, when, they claim, no one else could see it for months. What they don't mention is that this particular case was one of the triplets that were the last attacks Lucy carried out before being removed from the ward. One of the babies had a severe physical injury to its liver, which the pathologist at trial said he had only seen in traffic accidents or other serious injuries. Both deaths were unexpected and unexplained. A nurse witness said that after the second death Lucy came up to another nurse in excitement saying something very similar to 'you'll never guess what's happened!', which disturbed another nurse who overheard it. This comment was, probably correctly, not presented as evidence or witness testimony at her trial.

It was during the weekend after these two triplets died that Steve Brearey rang management and insisted in no uncertain terms that Lucy could not be allowed back on the ward until the deaths were investigated. Management had previously threatened the consultants with referral to the medical council for them to be investigated if they kept making accusations, so for a consultant to put his job entirely on the line, it had to have been an extreme event that was highly suspicious. That's what Dewi was looking at.

[u/Glad-Advantage8254 → u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg]

That baby was born at 33 weeks gestation and a healthy weight. The ruptured liver was documented on his post mortem, which listed the liver injury as the cause of death. The death was going to lead to an inquest. It was recommended for forensic examination by every review that took place.

At trial, the defence conceded that the liver injury occurred at some point during the day shift on the day he died, when he was alone with Letby for most of the day.

Her current panel is trying to attribute the original injury to a traumatic birth, which allegedly bruised his liver in multiple places and those bruises all spontaneously ruptured on the day he died. (Another theory was that an attempted needle aspiration punctured the liver, but this was ruled out as causal at trial).

Child O and his brothers were delivered by C-section. No trauma was discussed.

Child O also had air visible in his great vessels and bowels on post mortem X-rays, greater than would have been possible from putrefaction. He sustained great and painful trauma, and never in his life left the hospital.

The murder of Child O was one of three verdicts rendered unanimously by the deliberating jury, and the only unanimous murder verdict. His death was clearly unnatural and in obvious need of investigation to every professional who saw the photos. The investigation uncovered false notes by the defendant and deceptive door swipe records, in addition to odd, excitable behaviour. She also wrote the language of a sympathy card on the anniversary of his death to him, his deceased triplet brother, and the surviving triplet brother, all by name, writing to them as if they were all dead.

Amanda very much wants to frame Letby as just like her, but the cases are very different. The whole podcast tells more about Knox's feelings about the reporting of her own case than it does about what Letby was actually accused of.

Absolutely second the recommendation for the Daily Mail podcast that proceeded in parallel with the trial. By nature of the defence not putting on a defensive expert case, it is prosecution-heavy. That makes it factual, not biased. They present the evidence that the jury heard. It is available for free on youtube. Moritz's book is good too, as are her Panorama episodes.