This might not be as unpopular an opinion as it was a few years ago, but here goes: Lucy Letby is not only 100% innocent, but none of the babies in her case were murdered at all, and instead died from natural causes associated with their grave medical states coupled with understaffing, mismanagement, poor ward hygiene, and some incompetence from well-meaning but undertrained staff. Absent the egomaniacal hallucinations of god-complex-having consultants who insist they know better than the pathologists who did the autopsies and found only poor care and serious illness and nothing suspicious, this would never have been brought to the police. In fact, when it was brought to them, they at first said “nah there’s nothing here” until the consultants in question really pushed them.

I finished 2 books on her case in the last week, Unmasking Lucy Letby (the more “on the fence” of the two books, written by two BBC correspondents) and Reasonable Doubt (this one is very much an advocacy book which is 100% on Letby’s side). I’ve also read the report from the international panel of experts (one of whom is an expert who wrote a paper in 1989 which the prosecution used against her, something said expert shot down as a complete misunderstanding of his work). Even the talk page of her Wikipedia article is worth parsing. The upshot of all that reading is this: the evidence against this woman is non-existent. It’s not just that the evidence is weak, but there is none. There is no evidence of malfeasance at all, let alone that of a serial killing nurse, and certainly not of Lucy Letby being that serial killer.

There are so many professionals and experts - not internet-based true crime conspiracist wankers who I have hitherto ignored - who are calling this a huge miscarriage of justice, and literally NO ONE is coming out in support of her conviction apart from the ones who brought the case in the first place. Like, you’d expect to get a lot more “well, not sure, but…” from neonatal doctors and statisticians and pathologists and psychologists and endocrinologists, but you don’t see that at all; every single expert in their respective field who has come out publicly about this case has been uniformly on the side of her complete innocence. That just doesn’t happen in cases where the evidence is in any way convincing. The same is true for her nursing colleagues; they all said they never saw her do shit, and in fact she was one of the best among them. They still maintain that view.

This might just be the worst miscarriage of justice I’ve ever seen, and I grew up with the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four & Maguire Seven ringing in my ears. At least in their cases, there was physical evidence used against them. It was bullshit and the science was flawed, but no one at the time knew that. Letby doesn’t even having shit science against her. The entire case is an outbreak of hysteria amongst 3 or 4 consultants who had personal beef with Letby because of complaints she posted about them to higher-ups which threatened their careers.

Confirmation bias + no understanding of even elementary statistics + “I’m fuckin’ Nancy Drew up in this bitch!” egomania from those consultants = this fucked up case.

I also think it’s repugnant what was done to the families of those dead children. The lunatics who built this case against Letby really took the unimaginable heartache and grief of the parents and told them “actually, no, it’s so much worse than you thought. That nice nurse who you thought was so caring and trustworthy? She offed your kid right under your nose.” Once Letby is exonerated and compensated (something I would happily stake my life on), those parents are gonna have to find a place for the new depths of suffering the news brings. Now they’re back to being the parents of a sick kid who died, and not members of a worldwide exclusive cohort of victims of a serial killer, a killer onto whom they had focused their anger and sadness for so many years but who is now shown to be innocent and irreversibly damaged because of the ordeal. I don’t know how many years of therapy will be needed to untie that particular Gordian knot of ambivalence. They deserve compensation as well. And the consultants who jury-rigged this bullshit case deserve prison, but at the very least they should be struck off the medical register. In fact, the only time they should be allowed within the grounds of a hospital ever again is when their corpses are wheeled into the morgue in 30 years.

COME AT ME.

P.S. I didn’t go into specific evidence and debunking of said evidence because it’s all covered in the aforementioned books and articles. I’m happy to regurgitate what I’ve read if you want to go toe-to-toe with me on it (e.g. “but what about the post-it note with her confession on it!” etc.), but it’s honestly better if you just read the material if you’re interested in the topic. I’m deferring to experts here, I myself don’t know shit about fuck. As I said, I’m not leaning on true crime sleuths or conspiracy theories or podcasts, I’m focusing only on expert opinion published by credentialed and recognised experts. Until I heard about such people and their opinions, I’d never given Letby’s guilt a second thought. I’m not a “truther”, and I would argue that the “truther” or the “conspiracist” in this particular case is the one who puts a woman in prison for life based on a 9/11 truther-style cherry-picking excursion, cherry-picking both “evidence” that fits their narrative and “experts” who are actually not experts in the fields they need to be for their expertise to matter. The non-truther position, in my opinion, is the one that sees scientific consensus on a given topic and defers to it. The consensus is very much on Letby’s side.