Dan Wootton Outspoken - WHY LUCY LETBY HAS BEEN SUBJECTED TO ONE OF BIGGEST MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE IN BRITISH HISTORY

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

A special edition of the show. For four years Dan has stayed silent on the horrific case of the deaths of multiple babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital. But today he declares: “I am now convinced that Lucy Letby has been subjected to one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history.” Then he gets expert analysis from Professor Norman Fenton, a mathematician at Queen Mary University of London, and Dr Scott McLachlan, a lecturer in digital technologies for health at Kings College London in the Division of Digital Health and Applied Technology Assessment within the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care. In addition to his PhD in computer science, he has extensive training in law and nursing and has forensic knowledge of the Letby case.  While many have raised concerns about the evidence following her most recent conviction, this pair of expert were raising legitimate concerns about the case against Letby before the end of the first trial. One of their chief concerns is that evidence that should have been heard, was not, potentially leading to a flawed guilty verdict. As a result of this special edition, there will be no Uncancelled Aftershow today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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guilty. The police were potentially already concerned about the value of this statistical evidence. The statistical value of the chart is pretty much zero. You could take any nurse and build a similar chart which looks exactly like that if you only look at the deaths which occurred when those people were on duty. And this is why it's so easy to wrongly convict a nurse if the whole establishment comes down

looking for you to be the easy person to blame. When you look at the babies in the LEPI trial, you've got babies who were born as early as 27 weeks gestation. The babies were nowhere near as stable and healthy and strong as was presented during the trial. No spin, no bias, no censorship. I'm Dan Wooten. This is Outspoken, episode number 81. And please click to subscribe to this brand new independent news source. Turn on the notification bell so you'll be alerted to our brand new live shows, uncancelled interviews and special royal episodes. And today, a special edition of the show.

For four years I have stayed silent on the horrific case of the deaths of multiple babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital. I admit that shamefully, like most of the country, I bought into the concept that Lucy Lettbee was who the MSM portrayed her as, Nurse Death, or the Angel of Death. But for the past 18 months, I have been studiously and quietly studying the evidence in the case and the circumstances around it. And I am now convinced that Lucy Lettbee has been subjected to one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history. Indeed, Sir David Davis, a former Conservative cabinet minister of whom I have a lot of respect, now says there is a 90% chance Lettby is not guilty. Was it a miscarriage of justice? Have you met with her yet?

No, I haven't met with her. I mean, I'm not worried about it. And people ask, would I meet with her? I said yes if she wants to but I'm not going to make a judgment of her innocence or guilt by looking at her and saying you know are you guilty. I'm judging on the evidence. I spent three months going through the evidence. And where are you now? Guilty or not guilty? I think most likely, you can't be certain, but most likely, like 90 odd percent, not guilty. The most likely reason is one of two things. Either poor management of the hospital, the Royal College found that, or a superbug, Pseudomonas, an investigation found that, all both together.

That's much more likely. So is it time then to retry Lucy Letby? Yeah, I don't want to declare her innocent. I want a retrial. Do it properly. Okay. So today, I believe it is important to open the floor to Professor Norman Fenton,

a mathematician at Queen Mary University of London, and Dr Scott McLaughlin. While many have raised concerns about the evidence following her most recent conviction, this pair of experts were raising legitimate concerns about the case against Lutlepi before the end of the first trial. One of their chief concerns is that evidence that should have been heard was not potentially leading to a flawed guilty verdict. As a result of this special edition of the show, there will be no uncancelled after show today,

but it will be back next week via our own website, www.outspoken.live. That is our safe space, free of censorship. Your support at just £5 a month not only gives you 30 minutes of extra content, it allows me to continue making this independent daily news show. But now, let's go! Lucy Letbee was sent to prison for the rest of her life when I was working in the mainstream media. Questioning the case within the Daily Mail website or on my GB News show was not something

considered palatable, even after the verdict. So I kept silent, determined to research the case further, knowing deep down that something wasn't right. That feeling grew after seeing the back seat over here. I'll run that until I get the seat. Okay, just take a seat in there for me, Lucy. I'll move that seat forward a bit. I've just had knee surgery. Oh, right, okay. Not to mention the broken woman in the police interview, who all her friends and most of her nursing colleagues had rallied around. Did you have any concerns that there was a rise in the mortality rate? Yes.

OK, so tell me about that. What concerns did you have? I think we don't just notice as a team in general and this and stuff that this was a rise compared to previous years. I remember having one discussion in the newsroom at GB News with my fellow presenter Michelle Dubry who admitted to me that she was 100% certain Letby was innocent. Did she say anything on air about it though? Of course not. However when Letby refused to show up for her sentencing Michelle did suggest her arms should be strapped so that she could be forced to hear the victim impact statements.

Other presenters on that channel advocated for her to receive the death penalty. I'd strung her up. I know absolutely no problems with doing it whatsoever. I think actually the only problem will be how slowly we could do it in my book. This is the most disgusting crime. I'll tell you who else needs to be strung up

in my book as well. It's the people who worked at the hospital in positions of power who covered this thing up. They had numerous doctors coming to them saying, we think that this woman is killing babies. And what happened? They protected her, they made them go and apologise to her, they made them go and have mediation meetings with her,

they put her back on the ward. When they took her off the ward, then they put her in a position of safety. It's an absolute disgrace. Babies die because they were too afraid of someone going to HR Now, over the past year, I've personally researched the case, becoming increasingly horrified by The Week about the complete lack of evidence. Yes, that's right. Many of you will be shocked by that. Letby was convicted of seven

murders and seven attempted murders of babies in intensive care during 2005 to 2016 without anything at all evidential or solid linking her to any of the crimes. Indeed, none of the autopsies suggested foul play in any of the deaths either. But Lucy Letme never had a chance. The mainstream media had declared her guilty, christening her angel of death and nurse death long before she faced a single jury member. So she was convicted in the court of public opinion largely because of a note that she had written seeming to suggest that she was guilty. In fact, that note was part of screeds of phrases she had written on the advice of councillors. That includes the famous line that totally changed public perception,

I am evil, I did this. Now, disturbingly, the jury was told to take those words literally, but in the same notes that her councillors had advised her to write, let be also said, not good enough, why me, I haven't done anything wrong, police investigation slander, discrimination, victimization. And that's far from the end of the new evidence. There was sewage seeping into the ward. The CPS has admitted the swipe card data was wrong. Experts were not called to give evidence on Letby's behalf. No one saw Letby do a single thing, certainly not harm a baby. There is no CCTV, there is no DNA evidence.

The way she was accused of killing the babies by inserting oxygen into their blood would have been particularly difficult to implement, even for a medical professional. There is no evidence that Lucy Letby ever researched such a difficult method of murder. The list goes on. And as soon as the new health secretary, Wes Streeting, started scolding those who were questioning what is, in my opinion, a very obvious miscarriage of justice, I became even more concerned. Now, of course, and I really do appreciate this,

this is a horrific moment for the family members of the dead babies, some of whom have had to sit through two emotionally devastating trials already. But I think they would be more horrified to realize a completely innocent woman has been set up as some sort of perfect diversion. Because when the establishment wants silence around an issue, that's when I have learned there is even more reason to shine a light on it. I appreciate that some of you may be angry with me for talking about this subject, but keeping quiet is no longer an option. I've taken my time to be sure of the facts of the case before going public. It is not a knee-jerk decision and it is one I have

thought seriously about. By the way, I'm not the first. I'm not claiming to be. The contrarian journalist Peter Hitchens has been campaigning for LEPI for some time. So too has a woman I respect greatly, the former health minister and more importantly nurse Nadine Dorries. Well, as you said, I'm a former nurse and I was also the minister responsible for maternity and neonatal care for two years. I was the minister who called for the inquiry into East Kent hospitals because of which discovered at one point when I left 200 unexplained neonatal deaths. And so I have first hand experience at how a culture can develop in a hospital and how easily things can go wrong. And we know from the Countess of Chester Hospital, which had launched its own independent inquiry into the high number of deaths before Lucy Letby was charged, that there were some very serious problems on the unit, including outbreaks of infection,

including poor culture, bad practices, a shortage of consultants, junior doctors, reluctant, not asking for help with serious cases. So we knew there was a problem on the unit already. And having spent three months immersing himself in the evidence, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister, Sir David Davis, now believes there is a 90% chance Letby is not guilty. So Letby is locked up for the rest of her life she's serving 15 whole life sentences based on circumstantial evidence that was at least in part misrepresented at her trial in my view this woman deserves an urgent retrial because in a few years time i have no doubt that this will be considered a very, very serious

miscarriage of justice. And now it's time for the uncancelled interview. And today I am delighted to welcome in the two men best placed to comment on this case. Norman Fenton is a mathematician at Queen Mary University of London whose own interests in the case focus on the probability of coincidences and clusters. And Dr Scott McLaughlin is a lecturer in digital technologies for health at King's College London in the division of digital health and applied technology assessment within the faculty of nursing, midwifery and palliative care. In addition to his PhD in computer science, he has extensive training in law and nursing and has a forensic knowledge of this case. So I'm sure you agree that those are qualifications

that speak for themselves. Thank you so much both for being here scott how do you feel about my summation of what's happened with lucy let me i i i think you're you're you're on the money um the the fact is that the more that even even back in sort of 2019 2020 the, the more that Ms. Letby was being held out as some sort of, you know, villain or, you know, Harold Shipman-esque type clinician, the more it seemed that there needed to be some serious consideration of what was going to be presented at that point in court. And indeed, as we saw during the trial, there needed to be more analysis of what was presented. Norman, what about you? There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and

water to drink. And of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Well, although some people have denied it, it is a fact that this case was originally driven by evidence of statistical coincidences. about the sequence of supposedly unusual events at which Lucy Letby was present and the total number of deaths that occurred in the period that she was working. We've done extensive analysis of all of the relevant data and I can point to the problems that were never really raised during the trial that indicate that the statistics should never have been used to drive this case.

Interestingly enough, what we've also found out quite recently is that the police were clearly anxious, were clearly interested in these statistical coincidences. The fact that she was apparently, I mean it was originally driven by the fact that there was a death which was considered to be unusual, which Lucy Letby was at. And then they started to look at other deaths and other unusual incidents, collapses or events at which Lucy Letby was present. And this is all this has happened quite often in previous so-called killer nurse, killer nurses cases where they were eventually overturned. There was a case of Lucia de Burke in Holland. There's another

ongoing case with Ben Gein here. But these so-called sequences are not at all unusual. And just for example, I'll give you a very simple example. If you imagine that you see somebody tossing a coin 10 times and it comes up heads each time, the instinctive belief is to assume that that person is cheating somehow. Well, there's a one in just over 10, one in just over a thousand probability that actually you would have got 10 heads in 10 tosses purely by chance. And if you actually saw, but if you saw 10,000 people tossing a coin 10 times, then actually it's almost certain there's actually over a 99.994% certainty that at least one person of those will have tossed the coin 10 heads 10 times and actually you'd probably almost certain you're you're greater than 50 certain to see at least 10 people do it so these people have a completely um misunderstood complete misunderstanding of the nature of these

probabilistic coincidences and the police certainly had that misunderstanding when they started to compile this list of apparently a sequence of events that Lucy Letby was there for. But it was incomplete information. They didn't take account of the fact that they were only looking at the events that Lucy Letby was present for and not other events where she wasn't present for and not at other events where she wasn't present for. So if you take any nurse or any clinician and look at all the events which they are present for and then produce a chart of all the other nurses, you'd see exactly the same thing that you saw with the Lucy Letby chart, which was so prominent and which so influenced the jury, which is you'd get this apparent sequence where they were present, all of them, whereas the others weren't present for many of them. That's that's just you know, it's just one of the examples of the statistical issues which was never properly investigated. And just one thing, I mean, there are already concerned about the value of this statistical evidence. And we now understand that they actually contracted a statistician, someone I know very well, Jane Hutton at Warwick University, to do a proper statistical analysis of this data.

But as far as we understand now, that never actually happened. She never actually did the statistical analysis because they presumably never followed through on that. And that's something else which is extremely concerning. Scott, what's your view on the chart? Because as Norman says, it really did become for the jury in the case, probably the most compelling piece of evidence, this graph showing Lucy Lettby present on the ward when the babies died. Well, you've got a series of interesting what in mathematics we call confounders with that chart. The first of which being that Lucy was regularly picking up extra shifts.

So of all of the nursing staff on that unit, she was the one that was most likely to be called in or to volunteer to work extra shifts when they were down a nurse. The second confounder is the fact that there was only, to the best of our knowledge from the information from the second trial and from the third wall inquiry, there were only two remaining neonatology trained nurses on the unit, of which Letby was one of them. So of course, again, when you've got a situation where you've got these very, very premature neonates, the first nurse that you're going to want to make sure that's on the unit somewhere is one of your two neonatology trained nurses. You've also got the fact that they had, we know both from the

previous RC-PCH report and from the evidence that's come out in the third wall inquiry that there were only a very very small number of permanent full-time staff on the unit that a lot of the other staff were either student nurses who were being brought in and trained so they were band fives or they were agency nurses or whether it be external agency or an internal agency to the hospital, who were being brought into the unit to supplement whenever staff numbers were down. So what you see in that chart, when you rearrange the chart, is the fact that you've got Lucy and possibly two other nurses who are there for most of the events that happened, and then a lot of other staff who were only there for one or two or three

and that's very likely because they're just itinerant staff who were brought in at particular times so there's there's a lot of confounders that mean that the the statistical value of the chart is pretty much zero wow and that was the main chart, Norman, that probably convinced the jury to convince. Yeah. Incidentally, there were also a total. What's also important to know is there were a total of 15 deaths, which are neonatal deaths, which occurred during the period that Lucy Letby was working. Now, for a start, that was not a statistically they talk about a peak, this strange peak, but it was not. We've done an extensive analysis. Scott actually looked at, found 14 comparator hospitals, i.e. hospitals which were delivering similar types of care and a similar number of births each year. And at the Countess

of Chester, during the period when Lucy Letby was there, which was 2014 and 2015, there were nine neonatal deaths in 2015 and eight in 2014. Now, they say it was a spike because in the year after Lucy Letby left, there was only three. But there was an explanation for that because by then they downgraded the hospital. I believe it's from a level one, level two to a level one, which means they were taking much, much, they were not taking these high risk babies anymore. But if you compare it to these other hospitals, you find that, for example, Sherwood Forest Hospital with a similar number of births in 2014, there were 13 neonatal deaths. And you've got Kettering, which had in the four years from 2014 to 2017, had nine, seven, six and seven neonatal deaths. So there's actually nothing unusual. showed that the probability of observing neo nine neonatal deaths in a hospital like that like the

countess of chester was about 34 percent in any given year so it's just you know it's a one in three chance that you'd see that many deaths nothing unusual about that but also in that going back to the chart again again it only included the deaths where she was actually on duty, apparently on duty at the time, and not the ones where she wasn't. So again, you know, it comes back to that thing I was saying before, you could take any nurse or any doctor or anybody else who happens to be working there and build a similar chart, which looks exactly like that, if you only look at the deaths which occurred when those people were on duty and this is why it's so easy as we've seen in the terrible case in holland to wrongly convict a nurse if the whole

establishment comes down looking for you to be i guess the easy person to blame but scott i mean sorry in that lucia de burke in the Lucia de Burt case, it was driven exactly the same way, by exactly the same statistics of coincidence without the supporting clinical evidence. And in the end, she served, I think, seven or eight years in prison. It was only after, incidentally,

a colleague of ours, Professor Richard Gill, presented convincing statistical evidence showing that there wasn't that it should never have been. The statistics were always misleading and always exaggerated in the probative value, which in the end, you know, got basically got her off. You know, she was cleared of those murders. Scott, it was interesting. One of the main prosecution witnesses spoke out this week to the BBC Panorama, and her argument seemed to be, it was just impossible that these babies could have had such a decline so quickly. What's your response to that? Okay, so bear in mind, I do a lot of my work at the moment with midwives. And so a lot of the research that I'm doing, I'm doing with midwives, I'm

having discussions with them, they help me to analyse through some of the various testimony and evidence that we have for each of these babies. Any baby that is born premature has an elevated chance of dying. That's just a natural fact. It's something that, you know, we can't really do much about. You know, obviously the best outcome is that the baby stays within the mother until somewhere between 38 and 41 weeks. When you look at the babies in the let me trial, you've got babies in some cases who were born as early as 27 weeks gestation, which means they're being born somewhere about sort of 12, 13, 14 weeks early. Now that increases their risk of all sorts of health problems. And, you know, it increases their risk of just dying of health problems and um you know it increases their risk of just dying

during the birth process or just after the birth process but it increases their their chance of not going home at all and in fact when you get sort of down around um the late 24 early 25 week babies which one of them was um that baby was quite literally a coin toss as to whether he was going to go home. And that's really sad, but that's how it is. Now, what you see with many of these infants is that they were born as emergency caesarean sections. They were born all as emergencies. Well, that again increases the risk of demise. In many cases, they were born because the mother had a health condition or there was suspected infection, a maternal infection. And so, you know, they're

being born for that reason. You've got one mother whose waters had broke quite early. You've got another mother who had herself a health condition that meant that her babies very likely wouldn't have survived and so I did a complete analysis using I created a Bayesian model that was trained on all of the births that occurred within England and Wales for an entire year that included every pregnancy every stillbirth every that happened, and then every neonatal death that occurred. When we take the information that we have on, and I've done it for six or seven of the babies

from the Blythby case, what we see is that in some cases, some of the babies had a one in 2.5 chance of unfortunately not going home. But the testimonial evidence we see consistently through the case misrepresented the status of these babies. So what we saw was doctors and nurses going, well, the baby was stable, the baby was healthy, the baby was perfect. And well, you know, every midwife and every neonatal and sick children's nurse that I speak to says, well, no, it's not possible that a baby who was born 10, 12, 13, 15 weeks early is going to be healthy and stable. The fact that they were born as an emergency, the fact that they're receiving, you know, they're being intubated and they're receiving, they're being fed by a tube into their umbilicus, that means they're not stable because they're actually receiving medical

treatment. So, you know, what we're looking at here, and it's starting to, we're starting to see it in the thermal inquiry, is a recognition of the fact that actually the babies were nowhere near as stable and healthy and strong as was presented during the trial. Fascinating. let me case is that anyone who has challenged the evidence or challenged the way that the mainstream media has covered let be is immediately branded a conspiracy theorist and peter hitchens who's the contrarian journalist who has been campaigning on this for a very long time, spoke out about this recently. I was intrigued by Dan Hodge's piece today in which he says these words, the campaign to free baby killer Lucy Letby

relies on a crazy conspiracy theory too far. Is he calling you a conspiracy theorist? He can call me what he likes. I decline to join in this name-calling. I treat my opponents in the Letby case with respect. I spend my entire time thinking about keeping very much in mind the possibility that I may be wrong and they may be right. I have to keep my mind open. There's no point in debating with people who you've already decided are fools. I think that the campaign to have the Letby case re-examined is legitimate and strongly based on facts and on study of the trial itself.

I think the more that we go into this, the more we will learn. It's an extraordinary trial. Even those involved in it concede it's an extraordinary trial. It's quite unusual for anybody to be convicted of murder without any objective evidence whatsoever. Not merely that they did the crime, but there was any crime at all. It's all been a matter of opinion. I have an article in the Spectator today in which I point out that this is the whole case was hypothesis. Yeah, I actually have direct experience with this personally because in last year, June of 2023, I was due to give a lecture to a big NHS

conference on data analytics. And my seminar, my lecture was cancelled at the last minute. They cancelled me apparently because I'd also been raising questions about the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccine. So that was the reason why they cancelled me. And I did a freedom of information request to get information about more details about why they cancelled me. And as a result of that, the Free Speech Union took up my case

and submitted a judicial review of this cancellation. It turned out we were too late for the judicial review, but we did get the NHS lawyers' response to the claim. And one of the points they raised in that was that I was not only an anti-vaxxer, but I was a conspiracy theorist because I had raised concerns about I had actually raised the possibility of Lucy Letbiz's innocence. So they were citing that as evidence that I was a conspiracy theorist and someone who deserved to be cancelled from this conference.

Which is extraordinary, by the way, because I mean, look, I hate the term conspiracy theory anyway, because if someone calls me a conspiracy theorist these days, I don't give a damn. Look at how many so-called conspiracy theories have come true over the past decade. But let's put that to one side. The crazy thing about calling someone like you, Norman, a conspiracy theorist is literally your entire career is about looking at evidence. And the thing that I think shocks a lot of people when it comes to the Letby case, because I admit, I'm the first to admit, initially I bought into the narrative

because I just assumed that if they were putting her on the front page of the newspapers calling her the angel of death, they better damn well have some evidence. And it was only once I got through the trial to actually realize there is no evidence and i know that sounds extreme but it's true isn't it norm there is actually no hard evidence to convict lucy letby she was right she was sent to jail for the rest of her life on circumstantial evidence which is a very different thing let me make it clear that i've never commented on the clinic on the supposed clinical evidence in the case my concern has always been on the statistical and public and for that there is no evidence all of those claims about these clusters these sequences being you know too too strange to have happened by coincidence.

That is all complete nonsense. There was no spike and there's no statistical significance to the sequence of events at which Lucy Letby was present. Scott, what about the fact that this method of death is actually really complicated, right? And again, there is no evidence of Lucy Letbe ever researching how you would kill a baby by inserting oxygen into them. Can you just explain that a little bit for me? Right. So I think the best thing I can do is to point to an analogy. If you recall, the first baby that this was mentioned in was for baby A.

Now, in the case of baby A, it was claimed that baby A was in a room with at least three other babies in incubators, sorry, with at least two other babies in incubators. So you had another baby to the left of baby A and another baby across the room. You've got a situation where there were at least five staff members in that room, including Lucy Letby and a sixth staff member who was the ward manager who was standing, who acknowledges in her testimony, she was standing outside of the door and the door has a glass panel in it. Lucy is supposed to have injected air into the umbilical venous catheter of this baby or potentially into the nasogastric tube. However, as one of the midwives that I work with pointed

out to me, she bought me the two types of syringes that they have on the neonatal unit and sat them down in front of me. Now, they come in sterile packaging and they're irradiated in that sterile packaging. But what's interesting about it is if you pick that packaging up and try and open it, it's a cellophane based plastic. So it makes a lot of noise when you attempt to open it up. So in order for her to have opened it up, now they keep these neonatal units with slightly lower lighting than a normal ward. And they usually keep fairly quiet. They talk softly within the unit because you don't want loud noises to disturb the babies. The babies are in incubators that are enclosed. So she would have to have pulled out one of these syringes, taken it out of the crinkly packaging while there was two doctors and another nurse and another nurse sitting at a computer to

her right. So she had a nurse to her left dealing with a baby in the next incubator. There was two doctors in the room who were dealing with the third baby. And then there was the nurse, Nurse Taylor, who she'd taken handover from who was sitting at a computer about three and a half feet to her right she's got to have taken this out of the cellophane wrap drawn the air up opened up the lid of the incubator and then reached into injected into whichever of the tubes that was supposedly the one that she used and some of the evidence is contradictory as to which tube dewey evans claims it was used in and which tube some of the other doctors claim it was used in there's there's no consistent sort of there's a lot of inconsistencies across all of

these babies but there's no consistency as to where they think this air was administered in many cases so how did she do that in a room where there's four other members of staff, plus the nurse manager looking in through the door? It's farcical. So the point that you're making is that it would not only be a very, how am I trying to put it, a death that would be very technically difficult to implement, even for a medical professional actually practically it's farcical suggest to suggest that she did this multiple times given the the vast number of people in the room and then the other critical point i think to scott which again is not focused

on enough in the mainstream media is that of course all of these babies went through autopsies and again correct me if i'm wrong but my understanding is that at the autopsy stage the coroner never suggested that the cause of death was as a result of what lucy letby has been convicted for and that that is correct the the it almost it almost seems comical this idea that you've got about sort of 15 babies who've died in this hospital over about an 18 month period you've got death certificates for each of these babies the death certificates give causes some of them are congenital causes some of them are you know the midwives call it a failure to thrive. For example, you know, the baby just was not compatible with life. It was too premature.

But you've got some of them with very, very clinical causes of death that have nothing to do with the things that Lucy's been accused of doing. But what I find comical is this idea that simply because somebody wants to say that Lucy's guilty of doing something, we overturn just that subset of deaths that are in that chart, that have got the X against them in that chart. We overturn those death certificates, but we leave all of the other ones who died during the same period, which is an almost similar number, we leave all of those and let their death certificates stand. Nobody at any point thought to look, is there a cause of death that more closely fits with a larger number of this population than, you know, they've looked for something that is completely imbalanced. And Norman, given everything that you do is so evidence-based,

are you concerned about what the jury was told? Yeah, because it goes back to this point about the claim that the statistical evidence was not in any way the driver for this they claimed that it was all based on the clinical evidence not statistical evidence and yet it was very clear that that chart had a profound effect on the jury so whatever they might say about this being driven by the statistical evidence i think about driven by the clinical evidence, I think that that statistical evidence had a major impact. And what about the door swipe too? The swipe card, because the CPS have, since the trial, admitted that the swipe card data was inaccurate.

Yeah, exactly. And this is the thing, the chart in itself, there are so many incompletenesses and inconsistencies in that chart so when i said about when you look at the full data in context you take account of the fact that uh even the even the where they were saying that lucy letby was present for example i mean scott can maybe clarify this but that if for example she had been present in the shift before one of these events happened, they counted her as being present. But if there were other nurses who were present in the shift before, they weren't included as being present in the chart. So that's another inconsistency which exaggerates this apparently, you know, this this coincident coincidental evidence. And there's another thing which I think also following on from what Scott was just saying about the nature of these, also was said earlier about these babies being particularly at risk. Another thing which is not widely discussed is the

fact that nine of the babies which were on that chart were either twins or triplets. So there was actually three sets of twins and one set of triplets. And we know not only is the risk of death to twins and triplets higher than normal babies, but also if one has a congenital defect, then it's much more likely that one of their siblings will as well. So these also are other confounding factors of the type that scott was talking about

got it scott can i talk to you about the note because again certainly in the media this was considered the slam dunk right okay well she's guilty a note was discovered within the note she said i am evil i did this we have since learned that actually the note was not presented in an accurate way to the jury by lucy letby's defense god knows why i find that very difficult to get my head around but in fact this was a note that she was encouraged to write or it was basically like when you, part of your therapy is you put all of your thoughts down and of course some of her thoughts were talking about the fact

that she was being discriminated against and it was victimisation and that she had never done this. Well, there's a couple of interesting things about the whole note situation, as you suggest. There's the fact that, and it's something that one of the classes I went to in law school told us, you know, you should never, ever encourage a client to use the, you know, social care or support services provided by their employer, because then the clinician, so the psychologist in this case, giving that support is conflicted because they've got a duty of care to the patient, but they've also got a duty to the person, their employer that's paying the bill. So you've got a situation where Lucy's been, you know, because she was

having a stressful time at work, she's been sent to the psychologist at the hospital. And that psychologist has suggested to her to, you know, keep a diary or make some notes or do something in order to, you know, get your thoughts out on paper. And at least, you know, if it's out on paper, sort of, you know, you can work through it. And so that appears to be what's happened. Now, the other thing that you correctly point out is that it was misrepresented as evidence of guilt, which is a similar thing that happened to the diaries in cases like the Lucia de Burke case.

It was also something seen in the Cathy Folbig case in Australia, which has now been overturned and she's been released from jail as well, is this idea that because somebody wrote a particular set of words in their diary, that means they must be guilty. You know, when often what it is, it's that thing of, you know, when everybody keeps telling you and telling you you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you eventually write down, I must be wrong. It's my fault. You know, it's a psychological issue. And then the third thing that you allude to that's correct as well, and it's an issue for a whole lot of things that happened during that first trial, is why didn't defence counsel get up and put the record straight and tell the court, well, actually, these notes were written as part of an employer-supported mental health care situation. They were not written by Lucy just off of her own bat at home.

And so, therefore, what is in them is the type of content. There was no information at all presented during the trial to say that Lucy had even been through these counselling sessions. No, indeed, I think certainly there were some serious issues with her defence, but one of them, I guess, too, and again, I think this is a really important point that isn't covered, is that there are loads of reasons why medical experts didn't want to give evidence in the trial, because if you support someone like Lucy Letby, I don't know if you want to take this one on, Norman, but you effectively get turned on by the medical establishment. So it's such a big risk.

And that's why some of the medical experts simply were not prepared to give evidence on behalf of Lucy Letby. Do you think that is a fair contention? Oh, yeah. Yeah. One of the people you should maybe speak to about this and who's got on the record about it is Wayne Esquire, who was famously effectively excommunicated because she had given evidence which was against the existing, let's say, the accepted narrative on shaken baby syndrome, because we actually worked with her on that. And she's made it clear that it's an incredible danger to clinicians for coming out against the accepted orthodoxy. And we've also seen it as well, incidentally, with those clinicians who've come out strongly in public against the safe and effective COVID narrative.

It's the same thing. So these people, any doctors who are prepared to do this, risk their careers. It's as simple as that. And it's not even doctors. I mean, you know, even within the nursing profession, there is a large sort of a significant number of nursing academics and practising nurses who will ostracise you,

and I've been ostracised even within my own working department, for the fact that, you know, we're even willing to consider looking at these things. You know, it has a knock-on effect all over the place. And a lot of nurses were, in fact, we know from the Thirlwall inquiry that there was at least one nurse who had volunteered to come forward and speak on Letby's behalf, who was told by the hospital, it was made quite clear to her that if she did, it was a career-ending move. Well, indeed, because breaking right now, Lucy Letby's best friends continue to stand by her and at the thirlwall inquiry we have so much evidence emerging from the head nurse at the countess of chester hospital uh

dawn reese that in fact they all believe in lucy letby's evidence So let's look first at Dawn Howe. I think this is really important to show. It was released by the BBC after Letby was found guilty. But Dawn Howe is Lucy Letby's best friend. And she makes it very, very clear that not only was she going to stand by Lucy Letby, but so was the entire friendship group. Have all of Lucy's friends stood by her? Yes. We know she couldn't have done anything that she's accused of, so without a doubt we stand by her. I've grown up with Lucy and not a single thing that I've ever seen

or witnessed of Lucy would, you know, let me for a moment believe that she was capable of the things she was being accused of. You seem utterly unshakable on this, but isn't it possible she's fooled you all? Unless Lucy turned around and said, I'm guilty. I will never believe that she's guilty. And then this week, we had Karen Rees, who was Lucy Letby's boss, speak to the Thirlwall Inquiry. And as part of that evidence, text messages emerged showing that she had supported Lucy Letby throughout. That group with Karen Rees and two others. In 2017, Rees told her, hang on in there, girl, your nursing team are fully behind you.

In 2018, she wrote, happy new year to you all. Lucy, I hope we get closure this year. I'm really proud of you. The professional way you've presented yourself throughout is admirable. We'll continue to support you. Do you think, looking back, you got too close to Lucy Letby and her position? I think the answer to that is yes. I was looking at her and she kept crying and saying, why are they doing this to me? I've done nothing wrong. I'm not going to let them run me out of the job that I love.

I was witnessing the anguish, the absolute, she was absolutely, it was hard to keep witnessing that week in, week out. You've got multiple nurses in the last two or three weeks who have come forward and said that, you know, they stand by Lucy, they support Lucy. I can't think of the name. There was another nurse who, on about Wednesday or Thursday of last week, was interviewed and said the same thing.

Well, surely it's extremely significant that it was not just Karen Rees but it was all of the nurses standing by let me now let's just think about this Scott if they genuinely thought that there was any chance that babies were being murdered within the hospital that they worked in by one of their colleagues they're not going to stand by that person, are they? Because they're going to be absolutely terrified about the blame somehow being passed on to them. So, again, I think it's something that's underestimated the support that Lucy received from her fellow nurses. Although I note at the Thirlwall inquiry that the KC was trying to make the point that Karen had almost become too close to let be somehow. Truck month is on at Chevrolet. Get 0% financing for up to 72 months on a 2025 Silverado 1500 Custom Blackout or Custom Trail Boss.

With Custom Trail Bosses available, class exclusive Duramax 3-liter diesel engine and Z71 off-road package with a 2-inch factory suspension lift, you get both on-road confidence and off-road capability. Dirt road ahead? Let's go! Truck month is awesome! Ask your Chevrolet dealer for details. Well, there's also a requirement for both the doctors and the nurses within their professional standards and ethics that requires them. It's a legal requirement that they have to come forward at any point if they suspect anyone is doing anything to harm a patient, especially an incapable patient, you know, a minor or somebody who's say unconscious so you know this this idea that that they wouldn't you know if if they thought for a minute if you thought for a minute that somebody was harming somebody in your unit you would immediately speak up you'd immediately come forward you'd find somebody yet you know we're given this sort of misleading idea that, well, only these one or two

doctors had the information and that they were, you know, somehow for two years ignored about it. And the thing is, Norman, let's just be honest about this, right? We know how many issues there are systemically within the NHS. We know how many issues there were systemically at this hospital. So surely I'm not a conspiracy theory to suggest that it may have been much easier for certain senior doctors to try and pinpoint a nurse rather than actually look at why this hospital was failing so badly in so many areas. Well, exactly. And of course, that is something that a number of people have raised that as a possible explanation for this whole case. It's interesting. Incidentally, something I didn't mention is who wasn't considered to be included in the chart, the notorious chart?

Were any of the doctors? So it was only the nurses. It wasn't the doctors or any other of the auxiliary staff. So you've got that. I'd just like to have one other important thing that we haven't discussed about this, this whole case, is that in the second trial, which was the trial of baby K, wasn't it, Scott? The second trial, the jury were told. So that was just considering the murder charge against Lucy Letby for baby K only. The jury was instructed that they were able to take into consideration the fact that Lucy Letby had been convicted of six murders in her first trial. Now, if that isn't inviting classic confirmation bias,

and I was always on the understanding that previous convictions were not supposed to be given as instructions to the jury to be taken account of, it was kind of inevitable, given those instructions, that she was going to be found guilty of the murder of baby Kay. In legal terms, we call that propensity evidence. And in most other jurisdictions that follow the English legal tradition, propensity evidence is not allowed during the trial. Propensity evidence, say in Australia or New Zealand, gets considered during the sentencing portion at the end. So

you've got to have been found guilty first. Unfortunately, here in the UK, there does appear to have been a change to the way that propensity evidence works. And so it is possible for the prosecution to bring forward propensity evidence if they can demonstrate that the propensity evidence from your previous conviction makes it more likely that you should be, that you will have done this particular crime.

The issue with that here is that the prosecution, it was the first thing they led. So they didn't lead a prosecution against her and then add the fact that, look, we've already prosecuted her six months ago for these other ones. They led with it as the very first sentence out of the prosecutor's mouth, which means that from that very minute, that's all the jury heard.

Guaranteed, their ears will have switched off and they'll have gone somewhere else. Of course. And that is before you get to, I guess, my area of specialty, which is the mainstream media and the fact that every single juror already walked into that courtroom thinking that they were going into the case of the angel of death or nurse death, which is just another factor. But Scott, look, in your role as lecturer in digital technologies for health at King's College London, you do a lot of work within the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care, and you have extensive training in law and nursing. So you know a lot about how nurses work and about their psychology. You have obviously also witnessed Let Be up close in terms of the evidence, the videos that have been released.

What's your take on her as a human being and as an individual? And do you think she had it in her to murder babies? Just talk to me a bit about your understanding of Lucy Letby, the person? So, you know, in regards to nursing, I completed two years of training and two years of clinical training within hospitals quite a while back, but it's still relevant to my job today. When I look at, you know, some of the evidence that came out, especially some of the clinical evidence that sort of misrepresented things that even I know aren't how things work. And then you look at how Lucy responded to some of that evidence and how Lucy was in general. So I've seen the comments in the last couple of days in the media of, you know, one of the, I think it was a BBC reporter, or it might have been a Daily Mail reporter, suggesting that because, you know, she had a flat affect and looked a bit dour, that that meant that she must have been guilty from day one. Well, no, you've got to remember, by the time she got to court,

she'd already been about four or five years into, you know, being interviewed and harassed and her house being searched and her garden being dug up and her gutters being drained and all sorts of things. She'd already spent a considerable amount of time in custody. By that point, psychologically, she had to have been stunned. And so a flat affect is, which is what we, the term that we use to say, when somebody is showing almost no emotion, that flat affect is totally expected. You know, I would expect nothing less. She's sitting there, she's stunned, she's hearing all this, she can't believe it's got to this point. So, you know, she's, you've got to remember what she was hearing in court.

She probably already heard, read in the documents, because in every case a witness will have been a will-say statement or something that was presented by the prosecution during discovery to the defence. So she already had a fair idea what people were going to say, what they were going to accuse her of, how it was going to go. And she's been, you know, she's sitting at night alone in a jail cell and then being dragged into court every morning by bus. You know, her demeanour was entirely, and the few times that I went to see

the trial, her demeanour in the courtroom was entirely what i would expect for somebody who already knew what she was being accused of already knew that you know was probably told by her her defense counsel that you know the outcome wasn't going to go in her favor and so she's just she's sitting there as the world passes her by yeah big time and of course the parents went to the trial every day do you think that's also why scott in the end she didn't show up for the sentencing and for the reading of the victim impact statements it was just too much for her i i think part of it was the fact that um a lot of people forget that she'd already had received her verdicts for several of the charges, I think,

about two or three weeks prior. So the jury came back on the charges for a couple of the babies very quickly and then deliberated for two or three weeks. So it was already a foregone conclusion that, you know, it was fait accompli. She was already guilty because they'd already found her guilty. And so by the time you get to the sentencing, it's like, well, you know, it's not going to change anything. And I think that this idea that they should have dragged her, some people have suggested they should have dragged her,

forced her on the bus, dragged her to the courtroom, made her sit there with her hands cuffed, listening to it all. Well, she'd already listened to it all. She'd already, she, like everybody else, had already spent more than 10 months listening to it all. You know, I can quite honestly sort of see the fact that she was probably, she had no emotion left. And it's not that she didn't care

it's that she was at that point a husk yeah so can i ask you both how looking at the evidence looking at the case in its totality how you think those babies died i think i'll fill this one first from my perspective. So when I started to look at the various clinical evidence and the testimony, those people who follow my sub-stack, I run a sub-stack called Law, Health and Tech, will have seen very, very quickly that I identified what I believe and what we're now seeing from the Thirlwall Inquiry, the evidence is coming out, that what I believe was the guilty party. And that guilty party stemmed from that one little bit of defence evidence we did get, and that was the evidence of the plumber. When we look at the fact that we're talking about a very old building,

it was a building that had 50 plus year old lead pipes and lead pipes are very well known for the fact that over time they pit. So you end up with these tiny little microscopic holes through the lead as it breaks down. And so, you know, very, very small sprays of particulate from the pipes can spray out. In particular, in the room where most of these babies passed away, there was a pipe that ran diagonally across the roof above the false ceiling. Now, that pipe in particular was one that we know from the testimony of the plumber and we know from the the datex records was one that was replaced and eventually when they did replace it they replaced it by putting it along the wall to one side of the neonatal unit rather than as it had been diagonally across the middle now at the same time it appears they replaced components of the the sort of drop ceiling that sat above. I would reasonably suspect that they replaced those tiles of the drop ceiling because it probably had spray

from the pipes on the tiles. Now, you're talking about a pipe that was above several of these incubators. So every time you're opening one of these incubators, there's the potential that aerosolised particles could get into that incubator and settle on the baby. At the same time as well, you've got, we've now got, we had evidence a couple of weeks ago of a report that demonstrated

that the management knew that there was a plumbing issue and they knew that there were infectious agents on the unit. At the same time, we've also got evidence from that period that Countess of Chester had one of the worst responses to sepsis in the country. They were in something like the top three or the top five for the worst responses for sepsis. They had sepsis through several of their important key clinical areas like intensive care and the neonatal unit. on top of that now we've had evidence in the last few days that they were aware that there was a an issue and they rated it as a high issue and they rated it as an issue that could seriously impact public opinion about the neonatal unit that there was pseudomonas auregus in all of the apparently bar one so you've got the fact that the nurses, when they go to wash their hands,

they're washing their hands in a sink where the water faucet is putting a bacterial agent that is deadly to these babies on their hands. You've also got the fact that quite often they'll be washing components. And one of the midwives pointed out to me in the last couple of days, when I showed her the evidence behind that report. She said, do you do realize that they're probably washing the breast pumps that the mothers were using to express breast milk under those taps? So that means you go and wash the breast pump and you wash everything up, you put it out, you dry it. And then the next mother who picks that component up, that's already in there. Now, the interesting thing about what I looked at right at the start of this case with regards to these bacterial agents, the interesting thing is that these agents are the sort of agents who, even when they dry onto a surface like that, they can create a film. And we call it a biofilm. That biofilm can be touched, transferred, and is still active for all intents and purposes.

So it means you then transfer it. So you've got it on your hands, you open up the incubator, you maybe change the nappy of the baby. So on top of the fact that you've got this pseudomonas from the tap, when you change the nappy on the the baby you've also got whatever bacteria is in their fecal matter that's in the nappy that often what would happen and there's video of this they the nurses will pick the nappy up and i'll put it at the end of the incubator while they put the new nappy on the baby the problem with that is that you've then also got the bacteria, which, you know, you can have acinetobacter and other bacterias that end up inside the incubator. You've got a baby who's laying in that incubator with tubes that go into their umbilical cords. They're going directly into a blood vessel, but then go within four inches into their heart.

So you've got like a highway. You haven't just got this subtle chance like you might have if you've got say an IV on your arm you've got a highway directly to the heart and the point is there's an explanation and that explanation the symptoms yeah the symptoms of that explanation fit with more of these babies so we know that that Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas can both cause that sort of mottling appearance that some of the babies have. We know that from there's more literature suggesting that it can be caused by sepsis and a thing called NEC, enterocolitis.

There's more evidence that it can be caused by that than there is that it can be caused by introduction of air into a blood vessel. And you've got the fact that for almost all of these babies, sepsis is queried in their medical records. For several of the babies, the mother was being treated for infection or the mother had a temperature at birth and if the mother has an infection or a temperature at birth you must treat every baby that came out of that mother as if it is also infected okay okay so we've there's evidence all the way along for every baby that at some point these babies were treated for suspected sepsis or a diagnosis of sepsis or a diagnosis of NEC. Several of the death certificates say sepsis and NEC.

You've got the fact that there were other children who came into that unit at the time who were then sent out and treated at other hospitals like Liverpool Women's Hospital. They were treated for infection and brought back to the unit, got reinfected and had to go out again. Okay. And then to top it all off, there's evidence within the clinical notes to show that often what was happening was the doctors in the delivery units, the pediatrician who would receive the baby in the delivery unit, would query sepsis and start the treatment protocol, which is you initially give a bolus of antibiotics that's meant to be followed by three to five days of antibiotics when they get to the neonatal unit. There's evidence for some of the babies that the antibiotics weren't given in the neonatal unit

and, in fact, that the doctors were... They'd get from delivery unit to neonatal unit and the doctors in the neonatal unit, the same doctors who testified against let me would go on now let's let's cancel those antibiotics that's a mess there's there's of course one other important cause or potential cause explanation other than these types of bacterial or other infections and that was that this was an understaffed poorly resourced unit and that the baby and that this they were treating babies who were already at very high risk

with a very high probability of a natural death anyway. Or most likely a combination of the two. Okay, so final question. What should happen now? Should there be a retrial? Should the conviction be quashed? I mean, what should happen in your personal view norman um well obviously i i feel that there should be a push for another appeal um

uh i was uh speaking to the lawyer um um martin martin mcdonald mcdonald the other uh a couple of weeks ago and he was you know he is now the one that being apparently responsible for getting the evidence together with a with a view to i guess appealing to the criminal cases review commission i have to say i don't i'm not very optimistic about that because i actually worked with mark on submitting a case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission on the Ben Gein case and after we got together several, a number of different professors of maths and statistics in that case but that was you know the attempt to get an appeal through them was unsuccessful. Yeah, indeed. What about you, Scott?

I think that because I sat down literally at his Mr Davis to step up and actually have these current convictions overturned and returned back to the court. Because as Norman says, you know, as it stands at the moment, really, the ability for appeal, it's almost like it's been, you know, deliberately closed in front of her. And the Criminal Cases Review Commission, in all fairness to them, have limited resources, a limited amount of investigators, and doctors and so on who are questioning it without the fact that you know now at least Mr Davis has stood up and to be counted without that the drive coming from parliament to turn this over I don't think it is going to get turned over in anything sort of short of the next decade. No, and I guess that's why it's important that we keep talking about this. And it has been such a pleasure

to have both of you on Outspoken today for me to talk for the first time about my personal views on this. I needed the best experts in the business. I got them. Norman Fenton, of course, mathematician at Queen Mary University. He focuses on the probability of coincidences and clusters. And Dr. Scott McLaughlin, a lecturer in digital technologies for health at King's College London, though in the division of digital health and applied technology assessment within crucially in this case the faculty of nursing midwifery and

palliative care so thank you both so much and we will obviously keep in touch as developments in this case progress and I will put the link to your brilliant substat scott in the show notes as well because i think it's very much people worth checking out so thank you both so much and thank you for your company on this very special edition of outspoken today i hope you understand why it was important for me to talk about this case now all i would ask is that you have an open mind because at the beginning i was like probably so many of you thinking of course she did it and it's actually only when you dig down when you do your own research that you realize that something really wrong is afoot here because Because of the special edition of the show, we have no after show today,

but that will return on Tuesday. So please do register at www.outspoken.live. Your support at just five pounds a month allows me to keep this show independent. I hope you have an absolutely wonderful weekend. Please do subscribe if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble. We are back on Monday at 5 p.m. UK time, midday Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific. Most importantly, remember, I will keep fighting for you. We'll be you next time.