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Norman Fenton

The Lucy Letby trial and verdict: not everybody is convinced that justice was done

Interview with one such prominent sceptic: Dr Scott McLachlan





Lucy Letby is a nurse who has been found guilty of 7 counts of murder and 6 counts of attempted murder of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital during 2015-16.




Although the mainstream media is portraying her as britain’s most evil baby murderer there are a few legal and other researchers who have seriously questioned the quality of evidence in the case and suggested there may have been systemic causes of the baby deaths at the hospital which were nothing to do with Lucy Letby.


Dr Scott McLachlan is one such researcher. He completed his PhD on the topic of Learning Health Systems under my supervision in 2019. He has been following this case for a while now and is especially well qualified to comment on it. That’s because, in addition to his PhD, he not only originally worked as a nurse but also has several legal degrees and is currently a Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Health in the Division of Applied Technologies for Clinical Care with the Faculty of Nursing at Kings College.

Today I interviewed Scott to discuss his concerns:





My own interest in this case was piqued by this chart that was used by the prosecution:




I tweeted about this:




Richard Gill has also been expressing concerns about the way the case has been handled:





Richard is concerned that the errors in previous 'killer nurse' cases may have been repeated here.



Relevant to that, here is a video I made about the whole issue of the probability the same nurse will be on duty during a series of unusual events (this was related to the Ben Geen case):




For the medical material on the Lucy Letby case, the site to visit is Science on Trial



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53 Comments




Guest
Feb 02
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Guest
Sep 24, 2023

Egregious scapegoating

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Guest
Sep 15, 2023

Oh, and thanks for the Guest Comment facility, much appreciated.


My point about Briggs (who I recommend to you) is that he continually bangs on about over certainty in The Science and the problems of modeling (inputs are data, assumptions and maths, the output cannot give more than the inputs - so models only say what they are told to say).


WRT Lucy L and "what's the probability of her not having dun it?" The answer is either 1 or 0 depending entirely on (i.e given) whether she dun it or not. My view, given my information and therefore with uncertainty: unlikely.


But it wouldn't be the first time that plod has lied or dissembled, "experts" have spouted rubbish and…

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