Andy: Hello everyone, I'm Andy.

Richard: And I'm Richard.

Andy: And welcome back to Murdery Bits, part two of Lucy Let Be.

Richard: Welcome back to... Yes. Part Two!

Andy: Ah, now for you lot, it's been a week. But for us, it's been a mere 24 hours.

Richard: Yes.

Andy: good reason for that. So it's still fresh in our heads. And also it allows me to clear up my fucking desktop so I can close all this shit down and start working on the next one. But, ⁓ yeah, yesterday we spoke about the alleged offenses. We spoke about the investigation. We spoke about a lot about the trial and we got up basically to the verdicts. So once the jury has spoken.

Richard: Thank you

Andy: and an appeal has failed, the justice system creates a case that's basically settled. So legally, Lucy Letby's case is settled. But history shows that settled and correct are not exactly the same thing. In England and Wales, there are only a few mechanisms for challenging a conviction after the normal appeal process has been exhausted. And the most important of those is the Criminal Cases Review Commission or the CCRC. And the CCRC exists to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and if appropriate, refer cases back to the Court of Appeal. But it operates under very strict constraints. It must identify new evidence or a legal argument that creates a real possibility that the conviction would be overturned. And that's quite a high bar. In cases built on DNA or clear forensic error, it can be met. In cases built on expert interpretation, inference, and judgment like Letbe's, it's far harder. You can't simply say other experts disagree.

Richard: Yep.

Andy: Courts have consistently ruled that disagreement among professionals doesn't automatically undermine a conviction. Otherwise, almost no complex case would ever be finalized. So this creates a bit of a paradox. The very thing that makes the Letbe case troubling, that it depends so heavily on contested expert opinion, also makes it resistant to correction. Unless an expert recants, unless misconduct is proven, and unless new scientific consensus emerges and scientific consensus moves very slowly. Calls for an independent public inquiry into the medical evidence have grown louder. Some have argued for a review not focused on guilt or innocence. but on whether the methods used to infer murder were robust at all. Others have resisted this. They argue that such reviews undermine confidence in verdicts. And they re-traumatize families and risk becoming vehicles for denial. And this tension is real.

Richard: See, now that one, I've always had a bit of a problem with that one, because it ain't the first time I've heard, ⁓ no, we can't review the case, think of the poor family. Well, yeah, I get that. It's not nice reopening all those wounds again, but if there's a chance there's an innocent person facing a absolute life stretch, then I'm sorry, but that's...

Andy: Hmm. Yeah, what's the point of sparing the family's feelings if the person who is in jail for killing your child did not kill your child?

Richard: child yeah yeah no i don't think that's a particularly good argument

Andy: I mean, we are a race of savages, but we're not that fucking savage. At least not all of us.

Richard: But then one of the problems I have with this case, and I have it in general, is trial by jury. I spent 40 years getting people drunk, and I know what muppets most people are. And I imagine that half the jury in this case just zoned out with daydreaming rather than listening to all this really complex medical evidence that they can't possibly understand in the first place.

Andy: I've served on juries at the Old Bailey in an attempted murder and in a drug smuggling case. And I can tell you that I was the only one who was actually taking notes. And I think there were two other jurors on both my trials who showed any interest whatsoever in what was going on around them. was actually, it was fucking scary how little they took in, how little they knew and how little they learned. And it convinced me that if I ever have to be on the other side of that,

Richard: Yeah, for most people it's just a chore. Mmm.

Andy: I do not want to be tried by fucking jury.

Richard: No, but then the alternative is some dodgery-ass fucking judge who's lived in a bubble his entire life, ⁓ and is just self-righteous and sanctimonious.

Andy: This is true, but I did notice and I was quite impressed that the doddery-ass fucker who was in charge of the smuggling case at least, he must have been 98 years old if he was a fucking day. And he had this fucking big leather bound ledger in front of him. And I swear he wrote down every word that was said in that courtroom. Every fucking word he wrote in his ledger. I was really impressed because I mean, I can take notes. But this guy, was ink pen and like it was just, ⁓ I was really impressed. I'd love to have a read of that ledger.

Richard: Okay. Don't not Mmm. Hmm? Yeah, yeah, because that suggests he doesn't entirely trust stenographers then.

Andy: Well, no, he's obviously a man who takes his job very seriously. And that the old Bailey, as a judge, you would expect them to be at the top of their game.

Richard: Well, one would hope so, when you're a high core judge. Yes.

Andy: Anyway, we shall continue. So grieving parents were told unequivocally that the person responsible had been found and to reopen doubt is not an abstract exercise, it has emotional consequences. And yet the justice system exists not to protect your feelings, but to protect the truth. And there is precedent for confronting this discomfort. In past medical miscarriage cases, families initially resisted doubt until later evidence showed that certainty had been misplaced. And what felt like opening wounds became, for some, the beginning of a different kind of healing instead. There's no guarantee that that will happen in this case. But refusing to ask questions guarantees that mistakes, if they do exist, will never be found.

Richard: Mm-hmm.

Andy: Another development complicates matters even further. Some of the prosecution's expert theories, particularly around air embolisms, are now being scrutinized more openly in medical forums. Papers and conference discussions have raised concerns about diagnostic overreach and the danger of criminalizing unexplained outcomes. Quietly, and cautiously the ground is shifting. This doesn't mean that Lucy Letbee will be exonerated. It does mean that the confidence of the verdict is no longer universal. So. Strip away the names, strip away the headlines, strip away the horror. What remains is a fundamental question. How sure do we need to be before we can put someone in prison for the rest of their life? And the Letby case forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about how modern justice works. Juries are asked to assess probabilities that they're not trained to understand. Experts are asked to translate uncertainty into conclusions. And lawyers are incentivized to frame ambiguity as clarity. And once the narrative of evil takes hold, it becomes almost impossible to disentangle evidence from expectation. That doesn't mean that juries are idiots. It means they're human. The law asks them to be certain in a world that rarely is. There's also a broader cultural issue at play. Healthcare systems are under immense strain. And when things go wrong, there's a powerful desire to locate individual blame rather than systematic failure. Individual villains are far easier to prosecute than institutional neglect. The Lucy Letbe story, regardless of its ultimate truth, has already served to reassure the public that the system can identify and remove a monster. But reassurance isn't justice.

Richard: or cover its arse really well.

Andy: Exactly. Justice is much quieter. It's more hesitant and less cinematic. It allows for the possibility that multiple things can be true at once. That the babies died tragically. That the parents deserve answers. That healthcare systems failed. That a jury acted in good faith. And that the verdict can still be wrong. Holding those truths together is uncomfortable. But discomfort is not an argument against inquiry. In the end, doubt is not an accusation. It's a responsibility. Lucy Letbee, at the moment, will likely spend the rest of her life in prison. And that fact may not change. But history teaches us that verdicts are not the end of truth-seeking, only the end of a particular legal process. Years from now, This case may be remembered as a triumph of justice, or it may be remembered alongside others as a warning of what happens when certainty outruns evidence. Right now, we just don't know. And that may be the most honest conclusion available. This wasn't a story about monsters or angels. It was a story about inference, authority, fear. and the limits of human judgement. And it's not over.

Richard: If you lost your place.

Andy: Sorry, I just gotta bring up my next bit.

Richard: Lucky we're not on the radio. Can't have silence on the radio. lucky I'm not a DJ otherwise I just start talking inane shit just to fill the space

Andy: Get back up on the dance floor. Let's put your hands in the air like you just don't care So one of the most revealing aspects of the Lucy Letbe case isn't what experts said at trial, but how the expert opinion has evolved since. Expert evidence is often treated in court as fixed and authoritative, but outside the courtroom, expertise isn't static. It changes as assumptions are questioned, data is re-examined, and professionals speak more freely once the adversarial pressure of a trial has passed. In the Letby case, this shift has been subtle, cautious, but it's real. At trial, the prosecution's expert witnesses presented their conclusions with confidence. They testified that the collapses and deaths couldn't be explained by natural causes alone, that air embolism, insulin poisoning, and deliberate interference were the most plausible explanations. that the patterns were inconsistent with coincidence. But crucially, they were not asked to prove how Lucy Letby committed these acts in a forensic sense. They were asked whether the clinical presentations were consistent with deliberate harm. And in that narrow context, they answered yes. But outside the courtroom, a different conversation is unfolding. Neonatologists reviewing the case after conviction have pointed out that many of the signs relied upon by the prosecution are basically nonspecific. Skin mottling, sudden collapse, oxygen desaturation, ⁓ bradycardia, these are not rare or unique indicators of foul play in premature infants. They're features of extreme physiological instability. They occur in sepsis, ⁓ necrotizing, entrocolytis, respiratory failure, congenital abnormalities, and even in response to routine handling. Several experts have since acknowledged, often in academic or off-the-record settings, that air embolism in neonates is exceptionally difficult to diagnose with certainty, especially retrospectively. There's no definitive clinical marker, no reliable post-mortem test, and there's no agreed diagnostic threshold. What was presented at trial as a distinctive air embolus rash isn't a universally accepted sign. It does not appear as a validated diagnostic criteria in standard neonatology textbooks. Some clinicians describe similar skin changes in babies experiencing circulatory collapse from entirely natural causes. And this matters because the prosecution's case relied heavily on the assertion that these signs were so unusual that they demanded a criminal explanation. As one neonatal specialist later put it, unusual does not mean unnatural. The insulin cases, often described as the strongest evidence, have also been subject to re-examination. At trial, the biochemical findings, high insulin with low C-peptide, were treated as conclusive proof of exogenous insulin administration. But... Post trial scrutiny has raised questions about the context in which those samples were taken. The blood tests weren't conducted as part of the criminal investigation. They were taken during medical emergencies, processed through routine hospital labs, and stored without forensic chain of custody procedures. And critics argue that this doesn't invalidate the results, but it does complicate how confidently they can be interpreted. Some biochemists have pointed out that insulin ⁓ assays in neonates are not routinely used for forensic inference. They are sensitive to degradation, sample handling, and filming and timing. Small errors can disproportionately affect ratios. No vial of insulin was ever traced, no syringes recovered, and no witnesses saw any administration of it. At trial, this absence was explained away by opportunity and access. Post trial, some experts have become more cautious, acknowledging that consistent with is not the same as proven by. Perhaps the most significant shift has occurred around statistical interpretation. During the trial, the prosecution relied heavily on visual representations. charts showing let these presence at collapses these were compelling they appeared to show an unmistakable pattern but since the verdict statisticians have criticized the lack of formal prob probabilistic analysis i love these fucking words

Richard: I, uh, I used to know a statistician and he once told me, me a set of numbers or facts and I can prove anything you want me to.

Andy: And yeah, basically tell me what you want it to mean. And I should show you.

Richard: Yep, absolutely.

Andy: No baseline rate was established. No adjustment was made for shift frequency, patient activity, or acuity, or clustering effects in small samples. Several experts have noted that when you examine rare events retrospectively, apparent patterns are inevitable. Someone will always emerge as the outlier. What has changed is not the data. but the willingness to say out loud that the data doesn't really speak for itself. Another important shift concerns expert independence. At trial, prosecution experts were responding to questions framed within the criminal hypotheses. They were not asked to independently assess whether the unit itself was safe, whether care standards had slipped, or whether systematic pressures could account for outcomes.

Richard: Presumably then at the time no investigation was put into the war to see if there was some kind of bug or virus or anything that was in the ward at the time that could have caused this.

Andy: Post trial review. I can tell you now that if they had examined the ward itself, they would have found untold things that were way below code for the purpose of that room was serving. Because in every hospital, there are bugs and germs and MRSA and all the rest of it. There was no such thing as a clean and dry room in a hospital.

Richard: Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓

Andy: I mean, we had clean dry rooms where I was working at the battery factory where people had to basically get dressed to go into the room and get undressed to come out of it, complete with hood and fucking all the rest of it. it's even then, even in a clean dry room, ⁓ you would still find things that can harm children, babies.

Richard: Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, you're always going to find them. I mean, I find it remarkable that hospitals after COVID, it hasn't become a standard thing that all staff in hospitals should wear masks all the time. They're just back now to wandering around breathing all over people with whatever germs they bought in from home with them.

Andy: ⁓ be honest, if they were wearing a mask that was actually effective, they would scare the kids to death. Because those paper masks are fucking worthless. They don't do anything.

Richard: ⁓ yeah, alright. Yeah, no it is indeed. But you know, maybe getting nursed by Darth Vader would be quite entertaining.

Andy: I mean it would be fun to film it for your YouTube channel. ⁓

Richard: But now I mean, how quickly we have just gone, ⁓ well, COVID, it's passed now. We don't have to worry about that anymore. But it seems to me so much more could be done to make hospitals a lot more sterile than they are.

Andy: I think if you're ill, the last place you want to be is in a hospital to be honest.

Richard: Go to the hospital. Got you.

Andy: I wouldn't, mean, most people who died died because they went into a hospital.

Richard: That's a bit soupy, yeah.

Andy: It's a fact, unfortunately.

Richard: Mmm.

Andy: Also, the COVID itself wasn't the big killer. Everybody who died, died with COVID, not so much of COVID.

Richard: of COVID mere.

Andy: I mean, my mate Jay, he had cancer, which he was recovering from at one point. But then during the whole COVID thing, we would Skype regularly, probably once a week we had chats. And I always stayed at his place whenever I came to England. But we were talking and he he'd found a lump in his shoulder. And he was worried about it, but he couldn't go. He couldn't get fucking appointment for the doctor because of COVID. And even though he's a recovering cancer patient or an existing cancer patient, he still could not go and see a doctor. Anyway, eventually, of course, he gets sick. And he has to go to hospital. And of course, he's got the cancer back and it's advanced.

Richard: Mm. Yeah. Mm.

Andy: And now he's got the COVID, they've put him into a bed and fucking started oxygenating him and force feeding him and fucking, and he died in hospital. And it was unnecessary. If he could have got to see a doctor when he wanted to, there would have been no need for him to be fucking locked into that disease-ridden room to die along with the rest of the no-hopers.

Richard: Hmm. you It would be interesting to know was he added to the list of Covid? Was it put down as Covid? Because an awful lot of people...

Andy: 100%, 100 % it was put down as COVID. Another friend of mine who died, you might know him, Michael Grant.

Richard: Mmm, name rings a bell.

Andy: Very big, very big black fella. He used to be ⁓ a bit of a career criminal in his youth. ⁓ I mean, yeah, he was a bank robber. Let's just say what it is. He used to be a bank robber in his youth. He was a couple of years older than me, probably 10 years older than me. ⁓ We were quite tight when I was...

Richard: ⁓ yeah. Hmm

Andy: in London, we used to do lunch quite a lot. He'd been around my house many times for a cup of tea and a chat. And he died of cancer while this was all going on. And he had the same issues, know, couldn't get, couldn't get medical help because fucking doctors, I mean, they all need prosecuting. All these fucking doctors who shut their surgeries and denied patients. their basic healthcare. I mean, having signed on hospital doors saying, if you're sick, do not enter. What the fuck is the point of a hospital? ⁓ don't get me started.

Richard: Mm. Yeah, that's a whole, yes, move on because we'll be here about this forever. Start going on about leading nightingale hospitals and all of that. ⁓

Andy: Yeah. Fucking, ⁓ another, another scam by the government to take away all the tax money and give it to our friends. Fucking wankers. It's nice though, see the government is on fire with this Epstein business. And Kirstama suddenly, because fucking Mandelson actually sold state secrets to Epstein, is now having to say, ⁓ we don't, we were not having that.

Richard: Mm-hmm. ⁓ yeah. Mm-hmm. ⁓

Andy: can't promote him again. I'll have to fucking strip him of his lordship this time. ⁓ I hope it doesn't stop there. There's a lot more to

Richard: Yes. I don't know how that fucker's still out, still out of prison. ⁓ yeah.

Andy: Yeah, I know. I know. But he is being investigated. then so was Boris Johnson.

Richard: Although somebody was telling it. Yes, I don't know.

Andy: and there was nothing to answer.

Richard: Somebody was telling me earlier now, I don't know where they saw this, but apparently now people are starting to link Epstein with ⁓ McCann, Madeleine McCann. And it's like, you know, yes, absolutely. That was my response. Yeah.

Andy: ⁓ for fuck's sake. That's a stretch. That is a big stretch. I mean, that's that's trying to leave JK rolling to him as well. I mean, this is how fucking sad these internet trolls are. I mean, you know, she's a wealthy woman. He tried. He made it his business to try and get to know every wealthy person in the world. His job was financial advisor to the wealthy. within the files, I would be surprised if my name wasn't in his files.

Richard: Yep. Mm-hmm.

Andy: You know, the hundreds of thousands of names of people are in his files. It doesn't mean that you got a fucking free kid every time you attended one of his parties. It just means that your name is in those files. It could be that as in the case of J.K. Rowling, he tried to blag himself some free ticket for one of the theatre shows, which was denied. But.

Richard: Yeah, yeah. But again, this case, you see, it just highlights the human's need for a black and white answer. That, you know, we struggle with shades of grey and we struggle with complex cases and everybody just wants a nice, easy, simple answer. And as a result, I think thousands of people over the centuries have been lynched simply because

Andy: Less than 50.

Richard: that happened to be wearing a pair of trousers and boots and it matched the description of somebody seen leaving the vicinity.

Andy: Me and Scousmic were walking home. We just got off a night bus at Archway Station. I don't know, it must've been four o'clock in the morning. We got a night bus from Soho to Archway and we thought we'd just walk through the flats and across towards Crouch Hill where we lived. And as we're hiking through these flats, there's a geezer walking a dog. Black trousers, white shirt. That was it.

Richard: you Mm.

Andy: walking a dog and he suddenly screams at us, you sit on that wall. And we've gone, fuck off. Fuck off, you wanker. And we kept walking. Sit on that fucking wall. Do as you're told. Sit down now. we've fuck off. And it was, I'm a police officer. And Scarlet's called, gone, where's your fucking tit on your head then, you cunt. ⁓ Anyways, he's caught up with this, cunt. He is wearing a police shirt. But know that he hasn't identified himself. Yeah, sit on the wall. We've got no we ain't fucking sitting on the wall. What the fuck do you want? We've had a report of two blokes walking around here causing mischief, whatever, where a new fit the description. So he gets on his fucking walking talking. It's our two boys here. I've got them.

Richard: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andy: blah blah blah next to us whatever block and the fella goes are they two young black lads 20 or 25 years old and he went no ain't them then is it

Richard: You

Andy: I mean the fucking arrogance of these cunts. ⁓ you shit on that wall. Fuck you.

Richard: No, ⁓ I got arrested once. No, once. And they actually came into my parents' shop and nicked me. And I was accused of having stolen sheep's fleeces from a van. And when I asked them why the hell I was a suspect, they said, you have long hair.

Andy: What? Hey, I've been arrested many times. and you're Welsh.

Richard: Well, everybody was Welsh in Wales, mate. But apparently somebody had seen somebody with long hair. So that was the sole bit of evidence they had for coming in and arresting me.

Andy: ⁓ I mean, I would call that pretty good police work. compared to some obscene.

Richard: Anyway, it turned out it wasn't me and the geezer that did get caught for it because he was caught banked or I was trying to sell them didn't have long hair.

Andy: Na kusno. And it wasn't Welsh because as most Welsh people know, if you want a sheepskin, just ask your girlfriend.

Richard: Yes, absolutely.

Andy: Anyway, let's get back to this. ⁓ I've completely forgotten where I was. Yes, post trial reviews of the neonatal unit have since highlighted serious staffing shortages, ⁓ skill mix problems, as in not enough experienced staff, and periods where the unit was operating well beyond its designated capability.

Richard: dance.

Andy: So some clinicians have since said that had they been asked to evaluate the unit without a criminal suspect in mind, they would have reached very different conclusions. And this doesn't imply bad faith. It highlights a structural problem where once an expert is instructed within a criminal framework, their role subtly shifts from neutral assessor to hypothesis tester. And hypotheses, once tested repeatedly in one direction, begin to feel like facts. Perhaps the most telling shift is not in published papers or formal statements, but in tone. Before the verdict, expert testimony was assertive. After the verdict, expert commentary has become cautious. Words like certain have been replaced with possible.

Richard: Mm-hmm.

Andy: indicative with compatible. Cannot be explained has been replaced with not fully understood. And these aren't minor linguistic changes. In law, there's a difference between guilt and doubt. The Lucy Letby case has exposed the fault line between how medicine reasons and how courts decide. Medicine tolerates uncertainty, but law demands resolution. So when medical uncertainty is compressed into legal certainty, something is lost. And once a verdict is delivered, experts, like everyone else, are affected by outcome bias. The conviction itself becomes part of the evidence landscape, and to challenge it feels destabilizing. And that's why shifts in expert opinion matter so much. They suggest that the case isn't scientifically settled. even if it's legally closed. And when expert certainty begins to erode, the foundation of a verdict built largely on that certainty becomes much harder to defend. And as we've said, this doesn't mean that Lucy Letby is innocent, but it does mean that the evidence against her isn't frozen in time. It's moving. And when evidence moves, justice, at the very least, should be willing to look again. That is the end of my statement piece about Lucy and Edby. But it's where we should really start the discussion on not just this case, but any case that relies on expert testimony, which is basically given in the framework of a criminal prosecution and not as an outside assessment.

Richard: Mm-hmm. Hmm? Yeah, well, I mean, I know it's difficult. How do you come up with a legal system that is better than the one we have? But at the same time, a case, especially if it relies heavily on expert opinion at the end of the day, mean, this is, know, experts can only give opinion. There are basic facts, but a lot of it is opinion. You ask any scientist, you take six scientists and put them in a room and give them a topic. They will all disagree with each other and they always will. And then you have eyewitness statements, which are just the most unreliable thing ever. And the legal system relies heavily on eyewitness statements as well, which in this case, funnily enough, they don't have a single one of. And I'm still the CCTV business. mean, if the CCTV is there and covers the room and there's no CCTV over doing anything wrong, I'm sorry, but that counts for something. I mean, I'd be interested to see if the jury were allowed to watch the CCTV. You know?

Andy: They usually are. If there is CCTV evidence, juries usually are. I when I was doing my attempted murder trial, I was shown some really good photos of the stabbing victim.

Richard: ⁓ But in this case, because the CCT evidence didn't show anything, were they shown CCT-V footage showing nothing, or was that then simply

Andy: No, but there was no TV. There was no TV.

Richard: ⁓ You did mention yesterday that there was CCTV.

Andy: No, I said there wasn't. We said there should be in every baby unit, but there wasn't. Well, yeah, there should be at the entrance and exit of every hospital. But I mean, about the evidence, just a few days ago, the world's top confession expert ⁓ quit the National Crime Agency to give evidence.

Richard: Well, they should be in every board. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but every world should have it.

Andy: that Lucy Letbee's notes are not admissions of guilt. Her notes, which were found in her home, as we spoke about yesterday, where she said, I am evil, I did this, I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them, and I'm a horrible, evil person. They were put before the jury as confessions, and they formed a cornerstone of the conviction. for which she is now serving 15 whole life sentences. But Professor Gisley Gurdensen, I'm thinking he's probably Scandinavian. He's the world expert on the forensic psychology of confessions. And he said that the notes should not be seen as a confession. He felt so strongly about the case, claimed by experts to be the greatest miscarriage of justice of the century.

Richard: Hmm. Yep.

Andy: that he quit the National Crime Agency over conflicts of interest with this case so that he could give evidence to try and clear Lucy Letby's name. And that's quite a big deal.

Richard: All right, okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Andy: He said I had to resign to do justice to this case. It was in the interest of fairness and justice. I'd already seen Lucy and later realised that there was a potential conflict of interest because of my role at the NCA. I couldn't just withdraw because there was a case in Northern Ireland where I declined to produce a report and it was misinterpreted as evidence of guilt. So I became concerned that with withdrawing from Letby's case, this could similarly be misrepresented.

Richard: Vroom. See that's a bit naughty isn't it? The experts pulled out so...

Andy: Yeah, if the expert won't give evidence because he's not comfortable with what he's expected to say, then they say, ⁓ well, they're definitely guilty then.

Richard: Yeah, no, no, that's bang out of order.

Andy: and terrible. ⁓ there's another doctor, a consultant, one of those who helped put Lucy Letbe behind bars. And he has admitted this is Dr. John Gibb, who worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital with Letbe. And he confessed that nobody saw her do anything. And he's, he's admitted his guilty feelings over the case, ⁓ which cast doubt on the killer nurse's conviction. The pair were on the same ward between 2015 and 2016 when Letby was found to have murdered seven babies. Dr. Gibb repeatedly raised concerns to management about Lucy Letby, who he initially described as quiet and competent. And this consultant pediatrician said a staffer in review that was ordered on the neonatal ward after babies started dying. more frequently ever, that Let B was the one person on duty for all the baby deaths and collapses, which was a key factor in her conviction. back down.

Richard: But that's like saying that if somebody gets stabbed in the borderline, I'm a suspect because I was there all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy: Yes, because you were definitely there, as was I. But Dr. Gibb has since spoken of his guilt, confessing that they may have got the wrong person as she looks set to spend the rest of her life behind bars. Speaking on a Netflix documentary regarding the investigation, he admitted, live with two guilts. Guilt that we let the babies down, and tiny, tiny, tiny guilt did we get the wrong person. But there is a guilt, you know, just in case miscarriage of justice. I don't care how tiny your guilt is, mate, or how tiny you make it sound. If you're talking about it, you're feeling it.

Richard: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely.

Andy: So yeah, I mean the data used to convict her was inference as we said yesterday and today. It shouldn't have stood up in court. It's not enough. They basically put that girl away for the rest of her natural life with no evidence whatsoever. All inference and insinuation.

Richard: Mm-hmm. Yes. ⁓ Again, the fact that nobody saw her do anything. mean, over what period was this? I this wasn't a matter of hours or days, a year. yeah, you know, somebody would have seen something suspicious.

Andy: I know. And as I said yesterday, if you're having that many abnormal deaths in a baby unit, the first thing you do is put cameras up. find out why. You don't just go on for a year watching kids die and having collapses. You just fucking sort it out. But no, I've got a better idea. We'll let enough of them die and then err over there. We'll put the blame on her.

Richard: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Die. I'm amazed that the... on her. and you know wouldn't be the first health trust to try and cover things up. There's been plenty of cases of them.

Andy: They're doing it as we speak. Some health trust somewhere is committing heinous crimes as we speak.

Richard: Yeah, no doubt about it. And again, I find, especially in a baby unit, I'm sorry, the fact that, mean, baby monitors, they cost sod all, can buy them from Amazon. even a CCTV system, they're not that expensive anymore. You'd have thought in a UCR, in any intensive care unit, that they would be cameras.

Andy: I know you bought them from Oligos. always I have three cameras in my house and I live in a one bedroom apartment. I just like to look at myself.

Richard: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was going to say, you're just a pervert who likes watching yourself doing wrong stuff.

Andy: No, I bought a camera linked to my phone so that I could watch my cats when I wasn't home while I was at work. It was like my cat cam. It was much fun.

Richard: ⁓ okay. Yeah, yes I'm sure it was. Apart from the bits where they were sleeping.

Andy: It was, because you could see them walking up on me desk and looking into the camera going, what the fuck?

Richard: Hmm. I mean, I imagine it would be quite interesting because I imagine they behave in a very different manner when there's no humans around.

Andy: ⁓ they do. They do. Yeah. It's amazing how many people don't know that cats actually walk around on their hind legs when you're not looking.

Richard: You

Andy: knife and fork. There's bacon in the fridge, you know.

Richard: Mm-hmm.

Andy: anymore.

Richard: But yeah, I think that part of the problem here though, as you were saying is that she had her appeal, the appeal was rejected as far as the law's concerned, that's it done and dusted. But the law can't be that rigid, especially in a case as complicated as this, that again, has relied on expert witness evidence and an awful lot of complicated medical stuff. And again, The jury. Now you've got a pool of a whole nation to pick from for your jury. You would have thought for a case like this they would have insisted on 12 people who had sufficient medical training to understand what was being said to them.

Andy: I can point to another example of that. There's a pool of 350 million people in America and they chose Donald Trump to be the president. So that argument falls flat on its face.

Richard: Yep. Yeah, but there is a difference between, know, anybody can run for president in the zone where anybody can become an MP, but not everybody has sufficient medical knowledge to deal with a case like this. So.

Andy: Yeah, but if you start selecting jurors by their skill sets, then you're no longer being tried by a jury of your peers.

Richard: Hmm, yeah, alright, I'll grant you, but I think that dispensations can be made in certain cases.

Andy: But also that could go horribly wrong the other way because don't forget it was medical experts who were twisting the fucking narrative in the first place.

Richard: Well, this is true. Yeah, no, this is true. It may not actually help. I don't know. ⁓ But, know, again, and I don't know, but as a jury, if I sat on a jury in a case like this and after we retired, I said, look, quite frankly, there's an awful lot of this stuff I do not understand. Would somebody come down and sit with the jury and go through that medical shit and explain it in greater detail so that they do understand it? No, you see. So there is a flaw there, isn't there?

Andy: No, not allowed to. Not allowed to. You can ask while you're in the jury room, you can ask to look at evidence again, but nobody is allowed to actually talk to you.

Richard: Hmm Yeah, but if you don't understand the evidence the first time, looking at it again isn't likely to help, is it? It's going to be still...

Andy: It didn't stop us asking for the photos of the stabbing again.

Richard: I'm sure it didn't. But that in itself is a disturbing fact in a jury though, isn't it?

Andy: I know but you know we all love a bit of gore.

Richard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, at the end of the day, we're human beings. you know, I mean, I went to the cinema and I watched that movie Mercy the other day. I don't know if you've heard of that. Chris Pratt and he's a copper who's been accused of murder and he's been championing this new system where

Andy: I haven't learned it yet.

Richard: They strap you into a chair immediately and you have an hour and a half to convince an AI that you're not guilty. And I mean that, you know, the whole timing was very much 24 timing, which if anybody has never seen 24 according to 20. Yes, but it also claims that you can get from Jaren Cross station to King's Cross in four minutes. No. Not no, even even if you had completely clear streets, yeah, there's no way you're doing that. So, you know, a lot gets compressed into the hour and a half, but it is entertainment.

Andy: It goes on for 89. No, not even with a fucking jet helicopter.

Richard: But I imagine we are a long way from being able to have an AI to sit in trial. And I'm sure that even that wouldn't be perfect. And this is always going to be the problem with justice, isn't it? Justice is always going to be flawed because it's human beings that do the judging. ⁓

Andy: It would be a long way from perfect. You can't argue with that, What's up?

Richard: Yeah, there is a lot in this case that is very worrying. one would hope that, you know, eventually, because, and again, I know that especially these days, cost is a big deal. And this is one of the reasons why you get one appeal, because they don't want to be paying for people to have appeal after appeal after appeal.

Andy: Yeah. Well, this is also why they want to do away with juries for trials that aren't for murder or for ⁓ other stuff. See my little overhead camera shot here.

Richard: ⁓ very nice.

Andy: My little kitty cat. Hello, mate.

Richard: Yes. Look at you and your disco keyboards. But yeah, no, there's, mean, you know, if ever there was a case where it would be reasonable to reopen this case and investigate it again, I think this one definitely is.

Andy: Yeah.

Richard: because there's nothing open and shut about it at all. In fact, there's an awful lot of it that is clearly very dubious.

Andy: Yeah. Yes, I mean, as it stands, it's a travesty and it is definitely a miscarriage of justice. As I say, regardless of guilt or not. I mean, if I was on her jury, I would definitely have been on her side.

Richard: Mmm. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Andy: simply from the fact that there was no evidence that I could see in my entire trial. Regardless of how you felt about her personally or whether or not you thought she was guilty, there was not one scrap of evidence.

Richard: Yeah Hmm. So, no, no, is all- But you see, someone else, and it's bothered me for years as well, that, you know, in any case, but cases like this, that the media are allowed to have so much access to write about it, because you do end up with juries and even judges who feel that to keep the public happy, they have to come up with a verdict of guilty because the trial has already happened in the papers. And how outraged would society be if that judge, those juries, had said, not guilty? I mean, there would have been outcry about it. Absolute hoo-ha. The papers would have gone on about it forever. But that's wrong, that trials can be interfered with by the media in such a way. I have a real problem with that.

Andy: Yeah, I mean, it's basically jury knobbling. Because if I tried it or you tried it, we'd go to prison.

Richard: Yeah, for all intents and purposes. Yeah. And no doubt, you know, all those jury would have read the media long before they were ever in, you know, in court. So they'd have gone in, they still allowed access to media, to news and yeah. Yeah, right. See, there's something very wrong about that because, you know, the media...

Andy: and while they were in court as well. Yeah, of course, because you're not sequestered. They were allowed home every day.

Richard: They come to a conclusion and then they just persuade everybody that their conclusion is correct.

Andy: Well, when your headline starts with the most evil woman on earth.

Richard: Yes, yes, before she's even been tried. No, I mean that needs to change. The media should not be able to influence any court case and I don't see why it's necessary for the media to report on these things until it gets to court.

Andy: Yeah. No, I feel really sorry for her and I hope that at some point in the not too distant future, because justice is blind, but let's hope it's not death as well, but at some point in the not too distant future, she'll get a chance at a retrial. And hopefully, unless they've found some compelling evidence, she'll be able to walk away because as it stands, they have nothing on her.

Richard: Mmm. Yeah. No, indeed. But then you see, again, another problem here, isn't it? I understand that it is a problem. It's very hard to prosecute an NHS trust. It's very hard to prosecute a corporation or a company because it has a legal entity in its own right.

Andy: You might not be able to prosecute them individually, but what you can do is say, all right, we couldn't prove that someone actually killed those kids. So the blame is now we're going to infer that it was absolutely the cause. The problem is the way your unit is run and the way your unit is built. So you are going to have to make some serious fucking changes and they are going to have to be enshrined in law to make sure that this never happens again.

Richard: Mm-hmm. But you see, do think, you know, I mean, this idea that you can't prosecute CEOs and, you know, managers and the likes because they're part of an organization. I mean, that bothers me because let's face it, there are plenty of crooked CEOs out there and companies taking full advantage of that.

Andy: No, absolutely should be personal responsibility.

Richard: Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. Yes, no.

Andy: To an extent, mean, just because you crash your Tesla into a tree doesn't mean you can sue Elon Musk.

Richard: No, indeed, but you know, I mean, especially with the organizations that run health care, though, mean, incompetence at managerial level when you're running a health care will only lead to incompetence ⁓ and mistakes happening further down the pyramid. Because, you know.

Andy: Yeah. Well, I mean, even 10 years ago, we were reading about NHS managers who were ordering light bulbs that cost 48 pounds each because they had to order them from a specific place. And it cost an extra £120 to get one screwed into a socket.

Richard: Mm-hmm. But my brother, he's a union rep in the NHS. And he works for, I don't know which union, but specifically he covers porters. And he was telling me that this is just in one hospital in Wales. So they got a new manager in. And the manager decided that as part of his flexing his muscles and showing people how great he was, that he was doing away with the yellow polo shirts that the porters wore and that they were now going to be wearing white shirts with long sleeves.

Andy: Ooh.

Richard: Now, people immediately pointed out that long sleeves are not allowed because you have buttons, germs can stay in them, it's impossible for people to wash their arms properly. And it was pointed out to him that white shows up dirt really, really badly, a lot quicker than yellow does. But he wouldn't have it. And my brother said at the end of the day, it was just a case of this man's ego.

Andy: and blood.

Richard: And that ego ended up with them going to court and it cost them 175,000 pounds for the judge to say, no, mate, your idea is ridiculous and you have wasted my time and a lot of money in insisting on this. You should have accepted the arguments that you were given in the first place as to why your decision was wrong and you should have let it go. So you're dealing with shit like that as well.

Andy: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, people who are put into the positions of management in organizations like that are 100 % idiots. And it won't change because it's all jobs for the boys and mine. I've got a mate who knows how to do that probably. And the thing is, once they get removed from one of those positions, they go straight into another one at another hospital, usually at an even higher level. They get promoted through stupidity.

Richard: Yeah, boys, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, ⁓ god, yeah, no, I've seen that happen far too many times. ⁓ we don't know what to do with this idiot. ⁓ well, let's give him a promotion and then it won't be a problem until he creates another one.

Andy: Yeah. It's fucking amazing. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway, that legitimately brings us to the end of our two-parter on Lucy Letbe. Lots of food for thought.

Richard: Well, now let's hope we'll be back talking about her again sometime in the next few years.

Andy: It would be nice to a follow up on her upcoming book, her OnlyFans page and her holiday in Majorca where mysteriously 15 babies died in the hotel she was staying in. Well, that won't happen. Anyway, thanks for listening. Hope to see you again next week and have yourselves a great week.

Richard: Hmm. Yes. Nope.

Andy: Don't get a job in a baby care unit because it's just not worth it these days. You never know when the finger's gonna point at you. Pardon me. You never know when the finger's gonna point at you. All right, we'll see you same time, same place next time. Bye for now.

Richard: Take it easy peeps. Mmm. Yeah