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Professor Norman Fenton has been reviewing the statistics relating to the Lucy Letby case. His focus is entirely on the statistical evidence and not the clinical evidence.
He has never commented on the guilt or innocence of Letby, but he is sure that “the case should never have been triggered by the statistical evidence.”
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Letby is a former neonatal nurse who has been convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder another seven at the Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016. The latest of her convictions followed a retrial of the attempted murder of a baby girl known as Baby K, the verdict for which was reached in July 2024.
Last month Sir David Davis MP called for a retrial of Lucy Letby. Based on his own review of the evidence Sir Davis believes there is a high likelihood that Letby may not be guilty.
As reported by GB News, Sir David spent three months going through the evidence. He said, “You can’t be certain, but most likely 90 odd per cent not guilty.” And offered an alternative explanation for the deaths.
“The most likely reason is one of two things: either poor management by the hospital or the Royal College found a superbug Pseudomonas. An investigation found that or both together. That’s much more likely,” he said.
The following week, Sky News reported that Letby had lost her appeal against a conviction for the attempted murder of Baby K. Letby’s lawyer, Benjamin Myers KC, had argued that the judge should not have allowed the retrial of Baby K to go ahead due to “overwhelming and irremediable prejudice” caused by media coverage of her first trial.
Myers said the media had been “saturated with unadulterated vitriol” towards the former nurse before the retrial, citing 62 examples of hostile coverage, including a debate on ITV’s Loose Women titled: ‘Was Lucy Letby born evil?’
As The Guardian noted, outside court, there was a growing chorus of voices raising questions about some of the key evidence presented in the trial. There was no forensic evidence to prove her guilt and no one saw Letby causing harm. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on statistical evidence and expert opinion on complex medical points.
Due to laws intended to ensure juries are not influenced by stories in the press, throughout the trial period of 21 months and much of the preceding six years, British journalists reported only what was said in court.
However, “Sir David Davis MP used parliamentary privilege to tell the House of Commons in May about a 13,000-word article in the New Yorker magazine about ‘the Lucy Letby trial, which raised enormous concerns about both the logic and the competence of the statistical evidence’,” The Guardian said.
Related: A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? New Yorker, 13 May 2024
As Professor Norman Fenton explains below, “There really was nothing unusual about the spike in neonatal deaths when Lucy was working at the Countess of Chester. If she does ever get a re-trial then the judge should not allow any of the statistical evidence to be presented since it has almost no probative value.”
Related: “Killer nurse” case: Is Lucy Letby guilty or has the evidence been skewed?
Was there a spike in neonatal deaths when Lucy Letby worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital?
On Dan Wooton’s show on 25 October Scott McLachlan and I were interviewed about the Lucy Letby case. The full one-hour special on Dan Wooton’s Outspoken channel is HERE. Scott has written about it and expands on many of the key issues in the latest of his in-depth articles about the case.
My own concerns about the case have focused entirely on the statistical evidence and not on the clinical evidence – I’ve never explicitly commented on the guilty or innocent question but I am sure that the case should never have been triggered by the statistical evidence. In particular, the police chart shown in court showing Lucy as the nurse present at all the baby collapses was not the “impossible to happen by coincidence” scenario claimed. I’ve previously done a video with Scott about this.
In one segment of the Dan Wooton show I briefly described the research Scott and I had done that challenges the widely accepted notion that there was a large spike in neonatal deaths during the period between 2015 and 2016 when Lucy worked at the Countess of Chester hospital. At one point I said the year 2014 when I should have said 2016, so I wanted to correct that and also show the details of the data I was referring to based on this paper: ‘How unusual was the spike in neonatal deaths when Lucy Letby was working?’
So here is a new video about the “spike” in neonatal deaths:
The key chart is this one:
The Countess of Chester’s so-called spike was 9 and 8 deaths in 2015 and 2016 respectively when Lucy was there (the period she was there covered only 15 of these 17 deaths). You can see there were 4 in 2014 and only 3 in 2017 but that was because the unit was downgraded after Lucy left.
The chart shows the data that Scott collected for the 14 other hospitals with maternity units most closely matching the size and demographics of the Countess of Chester. The blanks are simply where the data were not available. You do need not great statistical skills to see there is nothing that unusual about the Countess of Chester numbers in 2015-2016. We can see, for example, that Sherwood Forest in 2014 had 13 deaths from a similar number of births while in all 4 years, Kettering had very similar numbers all 4 years to the higher numbers at Countess of Chester.
In 2015 when Countess of Chester experienced a peak of 9 deaths, Dorset Hospital had a higher rate of deaths per thousand births because it had 7 from a smaller number of births in total.
So how statistically unusual were the 9 neonatal deaths from 3,047 births at Countess of Chester in 2015? Based on a Bayesian calculation of the distribution for the rate of neonatal deaths from all of these similar hospitals, the expected number of deaths in any single year between 2014-17 has a median value of 6 with a mean of 7.46, and 95% confidence interval between 0.6 and 22.4.
From that, we infer the probability of observing at least 9 deaths in any given year by chance alone is 34%. Not unusual at all. And the probability of observing at least 8 is 40.4%.
So, in summary, there really was nothing unusual about the spike in neonatal deaths when Lucy was working at the Countess of Chester. If she does ever get a re-trial then the judge should not allow any of the statistical evidence to be presented since it has almost no probative value.
About the Author
Norman Fenton is a Professor Emeritus of Risk Information Management at the Queen Mary University of London. He is also a Director of Agena, a company that specialises in risk management for critical systems. He is a mathematician by training whose current focus is on critical decision-making and, in particular, on quantifying uncertainty using causal, probabilistic models that combine data and knowledge (Bayesian networks). The approach can be summarised as “smart data rather than big data.”
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Hi Rhoda,
Pleased you are revisiting the Lucy Letby case.
It’s fairly obvious to me this is a fix up on Lucy.
The nurse is totally innocent, they are using her as a scapegoat for other reasons.
just by her statements before they frightened her, is enough for me.
No mention was made of all the sewage leaks in the wards.
Good on you Dave!
Nothing would surprise about the medical profession after the Covid scam..
This case looks so similar to a Dutch case of Lucia de Berk (better known as Lucia de B.) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk_case
Lucia was convicted for the murder of babies under her care, based on statistical analysis. Just like they’re trying to do with Letby. Lucia spent 8 years in prison, but her lifelong sentence was eventually overturned.
One of the lessons learned is that the statistical attempts to link someone, is complete nonsense. And even before Lucia’s conviction this was known, as it had been tried before.
The people pushing this should be aware of this, it’s unthinkable that they do not. So what is going on? And I can help but notice all the other similarities, up to the names of the women. Lucia is just the Dutch version of Lucy.
Hi
M. van der Kemp,
Interesting comment, that I have never heard before.
I wonder if Rhoda could look into it in the future.
I hope the Letby-defense team is aware of it. But they must be.
The Lucia de B. case is well-known in my country. They even made a movie about it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800338/
Lucia also wrote a book about the time she spend in prison. Not so much about the technical details about her case. She wanted to write another book, but she hasn’t. Hopefully she just enjoys freedom.
Hopefully Letby can enjoy that too soon.