Nurse Lucy Letby found guilty of murdering seven babies

The jury consist of people like us,the posters on this forum...she wasn't convicted on all charges so I'd say they evaluated the evidence on all sides thoroughly before giving all their verdicts.

Why would anyone do something like this? It bothers me when people blame psychological disorders as if any one of us could be so consumed by an illness that our ability to chose would be gone. I have been badly depressed, done some things I was not proud of, but I still think that even at my worst I had the ability to choose my path. She caused immeasurable pain. How does she live with herself? Why did she do it? Is it that when you start making bad choices, you become more and more indifferent to what you’re doing. Why she did this is something I will never understand.

God, maybe she is a sadist. But I don’t believe you are a born sadist. So how exactly she became one is another mystery. Stuff like that scares me because essentially we are all born with our various personalities, sure, but a lot depends on what happens to us and whether we chose to be as bad as the worst thing that happened to us, if you understand me? Or better than that? God, it’s confusing and perplexing .

Exactly. If we can understand it, we can least try to prevent it occurring.

Some people are born that way, unlikely she got it from upbringing, just unfortunate genes

Except - some of you don't.

There's another case already: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/file-handed-police-after-unexpected-27603275

She could definitely be innocent. There is only circumstantial evidence. The conviction does make me uneasy since there is no hard evidence but whether she did it or not, only she knows. We've seen this happen with a case in the Netherlands where a nurse was convicted like this but it got overturned years later and the deaths were explained naturally. Imagine if Letby is actually innocent here. One thing I can say is that I hope I never have to go up against a jury. The standard for proof beyond reasonable doubt doesn't seem super high.

The notes that were pushed as confession notes all have her saying she didn't do it by the way. If you're going to take the note as a confession but then disregard the parts where she said she didn't do it, then it's not really fair. I know some people who are studying/studied medicine and I have to say that narcissism is quite common amongst them. Granted they are young doctors but I imagine the profession attracts narcissists, psychopaths, people with big egos and so on. I'd say the percentage is small but they would be there. I could easily see Letby being thrown under the bus to cover up whatever. Imagine if she was actually a nurse who genuinely cared and put in extra hours and all that and was affected by the deaths, only to get railroaded like that. I'm not saying shes innocent at all. I've just been reading about the case recently and there are some big red flags for me that raise doubt.

You are still claiming that her absence of empathy is the cause for her actions. It is absolutely not. A lot of people have no/ diminished empathy without causing harm.

Whatever her motivation: she chose to carry out these acts. Lack of empathy might have been an aiding factor in making these decisions, but it wasn’t the driver. And btw: very human has the ability to compartmentalise, empathy or not.

You don’t need empathy to know right from wrong. How is this so difficult to understand? Ironically she probably has at least a degree of cognitive empathy to have masked successfully for a long time.

I never claimed that compartmentalisation was the same as a lack of empathy. I mentioned it as convenient way to distance yourself from your actions to keep your mind free from distress.

Likewise I won't spare a single thought for her.

But life imprisonment on the back of circumstantial evidence bothers me. I did a stint on jury duty and when I saw the "logic" used by my "peers" to convict a man for armed robbery based on crappy early 90's CC camera footage (with the resolution of a potato) I am bothered by the process.

"sure the guards know it was him, they wouldnt have charged him if it wasn't him, they know them all" was the hard evidence that 11 other jurors used to convict this man, and the judge let them.

When posters ask "who else could have done it" that flies in the face of "innocent until proven guilty". No one needs to prove it wasn't them as proving a negative can often be impossible.

Yeah it was “reassuring” if that’s not an inappropriate word to use, that the jury demonstrated the ability to make decisions that didn’t reflect the prosecution viewpoint - it would make an appeal much harder in my view. Certainly lack of jury engagement or analysis on this case doesn’t appear to be a valid arguement. It was a mammoth task and given the nature of the content, I’m sure very upsetting for them.