Lucy Letby: Difference between revisions
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====On herd minds, groupthink and narrative biases==== | ====On herd minds, groupthink and narrative biases==== | ||
{{drop|L|ucy Letby is}} back in the news in 2024. On 24 May | {{drop|L|ucy Letby is}} back in the news in 2024. On 24 May, the Court of Appeal denied her leave to appeal against her convictions.<ref>Neither the grounds for the appeal nor the reasons for refusal are yet public, pending the outcome of her retrial.</ref> On 10 June, her retrial for the attempted murder of “Child K” began in Manchester. All this was thrown into relief when, on 13 May, ''New Yorker'' magazine published “{{plainlink|https://wayback-api.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/lucy-letby-was-found-guilty-of-killing-seven-babies-did-she-do-it|A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did she do it?}}”, a 13,000-word investigative piece questioning the safety of Letby’s original convictions. | ||
The piece is loosely geo-blocked in the UK, ostensibly to avoid contempt of court pending the outcome of the retrial. But it is not hard to find the essay online. It ran unedited in the ''New Yorker''’s UK print edition, so there may be some canny “Streisand Effect” marketing at play here.<Ref>That a carefully-researched piece is not available, when so there is so much intemperate commentary published by everyone else raises its own questions about the practicality of ''sub judice'' rules in the age of the world-wide internet, but that is a discussion for another day.</ref> | |||
Having been convicted of multiple infant murders, the general public’s view is clear: justice has been done. The sooner Lucy Letby’s name fades from the commonplace the better. | |||
The | But look a bit closer and the picture is more complicated. The “confessional note” is not | ||
quite what it seems. Criminologists attach little weight to it. Eyewitness evidence does little more than put Letby at the scene of the incidents — a place she was contractually obliged to be. Nor is the evidence that any of the infants were the victims of foul play, by anyone, strong. | |||
There is, thus, a small band of dogged campaigners for Lucy Letbys innocence. | |||
The case for conviction ''emerges'' from a preponderance of small pieces of evidence that point in the same direction. There is no smoking gun. | |||
Now she is in prison there are two available narratives for Lucy Letby. Either she is the personification of unspeakable evil or she is the victim of a breathtaking miscarriage of justice. | |||
The system has behaved in a way which deprives this individual of a middle ground | By percentage of the population, serial murderers are vanishingly rare in Britain. Wikipedia lists fifty-five, since 1600. | ||
But so are miscarriages of justice. Wikipedia lists fifty-four, since 1255. | |||
Both these outcomes, then, are highly improbable. They leave untouched a vast range of more probable outcomes which suffer the disadvantage of being unsatisfactory explanations of an awful situation: We like our narratives to tell us about the world, those that says, “well, it’s hard to say” doesn’t do that. We do not find them useful. Few occupy that space. | |||
JC will advance the position that more of us ''should''. While it may offer little intellectual satisfaction, it may be the best we can reasonably expect. | |||
The system has behaved in a way which deprives this individual of a middle ground in which she is an ordinary kid, with her pluses and minuses, virtues and failings, just like the rest of us: neither angel nor devil. | |||
====Confirmation bias==== | ====Confirmation bias==== | ||
{{drop| | {{drop|“A|ngel” and “devil”}} narratives become self-fulfilling: once you’ve adopted one, you can panel-beat almost any subsequent information to suit your view. | ||
The little definitive peripheral evidence there is about Lucy Letby is coloured dramatically depending on who is looking at it. For example, her social media activity. Here is BBC Panorama reporter Judith Moritz, in a piece to camera,<ref>{{Plainlink|https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001q7dl/panorama-lucy-letby-the-nurse-who-killed|''Panorama'', 18 August 2023}}</ref>: | |||
{{quote| | {{quote| | ||
“Sparky, full of fun, popular — she looks like the life and soul of the party in these photos. I don’t know what Britain’s most prolific child killer should look like — ''I’m pretty sure it’s not this, though''.}} | “Sparky, full of fun, popular — she looks like the life and soul of the party in these photos. I don’t know what Britain’s most prolific child killer should look like — ''I’m pretty sure it’s not this, though''.}} | ||
And then a few moments later: | And then, a few moments later: | ||
{{Quote|“She comes across as — mousy; a bit ''normal'' — you can’t really marry that with the enormity of what she’s been accused of.”}} | {{Quote|“She comes across as — mousy; a bit ''normal'' — you can’t really marry that with the enormity of what she’s been accused of.”}} | ||
If — and ''only'' if — we are | If — and ''only'' if — we are persuaded of her guilt, her vivacious personality and active social life ''notwithstanding that malign nature'' mark her out as a psychopath. It ''corroborates'' and ''amplifies'' her wickedness. | ||
If we believe | If we believe she has been wrongfully convicted ''despite'' that vivacious personality and active social life — ''what sort of serial killer is like that?'' — it only confirms and illustrates the single-mindedness with which a vicious criminal system will crush an innocent, unsuspecting spirit. | ||
If we hold a neutral perspective, we see this behaviour as ''perfectly'' ''normal''. It tells us nothing: it places Lucy Letby in that ordinary space, with the rest of us, within a standard deviation of the mean. There have been very, very few serial killer nurses. We have no idea what, as a rule, they are like. This information does not help us. | |||
In the language of the criminal law Lucy Letby’s social media activity has low “probative” content — it doesn’t prove anything — but high “prejudicial” value — it colours any existing preconceptions a jury might hold. A court may exclude this evidence if “its prejudicial effect is out of proportion to its probative value”.<ref>Section 126, Criminal Justice Act 2003, which (per explanatory notes) preserves the common law power for the court to exclude evidence where its prejudicial effect is out of proportion to its probative value. </ref> | |||
That Lucy Letby searched online for the parents of the deceased is consistent with ''either'' breathtaking malevolence — if you take it that she ''is'' a serial killer — ''or'' affecting compassion — if you take it that she is ''not''. By itself, it is ''evidence'' of neither. We all search online for individuals we meet in real life — even people we know we probably shouldn’t: this is perfectly normal behaviour. We are curious, imperfect animals. | |||
====Standpoint intersection ahoy==== | ====Standpoint intersection ahoy==== | ||
{{Drop| | {{Drop|T|his case stands}} at the intersection of at least four distinct fields of enquiry: law, medicine, statistics and ethics. They are not “[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions|commensurate]]”: each has its own rules, customs and institutions. They do not necessarily agree. | ||
In a perfect world, they would converge, but the world is not perfect. They may conflict. There will be times | In a perfect world, they would converge, but the world is not perfect. They may conflict. There will be times when the correct legal outcome is not the moral one, where the moral one does not bear out the statistics, where the statistics are at odds what we know, and so on. There are inevitable incongruities. | ||
====Victims==== | ====Victims==== | ||
{{Drop|E|motions are already}} aggravated; the stakes are raised yet higher by the undoubted loss and grief of the families of lost infants. | {{Drop|E|motions are already}} aggravated; the stakes are raised yet higher by the undoubted loss and grief of the families of lost infants. That grief cannot be avoided. It burdens the families whatever its cause. ''That'' the families are bereaved is not at issue: the question is ''why'': neither conviction nor acquittal necessarily delivers or denies justice for their loss. One can respect the families’ unimaginable grief and seek to ameliorate it, by arguing her case. | ||
====Substance, form and process==== | ====Substance, form and process==== | ||
{{Drop| | {{Drop|W|e must keep}} in mind these different frames of reference. There is a ''substantive'' element comprising medicinal, statistical and observational information. It is filtered through a ''formal'' framework — the legal definition of “murder” — and a ''procedural'' one: the processes and customs one must observe to reach a formal legal conclusion — the presumption of innocence, the adversarial criminal justice system, the laws of evidence, the rules of court procedure, the tactics and strategies that adversarial teams must adopt within that milieu to best present their case, and the "tribunals of law and fact” — judge and jury — who must ultimately settle the question. Neither judges nor jury are necessarily, ethicists, statisticians, physicians or metaphysicians. | ||
A legal conviction, or acquittal is a highly constrained, ''artificial'' process: it has evolved over centuries to favour certainty over doubt while protecting the innocent from unjust punishment. | |||
By contrast, in the “town square” there is a freer debate. Blogposts, twitter threads, podcasts, discussion forums, TV documentaries and investigative journalism address different questions with different information, looser rules of engagement and greater or less intellectual rigour. | |||
The justice system is gives the accused the benefit of marginal doubt. Acquitting the occasional perpetrator is a “lesser evil” than convicting a single innocent. In the town square, the accused are afforded far less doubt. | |||
====The medical misadventure cases==== | ====The medical misadventure cases==== | ||
{{Drop|I|ndeed, cases involving}} medical misadventure, where no direct evidence and | {{Drop|I|ndeed, cases involving}} medical misadventure, where there is no direct evidence and only subsequently collated expert evidence as to statistics or “science” make up a fair proportion of those miscarriages of justice.<ref>The “junk science” of “forensic odontology” (comparing bite marks), blood spatter analysis and hair microscopy are a recurring case of injustice: Chris Fabricant, ''{{Plainlink|https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B09PF98JST?|Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System}}''.</ref> Sally Clark, Daniela Poggiali and Lucia de Berk are but three examples of convicted innocents. The last two have strikingly similar facts patterns. We should not take concerns about statistics lightly. | ||
Where there is no “direct” evidence, | Where there is no “direct” evidence, form and procedure become all the more important. | ||
In Lucy Letby’s case no direct evidence definitively links her to a single murder. | In Lucy Letby’s case no direct evidence definitively links her to a single murder. It is logically possible she ''did'' commit the murders, logically possible she ''did not'', and logically possible she played a role in some or all of the deaths that may warrant criticism but not a murder conviction. | ||
====Probabilities==== | |||
{{drop|I|t comes down}}, at some point, to an estimation of ''probabilities''. These inform how “sure” one can be about the proposition “defendant murdered victim”. | |||
These murder cases have an unusually wide range of unknowns. In isolation , we cannot say whether there was any murder at all. The deaths could have been innocent, and they could have been culpable to some legal standard short of murder (negligence, for example) | |||
There is kind of meta-statistics at play here, too. For even if there is reasonable doubt for every individual case, the unusual repetition of cases creates its own meta-narrative. | |||
Roll once and get a six, and there is no surprise. There was no more likely outcome. | |||
Roll ''three'' sixes and it becomes less probable, but not infeasible: you would expect it to happen, but only once in two hundred and sixteen times. | |||
But roll ''fifteen'' consecutive sixes and the odds drop to around one in half a trillion. You should start inspecting your die. Which is more likely: that this would happen by chance, or that the die is loaded? | |||
This is the essence of the prosecution case against Lucy Letby: | This is the essence of the prosecution case against Lucy Letby: while each of the events on her shifts was in itself explainable, the sheer number of consecutive deaths on her shift were not. | ||
Unlike in Sally Clark case, prosecution did not e | Unlike in Sally Clark case, prosecution did not e |