Lucy Letby

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“We’ve found a witch. May we burn her?”

— Monty Python and the Holy Grail

On herd minds, groupthink and narrative biases

Lucy Letby’s case is in the news. Those internet citizens who have taken more than a passing interest have divided into opposing camps. There are some for whom Lucy Letby is a cold-blooded monster. Others question the safety of her criminal conviction. Those with a passing acquaintance with the case tend to suppose she must be a monster, having been convicted of it. But those who take a closer look tend quickly to gravitate to an extreme: either they are horrified by the extent of her visceral wickedness or certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Lucy Letby is positively innocent of all charges, and even some kind of martyred saint.

These two extremes — outright innocence and guilt beyond reasonable doubt — leave a wide range of ambivalent attitudes between. Bu humans like our narratives to tell us things about the world, and a narrative that says, “huh, who knows?” is not awfully helpful. It doesn’t tell us much about the world.

It may offer little intellectual satisfaction, but it may be the best we can reasonably expect.

The system has behaved in a way which renders Lucy Letby either a monster or scapegoat. There is no middle ground, in which she is an ordinary kid, with her pluses and minuses, virtues and failings, just like the rest of us: she is either angel or devil.

Given the probabilities at play — 99% of us are neither angel or devil — giving Lucy Letby only these two choices is an injustice in itself.

The problem with “conviction” and “innocence” narratives is that they become self-fulfilling: from either perspective you can panel-beat most subsequent information to suit that view. The hard-edged peripheral evidence we do have can and has been coloured through that lens.

Here is BBC Reporter Judith Moritz, in a piece to camera, on reviewing Letby’s social media posts:

“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.

“She comes across as — mousy; a bit normal — you can’t really marry that with the enormity of what she’s been accused of.”

Lucy Letby’s apparently vivacious personality and active social life, for example. If you have an open mind, this behaviour is normal. It tells us nothing. It places Lucy Letby within a standard deviation of the mean. But once you are persuaded of her guilt it marks her out as a psychopath — corroborates and amplifies her wickedness. If you believe her to be innocent, that this information has been so rudely traduced only illustrates the single-mindedness with which our vicious system will crush an innocent, unsuspecting spirit.

Similarly, that Lucy Letby searched online for the parents of the deceased is consistent with either breathtaking malevolence — if she is a serial killer — or affecting compassion — if she is not. But by itself, it is evidence of neither. We all Google individuals we meet in real life — even people we know we probably shouldn’t: this is perfectly normal behaviour. We are curious animals.

So we must remember there is another active participant in our judgment here: our own cultural baggage. The mechanisms by which we process information are biases — confirmation bias — a well-documented logical fallacy where we frame any information to validate what we already believe — or its less-understood converse: ignorance bias, where we tactically ignore information that does not support, or tends to contradict, our working theory.

Both biases are in play whether we believe Lucy Letby is a serial killer, or the victim of a grave injustice. Both standpoints are equally emotive.

There is no comfortable centre to hold here.

Standpoint intersection ahoy

Speaking of narratives there are many at play here. Criminal justice stands at the intersection of at least four discrete fields of intellectual enquiry: law, medicine, statistics and ethics. They are not commensurate — each has its own rules, customs and institutions and authority in one does not commute to the others. In a perfect world their outcomes would converge, but the world is not perfect. There will be circumstances in which the correct legal outcome is not morally right, the correct moral outcome is not borne by the statistics, the statistics are at odds with our knowledge, and vice versa. There is little wonder good people get upset.

There is even room for epistemology. You cannot but frame your understanding of the overall scenario through one or other of those prisms. Or a combination, but that is liable to lead to conflict. There is no transcendent, neutral frame of reference by which the others may be judged. Without a framework the territory is random, incoherent noise.

For the scenario is one that unusually uncertain, about which the prospect of consensus is unusually low. It is not even clear that there was a wrongful killing here, let alone by whom.

Substance, form and process

The first thing to bear in mind is the difference between the substantive — the wilful morally unjustified ending of a life (this is an ethical frame of reference), the formal — the commission of the act of murder as defined in law (in some ways an ethicist’s map of the territory: a systematic way of economically delivering that ethical framework), and the procedural — the process one must gone through to determine whether a murder was committed. This includes the the presumption of innocence, the adversarial tradition, the laws of evidence, the rules of court procedure, and tactics and strategies that defence and prosecution teams adopt within that milieu to best present their case, whose outcome is ultimately determined not by judges, lawyers, ethicists statisticians, physicians or metaphysicians but by 12 ordinary people, who may have none of these skills, drawn at random from the electoral roll.

These are different questions, with different considerations, and it is important they are not confused. A person who murders unobserved in cold blood, leaves no evidence, and has no motive cannot be convicted beyond reasonable doubt of murder unless no other explanation is possible. The procedural element fails: there is not enough evidence. A person who kills in cold blood, before witnesses but in demonstrable, reasonable self-defence, cannot be convicted of murder because the formal elements are not met. She has a defence.

Our justice system is meant to benefit the accused in marginal cases: we regard acquitting the occasional perpetrator as a lesser evil than convicting a single innocent. But even then we get it wrong sometimes. Cases involving medical misadventure and statistics are a recurring case of injustice.

Where, as in these cases, there is no “direct” evidence, the form and procedure becomes all the more important.

In Lucy Letby’s case there is no direct evidence definitively linking her to a single murder. There is no direct evidence unequivocally suggesting there was a murder — as opposed to misadventure, negligence or even inadvertent accident — at all. But by the same token nor is there unequivocal evidence that any of these were not murders, nor that, if they were, Letby did not commit them.

The internet is polarised around two highly unlikely contingencies.

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 did not amount to murder.

The question of whether she should be convicted 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. It is unclear 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)

If you conclude that “foul play” (including negligence) is at work there is then the question of who did it. Did other personnel have an opportunity?

Emergence

There is a 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. Roll three sixes Each of these enquiries requires an answer “beyond reasonable doubt”. If a victim dies in the presence of a single person with a means and motive, such that if the death was intentional there is no other possible suspect, if there is a reasonable doubt as to the death being natural — even if it probably was not — there can be no conviction.

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” — Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959)

Here is where a sequence makes a difference. One such occurrence might be improbable, five occurrences extremely improbable, 500,

So

What are the percentages of serial killers with history of broken homes, physical or sexual abuse, and mental illness? What percentage are female?

“God complex”

Killing people is not evidence of a God complex. The basest criminal can take life. Bringing people back to life — that is evidence of a God complex.

Evidence

Insulin “smoking gun”

In two cases (Child F and Child L) lab tests indicating high levels of insulin without accompanying c-peptide, which is prime facie evidence of administered insulin (naturally occurring insulin is accompanied by c-peptides; artificially administered insulin is not). Insulin was not prescribed for either infant. If it was true that insulin was added without prescription this is evidence of actual human agency in these two episodes.

The defence team accepted the prosecution’s claim that insulin was added to parenteral nutrition bags and it was presented to the court as an agreed fact.

• The test in question was not reliable for factitious insulin. From the label:

“Please note that the insulin assay performed at RLUH is not suitable for the investigation of factitious hypoglycaemia. If exogenous insulin administration is suspected as the cause of hypoglycaemia, please inform the laboratory so that the sample can be referred externally for analysis.”

• The test results seem to indicate very high levels of insulin: 4657 pmol/L is about four times a dangerously high level in an adult. While, yes, this is what you might expect a murderer to try to do —
• Both babies recovered: You might expect premature babies registering such high insulin levels — four times a critical level for an adult — might have at least caused a fuss at the hospital. But not only did the babies make a full recovery, with no record of hypoglycemic coma, but —
• No-one even noticed the high insulin in their tests until 2018: That is, three years after the babies made a full recovery. If you are looking for a res ipsa loquitur about these events, can we suggest that this is as indicative of negligence in the clinical staff administering the test, or the self-professed unreliability of the tests for detecting factitious insulin.

The Texas sharpshooter

See the TriedbyStats website: Over 730 shifts, with 38 “suspects” If you self-select one

The victim’s families

There are unquestionable victims here: the families. If Lucy Letby wasn’t responsible then this was either an unavoidable accident, in which case, there is no closure, or there is another culpable explanation — an alternative murderer seems extremely implausible — but medical misadventure of some kind is not. Difficult

The post-it note

Everyone seems to accept the notes are highly inclusive and of little evidential value.

“The ramblings of someone under extreme psychological pressure.”

Resources

Online

• That New Yorker Article (choose your own snapshot from the Wayback Machine)
• Mephitis - The Lucy Letby Case May In Time Be The Story Of The Century
• TriedbyStats
• The Insulin ‘Evidence’ in the Lucy Letby Trial. Criminal Justice in England: Disagreeable Facts

Podcasts

• We need to talk about Lucy Letby (Peter Elston and Michael McConville podcast)
• The Trial of Lucy Letby (Daily Mail podcast)

See also

• Miscarriages of justice