Lucy Letby: the handover notes: Difference between revisions

{{drop|L|et me first}} explain my “allegation” [[pedantry]]. It has so entered the commonplace that Ms Letby “collected trophies” that even the President of the King’s Bench repeated it without so much as a pausing, whilst recapping issues at the trial.  

But, during the trial, was ''not'' alleged that Lucy Letby kept handover notes as trophies. As far as I can tell, no variation of the word “trophy” was uttered over the course of the ten-month trial.<ref>One my fellow [[Pundshop Poirot|pundshop Poirots]] has accumulated a near-complete record of the trial transcripts and kindly searched for “Trophy”, “Trophies”, “trophy”, “trophies” across the whole database for me. There were no hits.</ref>

Nor did the Crown Prosecutor make much of them in his opening or closing. Mr Johnson KC said:

We can see the Crown presented the handover sheets not to allege Ms. Letby kept serial killer trophies but, based on her explanations for keeping them, ''as evidence of her dishonesty''. Mr. Johnson KC didn’t believe her explanations. He thought the sheets were ''somehow'' suspicious, but he did not offer a sensible theory for ''why''. His best guess was that ''they would help her perform a covert Facebook search''. He didn’t buy Ms. Letby’s explanation that she was just a bit of a “magpie”. But it’s a far more plausible explanation than “Facebook spellchecker”, which doesn’t even make sense, let alone “serial killer trophy hunter”.

Again, the prosecution displays all the signs of incurable [[confirmation bias]]. If you are presented with two options, one of which is has a fair chance of happening at random, even if not a racing certainty, but for the other to happen would be an extreme outlier, then without better evidence, ''don’t plump for the outlier''.  

We’re back to our old friend [[base rate neglect]]: squirrelling useless bits and bobs away is ''not especially unusual behaviour''. Mrs. Contrarian does it. One does not need to be mentally ill to collect things like a magpie.<ref>With that said, up to 6% of the US population have a diagnosable “hoarding disorder” according to the American Psychiatric Association’s {{pl|https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm|Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders}}, 5th Ed. So, even an undiagnosed psychiatric hoarding condition would be orders of magnitude more likely than this being “serial killer trophy collecting”.</ref> Further more, staff taking handover notes home with them seems to have been {{pl|http://cheshire-live.co.uk/news/patient-notes-countess-chester-hospital-6128424|a perennial problem at the Countess of Chester Hospital}}.

All the same — as that newspaper report from 2013 illustrates — taking handover notes home is not best practice, and requires explanation.  

But rather than starting, as the Prosecution seems to have done, with the hypothesis that “this must mean serial murder” and working backwards to confirm it, the right starting place is:

“We have some odd behaviour. What could explain this? Is this the sort of thing a person who was not a serial murderer might do?”}}

Given how rare [[healthcare serial murder]]s are, you should only ask, “is this cogent evidence of serial murder?” if you have answered “no” to that preceding question.

But let’s say we ''had'' answered, “no” to that preceding question. Is this odd behaviour this cogent evidence of serial murder? Consistent with it? Does it map to Mr. Johnson’s theory about spell-checking?

{{drop|T|he Crown may}} not have formally advanced the “trophies” line, but is it fair anyway? Look, I am not a serial murderer, so I suppose I am not well placed to say, but ride with me a while: ''a shoebox full of your own scribbled notes seems an odd serial killer trophy''.  

 

Doesn’t it?

Serial killers, the internet tells us, may take “trophies” as souvenirs or keepsakes from their victims or as a way of remembering to maintain a sense of control over their victims.