Lucy Letby: the ineffable truth
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Crime & Punishment
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Spotted routinely in the trenches of the keyboard war that rages on — though I sense it is blowing itself out; only a couple of Burmese Junglers still remain — over Ms. Letby’s conviction, you often see variations on this:
You were not at the trial. Unless you sat through ten months of evidence — unless you saw everything the jury saw, and looked into the whites of the defendant’s eyes — you cannot know the facts and cannot have a viable opinion on her innocence.
Of all the commonplaces advanced to prop the Crown’s sagging case, this is surely the weakest.
Run by those who also were not at the trial and so, by the same logic, have no better idea of how good a spectacle it was, it really amounts to saying:
“The outcome of this trial is agreeable to me. I wish to entertain no further debate about it.”
Impermeability
The trial was conducted according to the arcane rules of the criminal courts: the criminal law, the rules of procedure, the law of evidence, and long established (if often criticised) principles governing expert evidence.
These institutions have been set up to vouchsafe justice, and generally do, but they are not infallible. Miscarriages of justice can and do happen. Even outrageous ones.
From all the evidence-in-chief, cross-examination, the fork-tongued duels between wigged barristers and ornery experts, from from this tremendous melée, we must suppose that 12 random citizens formed a collective impression free enough from doubt to form a guilty verdict — but yet at the same time so mystic and ineffable that it cannot now be explained or rationalised. The verdict is a brute ontological fact, immune now to mortal analysis.
To the question:
How on Earth did she get convicted?
Comes the answer:
You had to be there.
The Holy Spirit was upon these jurors. A guilty soul was justly condemned. Now that spirit has passed. Like the peace of God, it passeth all understanding.
Justice has visited, done its thing and gone again, leaving no trace. None can now make sense of it. We must, instead, obediently abide.
What the eye don’t see —
Acurious feature of this argument is its dependence on what we cannot see. There is a “truth”, but it is comprised of darkness. We cannot apprehend it, so we cannot challenge it.
But, explicitly, the criminal law does not work like this. Quite the opposite: it is, to a fault, rational. It is unflinchingly evidence-based: evidence is the be-all and end-all. There are strict rules governing what may be admitted. All of it may be interrogated. Everything that can influence an outcome must lie on the surface. If it cannot be made to float — if it comprises innuendo or prejudice, we must sponge it from the record.
In a criminal court, everything is open to audit. Anything that is not is disallowed. A concluded criminal case cannot defy comprehension.
Darkness is not allowed.
Lucy Letby’s trials ran for months. There was a colossal amount of data, that is true, and there is no doubt the jurors’ task was Herculean — beyond any reasonable expectations of twelve ordinary men and women. They should be commended for their work. But this is not to say that the material grounds for their decision cannot be summarised, analysed or criticised.
Indeed: that is the very trial process: both prosecution and defence summarise their positions and present them to the jury.
So we should ask the question now:
How on Earth did she get convicted?
There ought to be a manageable answer. At the time of the original trial, in the public’s mind, it was something like this:
{{Quote|She admitted it on some post-it notes.
She, and no other nurse, was present at every collapse.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag In places, the alternatives have not entirely cohered.
This is not how conspirators behave.
Indeed, all the “strange band of misfits and ghouls” who have questioned the safety of the conviction have adopted the same stance. The defence case is by nature public, detailed, specific, articulated, and welcoming of good-faith challenge.
It has not had much. The credible challenges that have come back have been either formal in nature— “the rules have been followed, she had her chance, alea iacta est” — or somehow mystical — there are things about this process that resist intellectual inquiry and must not be disturbed.
This is especially perplexing since it is generally the prosecution who must makes the intellectual running. The burden of proof is such that it is the crown, not the defence, that should be best at spelling out the ingredients of its case. That the burden reverses on conviction should not alter this fact
For if the evidence was so compelling, and the crown’s case so immaculate, you would think someone would be able to articulate it. There are any number of erudite criticisms of the law, the application of evidence, the use of statistics, of the crown witnesses’ speculative diagnoses, available in the public domain. Bar one cantankerous lobbyist for the alcohol and tobacco industries — whose professional calling is to champion dubious causes —— no one has managed to mount any explanation of the merits of the crown’s case.
If you weren’t at the trial you can’t know: “context is everything”, and guilt with events through a combination of interlocking facts. This is a kind of “emergence” argument. It is routinely run, ironically enough, by people who also were not at the trial.
If this is right then the outcome of no trial can ever be gainsaid, appeals should also be forbidden, and the curial process should be sanctified as some ineffable, inexplicable conveyance of mystical verities by means of holy procedure, to be hereafter obeyed.
That is not how things work. Trials are reported, there are sequences, there are critical phases, points of sharp drama and afternoons of procedural guff.
See also
References
- ↑ Lucy Letby Trial recap, Chester Standard, July 3, 2023.
- ↑ Lucy Letby Trial recap, Chester Standard, July 6, 2023: “Professor Owen Arthurs viewed radiographic images for Child M and said they could not support or refute an air embolus.”
- ↑ Lucy Letby: Baby's catastrophic bleed not spontaneous, trial told, BBC, November 29, 2022. Per this report, Dr. Kinsey accepted in cross-examination that her findings did not assist with the cause of death, and that she had limited familiarity with air embolus.
- ↑ Baby had dangerously low blood sugar levels over three days, Letby trial told, The Standard, 24 February 2023.
- ↑ Lucy Letby Trial recap, Chester Standard, July 6, 2023: “Paediatric neuroradiologist Dr Stavros Stivaros provided agreed evidence in which he said Child M had shown signs of brain damage, likely caused by the collapse on April 9, 2016.”
- ↑ This may seem controversial, but in all the reports online there is no indication of what evidence he gave. It is not reported or mentioned in judgments or summing up. I am assuming, therefore, it was uncontroversial evidence, that may have admitted by consent as a witness statement and not cross-examined. Happy to be corrected.
- ↑ Jump up to: 7.00 7.01 7.02 7.03 7.04 7.05 7.06 7.07 7.08 7.09 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14 Member of International Expert Panel
- ↑ Specialist doctor ‘felt misled’ about suspicion over baby deaths, Lucy Letby inquiry hears, ITV, 12 November 2024. Dr. Hawdon’s contemporaneous review concluded that the deaths of Babies A, I, O and P – were “unexpected and unexplained.” Her evidence to the Thirlwall Inquiry was that she may have taken a different approach to her review if she knew of the consultants’ suspicions of murder.
- ↑ Not called.
- ↑ My evidence might have changed killer nurse Lucy Letby's trial Express, August 26, 2024.
- ↑ Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence Guardian 9 Jul 2024.
- ↑ Jump up to: 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 Summary of Joint Expert Witness Report on Baby F and L.
- ↑ Why I believe Lucy Letby is probably innocent Sunday Times, March 30 2025.
- ↑ Jump up to: 14.0 14.1 Lucy Letby: The New Evidence, Channel 5, September 2024.
- ↑ File on Four, BBC, 1 October 2024
- ↑ Lucy Letby Expert ‘changes mind’ over how babies died, The Times, December 16 2024
- ↑ Accept that Lucy Letby is a killer, no matter how “nice” she seems, The Herald, 24 March 2025. (Dr. Wilson is often cited as being pro-prosecution, but his views seem more nuanced than that. For example, his article closes as follows:
“I’m still left wondering that if her case had been heard in Scotland would the prosecution have been dismissed as ‘not proven’?”
- ↑ The actual evidence against Lucy Letby, The Times, February 5, 2025.
- ↑ Jump up to: 19.0 19.1 Is Lucy Letby guilty? Professor Norman Fenton interviews Law Health Tech from Twitter and Substack
- ↑ Former Cumbrian director of health voices concerns over Letby trial, Cumberland News and Star, March 31, 2025.
- ↑ Lucy Letby Must Be Allowed an Appeal, The Daily Sceptic, 11 September 2023
- ↑ Suspected serial killers and unsuspected statistical blunders Sage, 1 April 2024.
- ↑ Sample post on X.com, December 30, 2024
- ↑ Lucy Letby: Experts tell BBC about medical evidence concerns BBC, 1 October 2024.
- ↑ The flaws in the Lucy Letby case, Unherd, July 24, 2024.
- ↑ Lucy Letby: Serial killer or a miscarriage of justice? Daily Telegraph, July 9, 2024. There is some suggestion that Professor Wolfsdorf walked this back in Judith Moritz’ book, but it is not well reported. Moritz quotes Wolfsdorf as saying:
“All I can confidently state is the insulin: C-peptide molar ratio ... is consistent with factitious [deliberately introduced] hypoglycaemia.”
As regular readers know, “consistent with” is often used for heavy lifting, and Ms. Moritz asks a lot of it here, concluding — these are her, and not Professor Wolfsdorf’s, words — that:
“In other words, the surest conclusion we can draw from Baby L’s test result is that he was poisoned with insulin.”