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Lucy Letby: Difference between revisions
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There is no comfortable centre to hold here. | There is no comfortable centre to hold here. | ||
====Standpoint intersection ahoy==== | ====Standpoint intersection ahoy==== | ||
{{Drop|S|peaking 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 [[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions|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. | {{Drop|S|peaking 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 [[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions|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 with each other. | ||
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. | 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. | 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. | ||
====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. But we must realise that their grief is unavoidable and attaches to their loss which is the same whatever its cause. ''That'' they are bereaved is not at issue: the question is ''why'': Lucy Letby’s acquittal does not postpone or deny them justice for their loss: no injustice may have been done. Nor does her wrongful conviction given them justice: that your child was murdered it is surely a heavier burden to bear than she died unavoidably of natural causes. | |||
So advocating for Lucy Letby’s innocence should be no affront to the grieving families: one can respect their unimaginable grief and, in some way seek to ameliorate it, by arguing her case. | |||
====Substance, form and process==== | ====Substance, form and process==== | ||
{{Drop|T|he first thing}} to bear in mind is the difference between the ''substantive'' — the | {{Drop|T|he first thing}} to bear in mind is the difference between the ''substantive'' — the 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 “procedural” includes the presumption of innocence, the adversarial tradition of British criminal justice, 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, drawn at random from the electoral roll, who may have none of these skills. | ||
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: acquitting the occasional perpetrator is a “lesser evil” than convicting a single innocent. | |||
But even then we get it wrong sometimes. | |||
====The medical misadventure cases==== | |||
{{Drop|I|ndeed, cases involving}} medical misadventure, no direct evidence and which rely on statistics are a recurring case of injustice: Sally Clark, Daniela Poggliera and Lucia de Berk are but three recent examples with strikingly similar facts patterns. We should not take concerns about statistics lightly. | |||
Where | Where there is no “direct” evidence, the form and procedure becomes all the more important. | ||
In Lucy Letby’s case | In Lucy Letby’s case no direct evidence definitively links her to a single murder. No direct evidence unequivocally suggests there was a ''murder'' — as opposed to misadventure, negligence or even inadvertent accident — at all. Each case, taken in isolation, could be plausibly explained as a natural death. 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. | The internet is polarised around two highly unlikely contingencies. | ||
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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”. | 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. | 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) | ||
====Emergence==== | ====Emergence==== | ||
{{Drop|T|here 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 | {{Drop|T|here 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. That outcome was as likely as any other. Roll ''three'' sixes and it becomes a lot less probable: you would expect that only once in two hundred and sixteen times. Unusual, but nothing yet is seriously amiss. But roll ''ten'' consecutive sixes — a probability of less than one in sixty million — and you should start inspecting your die. | |||
This is the essence of the prosecution case against Lucy Letby: that while each of the deaths that occurred on her shifts was in itself explainable, a sheer number of consecutive deaths on her shift were not. | |||
Unlike in Sally Clark case, prosecution did not e | |||
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. | 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. | ||
{{Quote| | {{Quote| | ||