Lucy Letby: Difference between revisions

{{Drop|C|riminal justice stands}} at the intersection of at least four discrete fields of intellectual enquiry: law, medicine, statistics and ethics. The perspectives they afford are not “[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions|commensurate]]”: each has its own rules, customs and institutions. Authority in one discipline does not commute to the others. In a perfect world, their outcomes would converge, but the world is not perfect. There will be times where the legal outcome is not the moral one, where the moral one is not borne by the statistics, where the statistics are at odds with our knowledge, and vice versa.  

You cannot but frame your understanding of the overall scenario through one or other of those prisms. There is no transcendent, “neutral” frame of reference. Without some kind of framework, the territory is random, incoherent noise.  

{{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 change, drastically, the terms of the debate in a way that ''New Yorker'' articles, blogposts, twitter rants, podcasts, reddit subforums are not limited.

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.  

{{Drop|I|ndeed, cases involving}} medical misadventure, no direct evidence and which rely on statistics are a recurring case of injustice: Sally Clark, Daniela Poggiali and Lucia de Berk are but three recent examples with strikingly similar facts patterns. We should not take concerns about statistics lightly.