Lucy Letby: Difference between revisions

{{drop|L|ucy Letby’s case}} is in the news. On 24 May 2024, the Court of Appeal denied Letby leave to appeal against her conviction. Neither the grounds for the appeal nor the reasons for refusal are yet public. On 10 June, her retrial for the attempted murder of “Child K” began in Manchester. But on 13 May 2024, ''New Yorker'' magazine published {{plainlink|https://wayback-api.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/lucy-letby-was-found-guilty-of-killing-seven-babies-did-she-do-it|''A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did she do it?''}}, a 13,000-word investigative piece by Rachel Aviv that questioned the the safety of Letby’s original convictions. The piece was loosely geo-blocked in the UK, ostensibly to avoid contempt of court during the retrial. But it is not hard to find online, and it ran unedited in the New Yorker’s UK print edition, so there may be some canny “Streisand Effect” marketing at play here too. It raises its own questions about the practicality of ''sub judice'' rules in the age of the world-wide internet, but that is a discussion for another day.

Those with a passing acquaintance of the case tend to suppose that, having been convicted of multiple infant murders, the case is closed and she must be a monster. She admitted everything in a note, right? But look a bit closer and the picture is complicated. The note is not the unequivocal confession it has been made out to be. There is no direct evidence. Each piece of circumstantial evidence, in isolation, is ambiguous. The strength of the case of conviction appears to have emerged from the preponderance of evidence, rather than subsisting in a particular smoking gun.

At this point there are two available narratives: Lucy Letby is either a person of pure, calculated evil, or the victim of a breathtaking miscarriage of justice. But these extremes leave untouched between them a vast range of ambivalent attitudes: We like our narratives to tell us things about the world, and a perspective that says, “well, it’s complicated” doesn’t tell us much about the world. It isn’t useful. So few of us occupy that space.