Great post. I don't know the medical details of the case, but I agree that convicting someone based partly on statistics like this is seems really bad. Weird stuff happens in medicine all the time and usually it isn't intentional wrongdoing. Statistical anomalies can be used to alert us and guide further investigation, but we ultimately need to find a real and convincing cause.
Also, generally speaking—and again I don't know all the details of the case—using something someone wrote in the context of a therapy exercise as evidence against them is shockingly inappropriate. The fact that the counselor was employed by the hospital, thus creating even more conflicts of interest, is even crazier. I'm surprised that kind of thing would be admitted in court in the first place.
Do you mean these particular statistics or statistical arguments generally?
These arguments are flawed but most convinctions are based on people's sense of what seems truthful, which story of the evidence seems more plausible etc etc which is just half-assed seat of the pants statistics. And DNA evidence is just strong statistical evidence.
The problem is that our system really does badly handling statistical evidence both because of expert imbalances and because of the nature of the adversarial method.
I mean medicine or any field where it would be easy to make a cluster of adverse events look like intentional wrongdoing (whether it is in fact wrongdoing or not). Of course we can't banish probabilistic or statistical reasoning, just that we need to weigh its evidential importance appropriately in each particular case, given how easy it is to manipulate and how easily it is misunderstood by those who don't understand it.
Yes, 100%. And statistics can be particularly tricky because it purports to tell the jury how likely it was the defendant really did it (despite virtually never including base rates). And the fact that rather than require a jury with statistical fluency that will be disfavored really guts the idea that the jury should evaluate the strength of the evidence.
Also an adversarial system will often mean the prosecution may only call in statistician's after they've selected an unrepresentative sample based on suspicion.
An adversarial context seems quite bad for communicating technical understanding to a jury or even a judge. There should be an impartial fact-finding method for technical subjects.
In theory I think an adversarial process might be the best for technical concepts -- but only if you expect a jury to actually fully understand the argument and we don't do that. I mean if you insisted on a jury with some technical background/ability then an adversarial process would basically mimic the process we use to do science in journals.
But given that we don't do that it's hard, and especially so given that the government won't pay for a public defender expert. So I agree there should probably be some kind of special master but each side should be able to propose/raise considerations in response to their initial report to avoid oversight etc..
Yes, the use of the notes is the most shocking part for me too. (Although perhaps that’s because I’m a humanities person trained to assess texts and contexts rather than a STEM person trained to assess stats…)
Yeah it's crazy. Also the notes lower my probability that's she's guilty? They sound like the ramblings of a terrorised innocent person, not those of a calculated cold blooded murderer
They do, and I find it hard to see how anyone could look at the full page of notes and not be swayed in that direction. As I understand it, though, the jury never did see the full page? Which, if true, is kind of astonishing.
My trajectory on this has been: vaguely picking up what other people were reading about the trial at the time => reading my friend Adam King’s shortish piece in Unherd in July (https://unherd.com/2024/07/the-questions-haunting-the-lucy-letby-trial/) => James Phillips’s two Substacks last month => you, above. At this point it looks beyond doubt to me that the conviction is unsafe and the trial was *emblematically* bad. James Phillips draws some very interesting parallels with Covid (as I’m sure you’re aware!) but as we can see the problems went well beyond the scientific evidence.
I too read maybe five or six articles during 2022 and 2023 outlining her guilt and took it all at face value. The New Yorker article sowed the seeds of doubt and by now I am convinced that at very least she had an unfair trial.
The bigger issue here is the legal system in England and Wales which imposed draconian restrictions before, during, and after the trial which meant that public scrutiny of the case could only begin after her retrial concluded in May 2024. This was six years after her first arrest and four years after her charges.
Some key witnesses (and all the dead children) cannot be named because [legal reasons] while Letby herself has had the most mundane details of her personal life pored over. It’s more akin to an authoritarian state than one with a nine-century tradition of trial in open court, a presumption of innocence, and an ability to face your accusers.
Back when a ship lost power and crashed into a support pillar of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, people had takes to the effect of "what are the odds the ship would bullseye the pillar. This must have been the work of <whoever I hate>" Of course the problem with this argument is that if the ship had lost power and not crashed into anything, we never would have heard about it. Unless you have a sense of how common ship power outages are, you can't draw any such conclusions.
Even after accounting for the cherrypicking, there did seem to be a pretty high correspondence between Letby being on shift and bad stuff happening to premies. After reading the New Yorker article, that was the only point that made me wonder if she was still guilty. At the same time, you have to wonder if at some other hospital, some premies had crises and people began to suspect nurse Lisa Lotby, but then a couple premies crashed in other peoples' shifts and Lisa was no longer an object of suspicion. How often does stuff like that happen? Base rates for this thing are so hard to figure.
The thing I found most alarming was when the prosecution claimed the rashes on the deceased were evidence of air embolism, and then the person who actually wrote the paper on air embolism rashes contradicted the claim in the New Yorker article.
If she is innocent this is so horrible. You love babies and you love taking care of them and then you are sent to prison for life for killing them. As sad a fate as I can imagine.
You have to factor in the number of hours each nurse worked, you must take account of the difference between day shifts and night shifts, you must take account of the fact that half of the nurses in the police spreadsheet are agency nurses or bank nurses. Higher qualified nurses get the hardest shifts. Lucy was the highest qualified!!!! They had fired all the older nurses. The police indubitably had the complete clock in and clock out data of all the nurses but did not use it. What you must also do is write down a working criterion of "suspicious incident' and go through all the medical notes of all the babies, looking for all of them. Instead, the police was given a small selection of medical notes chosen by the consultants together with an initial version of the spreadsheet compiled by same consultants.
Are you saying that these factors were not considered in the report that included this table? Even a non-statistician who thinks about this for a few minutes should be able to figure this out…
If part-time and casual nurses were included as comparable to Lucy Letby, that is quite astonishing. It was a process that would inevitably focus blame on the hardest working and most capable nurse in a failing hospital.
I have a pretty strong prior against nurses intentionally killing people. It happens occasionally, but very rarely, compared to the large set of situations where circumstances look suspicious.
While statistical evidence, used correctly, can be very strong I fear it is particularly tricky for the adversarial method to handle. Part of it is that all but the most wealthy defendents will struggle to get the same quality experts and the judge won't understand how to evaluate the reliability but the issue goes deeper.
A key aspect of getting useful statistical evidence is unbiased samples but a prosecutor will always investigate the cases they see as suspicious. This creates a fundamental problem that by the time you summon a statistician to perform an analysis the investigation has already selected a deeply biased sample (the suspicious cases) and information about how those cases were selected will have been lost or it's importance not understood.
So the statistician working for the prosecution comes in and gets asked to evaluate how likely it is that these cases occured by chance but that's an impossible task without knowing how those cases were selected. Worst case, the investigator identifies some propoerty discovered after the fact not realizing it matters. Best case the statistician has to just make some vaguely plausible assumptions about the messy process of gut and testing that selected those cases.
I'd go so far as to suggest that in any case the prosecution wishes to introduce statistical evidence/arguments the court should be notified when charges are filed and -- at the defense's consent -- a special master with statistical and forensics expertise appointed to reexamine or reinvestigate the case.
I'm going back a long way, but in the USA we had the McMartin school case. The case became an absurdity inside of six months, yet the prosecution went on for years. It took only a couple of loony bureaucrats to ruin lot of lives. The scariest part of all is that there was nearly NO pushback from media or from sane government officials. It sold newspapers, and that's all that counted. It's been decades since I've had any trust in the MSM or in government officials.
And it's far WORSE now. Only a fool presumes they're right simply because they're professionals.
When Casey Anthony was acquitted in the US, I got a lot of flack for saying, basically, “look, she was tried before a jury of her peers and the prosecution didn’t deliver. What more do you want?” To many this was tantamount to excusing the actions attributed to her. All of which is to say, when it comes to criminal trials, and guilt or innocence, especially when babies and/or young children are concerned, few are willing to dispense with emotion in favor of logic.
> A comprehensive New Yorker article, which interviewed a bunch of experts and went through the case in much detail, has been published (note that in UK it’s still not accessible so I cannot link to it.)
It's mind-blowing that British people are subjected to sensationalist garbage "reporting" on this, but can't access a New Yorker article. It's also wild that the culture there has degraded to the point that you felt shunned over a factual question. It's one thing for people to get shunned over questioning a society's sacred values, but over a simple whodunnit question in a legal case? I'm curious when and how this legal and cultural transformation happened in the UK. Could this sort of thing have happened 20 years ago? Or maybe it's been like this for a while, but Americans like myself only recently started learning about this aspect of UK life?
I know. Did you hear about Beethoven's grandmother? Burnt at the stake on Brussels main square for witchcraft. Fortunately she had had her children by then, otherwise there would have been no Beethoven, I suppose.
When the jury system initially developed, jurors addressed issues that were within the purview of their experience -- Farmer John's cow died a day after it was purchased, Joe hit Sam after being threatened, and the jury has to decide if Joe was reasonably threatened. And so forth.
I'm not sure that juries consisting of ordinary people can actually understand complex statistical analysis. I mean, it sounds to me as if the statistical data used to convict her was worthless, but it could be that I'm being hoodwinked now and the jury was right then.
It's really hard for ordinary people to unpack a lot of this sort of evidence and reach a conclusion based on it. And no, I'm not suggesting we abolish the jury system -- rule by experts has its own problems. But it's a legitimately hard set of issues.
Beethoven's grandmother was burnt at a witch on the main square of Brussels. Farmers reported how she had walked past one day and a cow started pissing blood the next day. She was tried by educated witch hunters. But a jury would have come to the same conclusion. See the Lucy Letby case and the Daniela Poggiali cases. A board of highly educated annd respected judges can just as easily fall for the same fallacies of reasoning as a bunch of ordinary folk. They can become equally influenced by gut feelings. When the president of the court convicted Lucia de Berk, the hatred in her eyes and body language was incredible. Lucia stood up and said "this is all bullshit I didn't do it" and walked out. Those at the time who were G's saw this as confirmation of guilty. Those who took interest in the case for the first time were immediately convinced of innocence.
There's maybe not a much better way, but better still would be if the system was a bit more willing to admit to a mistake. A system which does not admit mistakes is bound to repeat them. And as it gets more and more unfit for purpose the mistakes get worse. These human social systems need maintenance and from time to time, revision.
Yes, as in the Lucia de Berk case in the Netherlands, and in the case of Daniela Poggiali in Italy. Then in the UK we also have Ben Geen, Colin Norris, and Victorino Chua - all with life convictions because of odd personalities and bad science and an imagine-catching smoking gun which dispassionatly looked at says nothing, or indeed, supports innocence.
PS it is dangerous to also mention Beverley Allitt in this context. There are facts about this case which cause doubt and have been censored away from public sources, eg Wikipedia. Wikipedia articles on serial killers are largely written by "true crime" enthusiasts who actually make money out of turning the Wikipedia articles they helped write into Kindle books or worse, eg the Encyclopedia of Serial Killer. It is cited by Wikipedia as a reliable source. Yet it actually has been written by merging Wikipedia articles into a fat and expensive book. This is an interesting and disturbing phenomenon. As soon as I started standing up for Lucy Letby the Wikipedia page on myself was vandalised. The pages on Ben Geen and similar were taken over by true crime fanatics. I tried to put some sense and reason into the Lucy Letby article and in the ensueing edit war three sock puppets got banned from editing Wikipedia but so did I, too.
This sets out additional facts about the case which are not discussed by Letby truthers, and demonstrate considerably more evidence that she was guilty.
I do not think this article grapples with the main issues people who have doubts about the way in which scientific evidence was presented voice. For example, he takes the insulin evidence as “proof” of poisoning, when we now know these are flawed tests that should not be used for this purpose.
and calling us "letby truthers" makes no sense. There are legitimate, factual issues with how medical and scientific evidence was presented that are independent of letby herself
Fair enough. Letby truthers is a shorthand, and I agree that there are actual flaws with the trial - I just think some people take it too far (not necessarily you). The existing case for her innocence effectively skirts around certain facts about the case to make her innocence seem more compelling.
Ultimately, I think that though there were fairly clearly massive errors at the trial, it also fairly clearly demonstrated her guilt.
I disagree. The existing case for her innocence takes all known information into account. Especially the fact that much information given to the jury was false, and exonerating evidence was withheld.
Thank you so much for talking about this. Something that really bothers me about modern living is how we have taken the pitchforks away from the mob and handed them cell phones. It is extraordinarily difficult to resist the pull of angry righteous voices calling out for blood. I'm worried that we are losing all the progress we made during the enlightenment, abandoning rationalism for feelings. I don't even know how to fix it, but speaking up about things like this must be part of the cure.
Serving on several juries radically lowered my estimation of the justice system and the intellectual capacity of the average person. Juries often struggle to follow the evidence given and lines of reasoning even in scandalous criminal cases & can be very easily swayed by the pre-existing biases of a single juror. Many jurors also have appalling poor command of reasoning - for example, if after forming conclusions about their case on the basis of a piece of evidence, that evidence is shown to be false, many will fail to update the conclusions they drew from that evidence earlier. Jurors also struggle to pursue lines of reasoning and evidence, wanting to bring the conversation back to the binary choice of the verdict, and often fail to see the relevance of any evidence that doesn’t directly pertain to guilt or innocence.
I can have no opinion on the outcome of this trial as I was not a juror. It does however remind me of the debates that took place after convictions for baby death due to 'shaken baby syndrome'. Some were overturned - in one case because an 'expert witness' did not understand probability.
For example:
1) 'shaken baby syndrome' was a contested clinical syndrome
2) some clinicians became known as 'expert' witnesses so that
3) the same people became used by prosecution or defence because their views became known
4) lawyers are entitled to choose who is called as an 'expert' witness. They may choose the witness who best supports the legal case
5) the judiciary are reluctant for a courtroom to be turned into the forum for adjudication of medical/scientific disputes
It thus seems to me that some of the leakiness in any conviction is built into the trial process. The law is not science. It delivers judgements based on the notion of a 'reliable witness' not on the basis of scientific exactitude. Trial by jury has yet to be superseded as a method of delivering judgement. The appeals process offers a pathway to overturning a verdict when jury trial is shown to result in misjudgement.
I am a retired and so outdated physician with no legal expertise whatsoever. In my understanding it is helpful to distinguish between obtaining best evidence from delivering appropriate judgement. While both are desirable and should be pursued the relationship between them is more complex than scientific aspirations for certainty.
I perfectly understand the outcome of the trial. The jurors did not have access to much more information than you or I. No expert reports. What they got but we didn't was the body language of the witnesses. But the court reporters did a good job of getting across how the body language came across to them. Eg "looked into Letby's eyes, saw nothing". What does that tell you? It told the reporters she was guilty. It told me she was at her wits' end, literally. Walkling dead. As you would be if you were innocent and in her position.
Once again we are confronted with the fact that many people are unable to imagine that an attractive white middle class tertiary-educated woman could commit horrific crimes. The people commenting in incredulity are, of course, almost all middle class, tertiary educated, and many of them are women, most of whom at least hope they are attractive.
"This is someone like me. I could not do this. Therefore she did not do this."
Whereas if you are impoverished or working class, or if you are male, you know that people like you do commit horrific crimes, and your own self-image is not tied up in this.
There are many articles like yours. If instead of an attractive white middle class female nurse in her 20s the accused haad been an ugly black moslem working class janitor in his 40s, nobody would write such articles.
Whoever the accused is, leave it to the courts. There should not be trial by media, still less by social media. This applies whether the conclusion of your trial is conviction or acquittal. Leave it to the courts, who saw all the evidence presented in context, and no extraneous evidence, with a jury acting under judicial instruction.
You are arguing for closed justice. Unless justice is practiced openly, public scrutiny is impossible, unsafe convictions cannot be called out and inevitably innocent people remain incarcerated.
We are not confronted with that fact at all. You are making it up, you have an agenda. I don't know anybody who is saying "this is someone like me THEREFORE she did not do this". People are saying "She did not do this. She is someone like you or me, therefore it could happen to you or me too". Colour irrelevant. Had she been black it would have made absolutely no difference to me.
I look forward to an article from you or the original article's authour going into equivalent detail on the innocence of a moslem working class man convicted of killing children.
The absence of such articles (if there is one) says nothing about *this* woman's guilt or innocence. Surely, given that you want such articles to exist, you don't actually want to always "just leave it to the courts". It's only the worst sort of uninhibited bitterness that would cause one to wish that an innocent person to suffer just because others suffer as well. Reveling in schadenfreude doesn't prove yourself virtuous.
I’m not particularly interested in there being any articles second-guessing court decisions.
But if there are to be articles second-guessing court decisions, then there should be articles second-guessing the court decisions for convicted people of all backgrounds.
Equal treatment. Believe it or not, the white middle-class tertiary educated woman is not the only important kind of person in the world.
A world in which 1,000 innocent people are convicted vs a world in which 999 innocent people are convicted and 1 attractive white middle class tertiary-educated woman is acquitted. If you don't prefer the latter then you've lost the plot.
I want more articles like this about anyone who's innocent. But the existence of this article isn't preventing that (maybe even the opposite. It's pretty plausible to me that attention towards wrongful conviction of white women could cause people to be more wary of false convictions as a whole, which benefits all innocent people). You don't want any articles like this for anyone. Maybe you think this is the wrong way to right wrongs. Fine. But you lower only yourself by insisting that anyone who does want such articles, who thinks that this is worth something only does so to soothe their own self-image.
There's a stew of reasons why attention get directed at one thing vs another. If some ingredients of that stew is implicit bias and people's insecurities, other ingredients are genuine sympathy and moral feeling. To condemn because of the lesser ingredients is to judge to a standard so harsh that no one could pass. Methinks you wouldn't do much better at things regarding which you have biases.
Great post. I don't know the medical details of the case, but I agree that convicting someone based partly on statistics like this is seems really bad. Weird stuff happens in medicine all the time and usually it isn't intentional wrongdoing. Statistical anomalies can be used to alert us and guide further investigation, but we ultimately need to find a real and convincing cause.
Also, generally speaking—and again I don't know all the details of the case—using something someone wrote in the context of a therapy exercise as evidence against them is shockingly inappropriate. The fact that the counselor was employed by the hospital, thus creating even more conflicts of interest, is even crazier. I'm surprised that kind of thing would be admitted in court in the first place.
Do you mean these particular statistics or statistical arguments generally?
These arguments are flawed but most convinctions are based on people's sense of what seems truthful, which story of the evidence seems more plausible etc etc which is just half-assed seat of the pants statistics. And DNA evidence is just strong statistical evidence.
The problem is that our system really does badly handling statistical evidence both because of expert imbalances and because of the nature of the adversarial method.
I mean medicine or any field where it would be easy to make a cluster of adverse events look like intentional wrongdoing (whether it is in fact wrongdoing or not). Of course we can't banish probabilistic or statistical reasoning, just that we need to weigh its evidential importance appropriately in each particular case, given how easy it is to manipulate and how easily it is misunderstood by those who don't understand it.
Yes, 100%. And statistics can be particularly tricky because it purports to tell the jury how likely it was the defendant really did it (despite virtually never including base rates). And the fact that rather than require a jury with statistical fluency that will be disfavored really guts the idea that the jury should evaluate the strength of the evidence.
Also an adversarial system will often mean the prosecution may only call in statistician's after they've selected an unrepresentative sample based on suspicion.
An adversarial context seems quite bad for communicating technical understanding to a jury or even a judge. There should be an impartial fact-finding method for technical subjects.
In theory I think an adversarial process might be the best for technical concepts -- but only if you expect a jury to actually fully understand the argument and we don't do that. I mean if you insisted on a jury with some technical background/ability then an adversarial process would basically mimic the process we use to do science in journals.
But given that we don't do that it's hard, and especially so given that the government won't pay for a public defender expert. So I agree there should probably be some kind of special master but each side should be able to propose/raise considerations in response to their initial report to avoid oversight etc..
How is it even legally admissible to use statements made in a counseling session?
Yes, the use of the notes is the most shocking part for me too. (Although perhaps that’s because I’m a humanities person trained to assess texts and contexts rather than a STEM person trained to assess stats…)
Yeah it's crazy. Also the notes lower my probability that's she's guilty? They sound like the ramblings of a terrorised innocent person, not those of a calculated cold blooded murderer
They do, and I find it hard to see how anyone could look at the full page of notes and not be swayed in that direction. As I understand it, though, the jury never did see the full page? Which, if true, is kind of astonishing.
It was in my opinion a very bad trial with a lot of evidence being presented in a very one sided way.
My trajectory on this has been: vaguely picking up what other people were reading about the trial at the time => reading my friend Adam King’s shortish piece in Unherd in July (https://unherd.com/2024/07/the-questions-haunting-the-lucy-letby-trial/) => James Phillips’s two Substacks last month => you, above. At this point it looks beyond doubt to me that the conviction is unsafe and the trial was *emblematically* bad. James Phillips draws some very interesting parallels with Covid (as I’m sure you’re aware!) but as we can see the problems went well beyond the scientific evidence.
I too read maybe five or six articles during 2022 and 2023 outlining her guilt and took it all at face value. The New Yorker article sowed the seeds of doubt and by now I am convinced that at very least she had an unfair trial.
The bigger issue here is the legal system in England and Wales which imposed draconian restrictions before, during, and after the trial which meant that public scrutiny of the case could only begin after her retrial concluded in May 2024. This was six years after her first arrest and four years after her charges.
Some key witnesses (and all the dead children) cannot be named because [legal reasons] while Letby herself has had the most mundane details of her personal life pored over. It’s more akin to an authoritarian state than one with a nine-century tradition of trial in open court, a presumption of innocence, and an ability to face your accusers.
Back when a ship lost power and crashed into a support pillar of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, people had takes to the effect of "what are the odds the ship would bullseye the pillar. This must have been the work of <whoever I hate>" Of course the problem with this argument is that if the ship had lost power and not crashed into anything, we never would have heard about it. Unless you have a sense of how common ship power outages are, you can't draw any such conclusions.
Even after accounting for the cherrypicking, there did seem to be a pretty high correspondence between Letby being on shift and bad stuff happening to premies. After reading the New Yorker article, that was the only point that made me wonder if she was still guilty. At the same time, you have to wonder if at some other hospital, some premies had crises and people began to suspect nurse Lisa Lotby, but then a couple premies crashed in other peoples' shifts and Lisa was no longer an object of suspicion. How often does stuff like that happen? Base rates for this thing are so hard to figure.
Yeah I think it's hard. But I don't think it was done properly, as evidenced by literally improper evidence re insulin being used
The thing I found most alarming was when the prosecution claimed the rashes on the deceased were evidence of air embolism, and then the person who actually wrote the paper on air embolism rashes contradicted the claim in the New Yorker article.
If she is innocent this is so horrible. You love babies and you love taking care of them and then you are sent to prison for life for killing them. As sad a fate as I can imagine.
Yes those are far fetched too
You have to factor in the number of hours each nurse worked, you must take account of the difference between day shifts and night shifts, you must take account of the fact that half of the nurses in the police spreadsheet are agency nurses or bank nurses. Higher qualified nurses get the hardest shifts. Lucy was the highest qualified!!!! They had fired all the older nurses. The police indubitably had the complete clock in and clock out data of all the nurses but did not use it. What you must also do is write down a working criterion of "suspicious incident' and go through all the medical notes of all the babies, looking for all of them. Instead, the police was given a small selection of medical notes chosen by the consultants together with an initial version of the spreadsheet compiled by same consultants.
Are you saying that these factors were not considered in the report that included this table? Even a non-statistician who thinks about this for a few minutes should be able to figure this out…
If part-time and casual nurses were included as comparable to Lucy Letby, that is quite astonishing. It was a process that would inevitably focus blame on the hardest working and most capable nurse in a failing hospital.
I have a pretty strong prior against nurses intentionally killing people. It happens occasionally, but very rarely, compared to the large set of situations where circumstances look suspicious.
While statistical evidence, used correctly, can be very strong I fear it is particularly tricky for the adversarial method to handle. Part of it is that all but the most wealthy defendents will struggle to get the same quality experts and the judge won't understand how to evaluate the reliability but the issue goes deeper.
A key aspect of getting useful statistical evidence is unbiased samples but a prosecutor will always investigate the cases they see as suspicious. This creates a fundamental problem that by the time you summon a statistician to perform an analysis the investigation has already selected a deeply biased sample (the suspicious cases) and information about how those cases were selected will have been lost or it's importance not understood.
So the statistician working for the prosecution comes in and gets asked to evaluate how likely it is that these cases occured by chance but that's an impossible task without knowing how those cases were selected. Worst case, the investigator identifies some propoerty discovered after the fact not realizing it matters. Best case the statistician has to just make some vaguely plausible assumptions about the messy process of gut and testing that selected those cases.
I'd go so far as to suggest that in any case the prosecution wishes to introduce statistical evidence/arguments the court should be notified when charges are filed and -- at the defense's consent -- a special master with statistical and forensics expertise appointed to reexamine or reinvestigate the case.
agreed
I'm going back a long way, but in the USA we had the McMartin school case. The case became an absurdity inside of six months, yet the prosecution went on for years. It took only a couple of loony bureaucrats to ruin lot of lives. The scariest part of all is that there was nearly NO pushback from media or from sane government officials. It sold newspapers, and that's all that counted. It's been decades since I've had any trust in the MSM or in government officials.
And it's far WORSE now. Only a fool presumes they're right simply because they're professionals.
https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/mcmartin-preschool
When Casey Anthony was acquitted in the US, I got a lot of flack for saying, basically, “look, she was tried before a jury of her peers and the prosecution didn’t deliver. What more do you want?” To many this was tantamount to excusing the actions attributed to her. All of which is to say, when it comes to criminal trials, and guilt or innocence, especially when babies and/or young children are concerned, few are willing to dispense with emotion in favor of logic.
cherry picking the insulin data is dumb & evil (by persecution). seriously.
backwards going over multiple medical records, your effective number of possibilities is in the millions or billions
not many understand this, but with infinite potential data being picked on and biased, it's quite meaningless
> A comprehensive New Yorker article, which interviewed a bunch of experts and went through the case in much detail, has been published (note that in UK it’s still not accessible so I cannot link to it.)
It's mind-blowing that British people are subjected to sensationalist garbage "reporting" on this, but can't access a New Yorker article. It's also wild that the culture there has degraded to the point that you felt shunned over a factual question. It's one thing for people to get shunned over questioning a society's sacred values, but over a simple whodunnit question in a legal case? I'm curious when and how this legal and cultural transformation happened in the UK. Could this sort of thing have happened 20 years ago? Or maybe it's been like this for a while, but Americans like myself only recently started learning about this aspect of UK life?
You think overly zealous prosecutors and angry mobs are a new thing? There is no time in history when we didn't have those.
I know. Did you hear about Beethoven's grandmother? Burnt at the stake on Brussels main square for witchcraft. Fortunately she had had her children by then, otherwise there would have been no Beethoven, I suppose.
When the jury system initially developed, jurors addressed issues that were within the purview of their experience -- Farmer John's cow died a day after it was purchased, Joe hit Sam after being threatened, and the jury has to decide if Joe was reasonably threatened. And so forth.
I'm not sure that juries consisting of ordinary people can actually understand complex statistical analysis. I mean, it sounds to me as if the statistical data used to convict her was worthless, but it could be that I'm being hoodwinked now and the jury was right then.
It's really hard for ordinary people to unpack a lot of this sort of evidence and reach a conclusion based on it. And no, I'm not suggesting we abolish the jury system -- rule by experts has its own problems. But it's a legitimately hard set of issues.
Beethoven's grandmother was burnt at a witch on the main square of Brussels. Farmers reported how she had walked past one day and a cow started pissing blood the next day. She was tried by educated witch hunters. But a jury would have come to the same conclusion. See the Lucy Letby case and the Daniela Poggiali cases. A board of highly educated annd respected judges can just as easily fall for the same fallacies of reasoning as a bunch of ordinary folk. They can become equally influenced by gut feelings. When the president of the court convicted Lucia de Berk, the hatred in her eyes and body language was incredible. Lucia stood up and said "this is all bullshit I didn't do it" and walked out. Those at the time who were G's saw this as confirmation of guilty. Those who took interest in the case for the first time were immediately convinced of innocence.
That makes sense, I just don't think there's a better way.
There's maybe not a much better way, but better still would be if the system was a bit more willing to admit to a mistake. A system which does not admit mistakes is bound to repeat them. And as it gets more and more unfit for purpose the mistakes get worse. These human social systems need maintenance and from time to time, revision.
Yes, as in the Lucia de Berk case in the Netherlands, and in the case of Daniela Poggiali in Italy. Then in the UK we also have Ben Geen, Colin Norris, and Victorino Chua - all with life convictions because of odd personalities and bad science and an imagine-catching smoking gun which dispassionatly looked at says nothing, or indeed, supports innocence.
PS it is dangerous to also mention Beverley Allitt in this context. There are facts about this case which cause doubt and have been censored away from public sources, eg Wikipedia. Wikipedia articles on serial killers are largely written by "true crime" enthusiasts who actually make money out of turning the Wikipedia articles they helped write into Kindle books or worse, eg the Encyclopedia of Serial Killer. It is cited by Wikipedia as a reliable source. Yet it actually has been written by merging Wikipedia articles into a fat and expensive book. This is an interesting and disturbing phenomenon. As soon as I started standing up for Lucy Letby the Wikipedia page on myself was vandalised. The pages on Ben Geen and similar were taken over by true crime fanatics. I tried to put some sense and reason into the Lucy Letby article and in the ensueing edit war three sock puppets got banned from editing Wikipedia but so did I, too.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/30/the-case-against-lucy-letby/
This sets out additional facts about the case which are not discussed by Letby truthers, and demonstrate considerably more evidence that she was guilty.
I do not think this article grapples with the main issues people who have doubts about the way in which scientific evidence was presented voice. For example, he takes the insulin evidence as “proof” of poisoning, when we now know these are flawed tests that should not be used for this purpose.
and calling us "letby truthers" makes no sense. There are legitimate, factual issues with how medical and scientific evidence was presented that are independent of letby herself
e.g. stuff like this
https://x.com/drphilhammond/status/1841014204989411490
Fair enough. Letby truthers is a shorthand, and I agree that there are actual flaws with the trial - I just think some people take it too far (not necessarily you). The existing case for her innocence effectively skirts around certain facts about the case to make her innocence seem more compelling.
Ultimately, I think that though there were fairly clearly massive errors at the trial, it also fairly clearly demonstrated her guilt.
I disagree. The existing case for her innocence takes all known information into account. Especially the fact that much information given to the jury was false, and exonerating evidence was withheld.
It doesn't have any additional facts. It merely repeats old tired "arguments", most of them ad hominems.
Thank you so much for talking about this. Something that really bothers me about modern living is how we have taken the pitchforks away from the mob and handed them cell phones. It is extraordinarily difficult to resist the pull of angry righteous voices calling out for blood. I'm worried that we are losing all the progress we made during the enlightenment, abandoning rationalism for feelings. I don't even know how to fix it, but speaking up about things like this must be part of the cure.
Serving on several juries radically lowered my estimation of the justice system and the intellectual capacity of the average person. Juries often struggle to follow the evidence given and lines of reasoning even in scandalous criminal cases & can be very easily swayed by the pre-existing biases of a single juror. Many jurors also have appalling poor command of reasoning - for example, if after forming conclusions about their case on the basis of a piece of evidence, that evidence is shown to be false, many will fail to update the conclusions they drew from that evidence earlier. Jurors also struggle to pursue lines of reasoning and evidence, wanting to bring the conversation back to the binary choice of the verdict, and often fail to see the relevance of any evidence that doesn’t directly pertain to guilt or innocence.
It's the worst system. Except for all the others.
Yes! But it needs regular maintenance and occasional revision.
I can have no opinion on the outcome of this trial as I was not a juror. It does however remind me of the debates that took place after convictions for baby death due to 'shaken baby syndrome'. Some were overturned - in one case because an 'expert witness' did not understand probability.
For example:
1) 'shaken baby syndrome' was a contested clinical syndrome
2) some clinicians became known as 'expert' witnesses so that
3) the same people became used by prosecution or defence because their views became known
4) lawyers are entitled to choose who is called as an 'expert' witness. They may choose the witness who best supports the legal case
5) the judiciary are reluctant for a courtroom to be turned into the forum for adjudication of medical/scientific disputes
It thus seems to me that some of the leakiness in any conviction is built into the trial process. The law is not science. It delivers judgements based on the notion of a 'reliable witness' not on the basis of scientific exactitude. Trial by jury has yet to be superseded as a method of delivering judgement. The appeals process offers a pathway to overturning a verdict when jury trial is shown to result in misjudgement.
I am a retired and so outdated physician with no legal expertise whatsoever. In my understanding it is helpful to distinguish between obtaining best evidence from delivering appropriate judgement. While both are desirable and should be pursued the relationship between them is more complex than scientific aspirations for certainty.
I perfectly understand the outcome of the trial. The jurors did not have access to much more information than you or I. No expert reports. What they got but we didn't was the body language of the witnesses. But the court reporters did a good job of getting across how the body language came across to them. Eg "looked into Letby's eyes, saw nothing". What does that tell you? It told the reporters she was guilty. It told me she was at her wits' end, literally. Walkling dead. As you would be if you were innocent and in her position.
For just $5/month to Mullvad, you can overcome UK censorship. (Not an ad, just advice from someone who believes in free speech.)
Thanks for the tip. https://mullvad.net/en. Hadn't heard of it before. I use NordVPN a lot, and recommend it highly.
Once again we are confronted with the fact that many people are unable to imagine that an attractive white middle class tertiary-educated woman could commit horrific crimes. The people commenting in incredulity are, of course, almost all middle class, tertiary educated, and many of them are women, most of whom at least hope they are attractive.
"This is someone like me. I could not do this. Therefore she did not do this."
Whereas if you are impoverished or working class, or if you are male, you know that people like you do commit horrific crimes, and your own self-image is not tied up in this.
There are many articles like yours. If instead of an attractive white middle class female nurse in her 20s the accused haad been an ugly black moslem working class janitor in his 40s, nobody would write such articles.
Whoever the accused is, leave it to the courts. There should not be trial by media, still less by social media. This applies whether the conclusion of your trial is conviction or acquittal. Leave it to the courts, who saw all the evidence presented in context, and no extraneous evidence, with a jury acting under judicial instruction.
You are arguing for closed justice. Unless justice is practiced openly, public scrutiny is impossible, unsafe convictions cannot be called out and inevitably innocent people remain incarcerated.
We are not confronted with that fact at all. You are making it up, you have an agenda. I don't know anybody who is saying "this is someone like me THEREFORE she did not do this". People are saying "She did not do this. She is someone like you or me, therefore it could happen to you or me too". Colour irrelevant. Had she been black it would have made absolutely no difference to me.
I look forward to an article from you or the original article's authour going into equivalent detail on the innocence of a moslem working class man convicted of killing children.
The absence of such articles (if there is one) says nothing about *this* woman's guilt or innocence. Surely, given that you want such articles to exist, you don't actually want to always "just leave it to the courts". It's only the worst sort of uninhibited bitterness that would cause one to wish that an innocent person to suffer just because others suffer as well. Reveling in schadenfreude doesn't prove yourself virtuous.
I’m not particularly interested in there being any articles second-guessing court decisions.
But if there are to be articles second-guessing court decisions, then there should be articles second-guessing the court decisions for convicted people of all backgrounds.
Equal treatment. Believe it or not, the white middle-class tertiary educated woman is not the only important kind of person in the world.
A world in which 1,000 innocent people are convicted vs a world in which 999 innocent people are convicted and 1 attractive white middle class tertiary-educated woman is acquitted. If you don't prefer the latter then you've lost the plot.
I want more articles like this about anyone who's innocent. But the existence of this article isn't preventing that (maybe even the opposite. It's pretty plausible to me that attention towards wrongful conviction of white women could cause people to be more wary of false convictions as a whole, which benefits all innocent people). You don't want any articles like this for anyone. Maybe you think this is the wrong way to right wrongs. Fine. But you lower only yourself by insisting that anyone who does want such articles, who thinks that this is worth something only does so to soothe their own self-image.
There's a stew of reasons why attention get directed at one thing vs another. If some ingredients of that stew is implicit bias and people's insecurities, other ingredients are genuine sympathy and moral feeling. To condemn because of the lesser ingredients is to judge to a standard so harsh that no one could pass. Methinks you wouldn't do much better at things regarding which you have biases.
Be honest: nobody in the media or social media cares unless it's the Karen demographic.