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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Brian wrote: | | No timeline - as soon as I heard of the conviction and the details of what she had supposedly had done, I thought something was a bit off. |
Well, that is worth a brownie point. But no more.
Who do you mean by the 'real guilty'?
If babies were murdered and it turns out Lucy didn’t do it, who did? |
If the babies were murdered, my money would be on Lucy Letby.
| Who is, or are, responsible? Another inquiry, with hand wringing and things learnt ie nothing. |
There are at least two going on right now, though neither is intended to clear Letby. There have been multiple enquiries going on for years and years into NHS scandals that make a bit of freelance serial killing pale into insignificance.
Each one, as you say, wrings it hands. Each one, as you say, learns nothing. It is the NHS that is guilty and, being a sacred cow, the NHS can never be put in the dock.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I did nothing more about the Lucy Letby case beyond keeping a weather eye out for developments, which were mournfully few. Until the New Yorker came out with a very long, very well researched exposé. Which I reckoned deserved an airing on Medium
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Me, Lucy Letby and the New Yorker May 17, 2024
Why you can’t buy a copy of the famous magazine in Britain
Lucy Letby is a British nurse serving a life sentence for murdering babies who were in her care. As might be imagined, this was something of a cause célèbre in Britain at the time but is now receiving wider attention worldwide. Not so much the crimes as the suspicion there were no crimes.
Strange to say, none of these developments have affected Britain. English law dictates that when things are sub judice, before the courts, nothing can be said in public for fear of prejudicing the outcome of a trial. Although Letby’s murders have been dealt with and can theoretically be discussed, some of the ‘attempted murders’ she was accused of resulted in a hung jury and the prosecution have announced they intend to retry Letby on these charges. This apparently pointless procedure has had the — some might think — convenient result that nobody in Britain can discuss the Letby case in general.
An untroubled air of ‘nothing to be seen here’ has settled over the land while Ms Letby has settled down to spending the rest of her life behind bars in leafy Surrey. Or as the Daily Mail put it:
| Outrage after serial killer nurse Lucy Letby is moved to ‘cushy jail’ with her own private en-suite bathroom, phone and TV because of ‘who she is’. Letby is serving a whole life sentence for murdering seven babies. The 33-year-old is yet to get a prison job and is being treated with ‘kid gloves’. |
Things are very different outside Britain. The New Yorker magazine has just run a long piece that pretty much demonstrates to any but the most purblind that Lucy Letby should have been given a medal, not prison time.
| That issue of the New Yorker has been banned in Britain. |
Though it is available on the internet https://archive.ph/AWpyz#selection-2285.1-2285.342 should anyone wish to read it. Technically, I can go to prison myself for having told you this so I think I’m entitled to say how I arrived at such a curious position.
I had not heard about the Letby case because, despite it getting acreages in the mainstream British media, they weren’t ones that I happen to follow. My first knowledge of it was when the trial was over and all reporting restrictions were lifted.
Even then I wasn’t terribly interested. What’s one more minor tragedy in a world of major ones? Until, a few days after the trial, someone posted this on the Applied Epistemology Library, a website I help to run:
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The more I look at it, the more it seems to me Nurse Letby might have been misconvicted. Baby deaths at the Chester facility:
2009 — 3
2010 — 1
2011 — 3
2012 — 3
2013 — 2
2014 — 3
2015 — 8
2016 — 5
The Countess of Chester, which looks after about 400 babies in its neonatal unit each year above, stopped providing care for babies born earlier than 32 weeks after this. So we don’t know comparable figures after this time which would have enabled us to see if this was due to poorer than average medical care, rather than the actions of a serial killer. The doctors claim that any problems identified by the increase in deaths in 2015–16 stopped when Letby’s role was switched.
Letby suffered depression and anxiety after being accused by doctors, she started scribbling notes questioning whether her own care had failed the babies, these ramblings were then used to suggest she had actually confessed at trial. Although the evidence looks damming you have to keep in mind that babies do die at these facilities for reasons that health professionals cannot always explain, without serial killers being present. The truth is boring...
The opposite side of the case is presented here https://news.sky.com/story/how-the-police-caught-lucy-letby-12933640
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I read this very full account from Britain’s second most important (after the BBC) television news service and for the first time I had the ‘facts of the case’ straight in my mind. It was immediately obvious Letby was innocent. This required no great prodigies of insight on my part, it was all classic Bayesian statistical blundering. Applied Epistemology 101.
I had, at the time, just qualified to earn money on Medium so I wrote it up at some length https://medium.com/p/b4c1e35d010b and earned myself $3.30. I suppose you could say I am trafficking in misery but I don’t really see any alternative.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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I fear that the LL case is just one among many. Where many members of the general public just cannot bear to look.
Having been told repeatedly by government, BBC and MSM that someone is a very bad person, many people find it psychologically painful to even consider the idea that they have been misled. Or that people in authority have repeatedly told them lies.
The additional suggestion that people in authority would deliberately do so (instead of just by error or omission) is another step too far for many people.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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The LL case being just one instance of a general condition may be of interest, in an AEL kind of way, but may also be venturing into "Red Pill" territory.
| The red pill and blue pill are metaphorical terms representing a choice between learning an unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in the contented experience of ordinary reality with the blue pill. |
Most people want a nice safe quiet life and happily keep taking the blue pills.
The old parable of sheep and goats comes to mind.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is indeed an AE matter, being extensively dealt with in the AE theory section. People are being offered the red pill every time they, say, turn on Newsnight. They always choose the blue pill.
I don't suppose you would care to tell us of your red pill experiences, Borry? Or anyone else on this site. And you are supposed to be a collection of pill freaks!
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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I shall have to consider which red pill experiences are safe to mention on an internet forum. Some may be so trivial they would bore you. Some may not be safe to mention in case people in uniforms come hammering at the front door. I shall have to find some in between.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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In general, denizens of this site can swallow a red pill when told of a new and destabilising theory because... they get off on them! They are members of a small minority who live for such things. One might almost say a red pill is, for them, a blue pill.
However as soon it comes to politics--or anything that affects them on a day to day level--they are as stodgily blue (i.e. red) as everyone else. This is a perplexing mystery that I have still to explain. You can point it out to them until you're blue in the face but they never redden with embarrassment. Even a little bit.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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It might be to do with comfort zones and ego boundaries.
If we're discussing (say) megalithic concrete, nobody much minds a radical "red pill" idea.
But if it's (say) promoting the efficacy of your local council only collecting household rubbish every three months, folks tend to take it much more personally.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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People take what they learn at school personally--though I doubt whether ancient concrete figured in the curriculum. If you challenge something they were taught, it is not that which was taught that is important (they have mostly forgotten that anyway), it is the system behind what was taught. If that is shown to be capable of error, then everything that was taught comes into question. The human brain could not handle that after fifteen years invested in the exercise.
If you will produce a real domestic dilemma, we can deal with it.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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As a police officer you invite an expert to help you condider a number of suspicious neonatal deaths. Over the course of two days you are breifed on his findings that include 28 suspicious incidents that occured during these suspicious deaths of neonatals.
You then check with your records and you find that no nurse was ever present.
You then find out that a nurse was present during 18 of these suspicious incidents.
Does this show you might have a serial killer?
Does this show that they might have an accomplice?
Does this show that you have a second killer?
Does this show that your expert might have misidentfied a number of suspicious incidents?
Do you allow your expert to come up with alternative explanations, not thought of as originally suspicious, on different dates, when one nurse was present, so all deaths that were considered suspicious are then simply explained by an ever present nurse?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Don't forget visitors are also an ever-present factor. In the Letby case, the parents of the babies. In the Middlesbrough bottom-bothering scandal, a senior judge had to accept that one of the parents 'must have' surreptitiously entered the ward at night, buggered the child and left. Thereby accounting for a flaccid anus that wasn't there the day before. Refusing to believe that one event would have demonstrated that it can be a naturally-occurring condition and the whole thing would have gone away.
Of course in the LL case this would require multiple parents killing their babies but that is not an insurmountable barrier. In Middlesbrough there was a pederast 'ring'. Shortly thereafter, if you recall, there was a far-ranging 'coven' of witchcraft enthusiasts doing unspeakable things to children. With multiple crimes you can multiply suspects as well as narrow them down.
There is no limit to what people--and that's the problem, all the experts are people too--will believe when confronted with a situation that is (a) awful (b) inexplicable and (c) demands answers to 'stop it happening again'.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The reason why the New Yorker exposé was so important was that the British mainstream media (i.e. leaving aside Private Eye) had also been on the trail but their lawyers had stayed their hand because the Letby case was still sub judice while the remaining cases were coming to court. This story appeared the day after these further trials had finished.
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"Letby proclaims innocence as she is handed 15th whole life sentence" July 11, 2024
That was the headline in the Guardian and it is a significant one.
British newspaper subeditors are masters of conveying implicit meanings in their choice of, and in the wording of, their headlines. This one screams out a message if you know your Guardian. And after fifty years, I reckon I do.
For a start, that wasn’t what the story was about. The story was that a jury had just found a convicted serial baby-killer guilty of an attempted murder a previous jury had failed to agree about. The judge had just sentenced Lucy Letby for it. How Ms Letby reacted was about the fifteenth least important thing that was being reported on. That’s the choice of headline bit.
The wording bit is ‘proclaims’. That’s a tricky word, it carries a lot of weight. It conveys a sense of affirmation, of solemnity, of righteousness. If the Guardian had wanted to report Letby’s reaction in a neutral but Guardian sort of way, its headline would have read
| ‘Letby protests innocence as she is handed…’ |
It could have indicated mild scepticism about her action with
| ‘Letby claims innocence as she is handed…’ |
That the Guardian could have used insist, persist, assert, vent, exclaim… even ‘says’, says it all. Someone at the Guardian carefully selected proclaim. There isn’t anything higher in the English language before you reach
| ‘Letby announces her innocence as she is handed…’ |
and the Guardian wasn’t prepared to go quite that far. But in the body of the report, one got the strong impression the Guardian judged the judge had already gone too far.
I should explain that, in Britain, the most severe sentence a judge can hand out is a ‘whole life sentence’. Life sentences can be as short as seven years and, even in a not very murderous place like Britain, are common enough. A ‘whole life sentence’ means what it says and is very, very rare. Reserved for the most heinous of murderers. Which was not, on this occasion, what the judge was sentencing Letby for
| Sentencing Letby, Judge Goss said she could not be blamed for causing Baby K’s death but she was guilty of a “shocking act of calculated, callous cruelty”. Letby, 34, was found guilty of trying to kill the extremely premature infant less than two hours after she was born on 17 February 2016. Baby K died three days later after being transferred to a separate hospital. Letby was not accused of causing her death. |
So Lucy Letby got the same sentence as the worst serial killer in Britain for being cruel and for being incompetent. It was a good thing she was the worst serial killer in Britain, and was already serving fourteen whole life sentences, or the judge could be accused of a serious error of judgement. He himself seemed to be having one or two misgivings
| Goss told her she was a “conscientious, hard-working, confident and professional nurse … which allowed you to harm babies without suspicion. Only you know the reason, or reasons, for your murderous campaign.” |
Not quite, your honour. I know. The Guardian seems to know. The Daily Telegraph definitely knows: “Is Lucy Letby innocent?” it proclaimed on its front page. At this rate it won’t be long before the whole world knows. Even the somnolent judicious authorities of Great Britain might, in the fullness of time, begin to wonder what all the fuss is about.
Not any time soon though because something else has happened. An ex-director of the Crown Prosecution Service has been elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, so that’s not just an extra head in the sand, it’s the highest head in the land.
Don’t start counting the days, Lucy, but maybe start counting the years. If they’re handing out whole life sentences like sweeties, they can’t be worth that much.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I followed up the Guardian piece with this a couple of days later. Because the Guardian itself had moved on apace.
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Lucy Letby is innocent. It’s official. Jul 13, 2024
When there’s a miscarriage of justice in Britain, there is a well-worn path to set the not-guilty-after-all free. First of all nothing happens. Then nothing happens. After years and years, something happens. It might be a campaign daubing ‘Free the Birmingham Six’ on prominent landmarks, it might be a series of articles in Private Eye, it might be the publishing of a paperback book.
It is never one of the world’s great newspapers taking the government to task with immediate effect.
| The verdict handed down to the former neonatal nurse Lucy Letby last week brought to an end more than 21 months of court proceedings. After two trials and two attempts to appeal, Letby has been convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others. She is serving whole-life sentences. The Guardian |
That’s ground zero. Here’s the Guardian on deep background
| Throughout the trial period, and much of the preceding six years when Cheshire police were investigating a cluster of baby deaths at the Countess of Chester (CoC) hospital and had arrested Letby, laws intended to ensure juries are not influenced by stories in the press meant British journalists reported only what was said in court. Outside court, however, there has been a growing chorus of voices raising questions about some of the key evidence presented in the trial. |
Notice how carefully the Guardian is treading. In Britain, jury verdicts that have been through the appeals procedure almost never get overturned. The most that can happen is the verdict being declared ‘unsafe’ for one reason or another. The Guardian has been quite cute. It is ostensibly dealing with this latest case — one that hasn’t gone through the appeals procedure yet — in order to show the entire methodology of conviction was unsafe. To put it mildly.
| There was no forensic evidence to prove her guilt and no one saw Letby causing harm … Although one of the doctors concluded that she must have tampered with the breathing tube of a baby on three occasions, he did not actually see her doing it. |
So how in God’s name, asks the Guardian without quite asking, did this result in Letby getting a whole life sentence for this one offence alone?
| The prosecution’s case instead drew on accounts from doctors and nurses on the hospital’s neonatal unit and relied heavily on statistical evidence and expert opinion on complex medical points, some of which took days to explain to the lay jury. It is these opinions that some clinicians claim do not stand up to scrutiny. |
That last sentence is the critical one. In British courts, expert testimony is held to be sacrosanct and the prosecution always has the best experts. The Guardian is not holding itself up as judge-and-jury, it is just saying, “We have spoken to some experts.”
| A Guardian investigation has interviewed dozens of these experts and seen further evidence from emails and documents. Those raising concerns include several leading consultant neonatologists, some with current or recent leadership roles, and several senior neonatal nurses. Others are public health professionals, GPs, biochemists, a leading government microbiologist, and lawyers. |
It is not contested that Letby found herself in the dock because of guilt-by-association. She was overwhelmingly associated, associated beyond reasonable doubt, was the prosecution’s argument. The Guardian demurs
| Prominent statisticians have described as fallacious a shift table shown to the jury implicating Letby because she was the “one constant presence” when babies died or collapsed. |
But the central part of the Guardian’s case is there was no case. There were no crimes. Unless the state of the NHS is a crime. The newspaper pulls no punches describing the then chronic state of the Countess of Chester hospital and its neo-natal unit. The prosecution thought that was irrelevant.
| The prosecution alleged there were two principal ways in which Letby inflicted harm: insulin poisoning and injecting air into babies to cause a fatal air embolism. |
The insulin theory got short shrift from the Guardian, but no shrift at all from our legal guardians
| Several experts challenged the use of results from this type of immunoassay test as evidence of crime, including the forensic scientist Prof Alan Wayne Jones, who is one of Europe’s foremost experts on toxicology and insulin … detailed papers [from] experts, including a consultant neonatologist, a medico-legal expert, a chemical process engineer and a former public health director [were] rejected as inadmissible and not considered by the court. |
But at least there is a crime — of using insulin to cause hypoglycaemia — so any passing serial-killing nurse had opportunity, motive and method. It is not entirely clear whether that same nurse would be entirely up to speed on the theory and practice of introducing air embolisms as a means to murder
| The idea that injecting air into the stomach via a nasogastric tube could cause collapse leading to death was described as nonsensical or “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical”, by eight separate expert clinicians who spoke to the Guardian, seven of them specialising in neonatology. |
Yes, but have you really tried?
| Several said it was not practically feasible. Nasogastric tubes are tiny; it would take several refills using the 10ml syringes on neonatal units to inject a significant quantity of air. Furthermore, it would leak out or the baby would burp or vomit it up, or pass it as wind, they said. |
I think that might stand as our verdict on the whole proceedings. The full Guardian article can be found here https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This think piece was prompted by the way things were developing after the British MSM broke the 'Lucy Letby story'. The 'six month' prediction at the end has proved presciently over-optimistic.
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Miscarriages of Justice: What Do They Tell Us? Jul 15, 2024
I’ve written about three British miscarriages of justice during my relatively short career on Medium — the Post Office Horizon scandal, Lucy Letby and the Croydon Playboy murder. This is not because such things greatly exercise my mind, I’m about average in that regard. But it can’t be an accident either (says Britain’s leading applied epistemologist).
| Something must be drawing me in. |
It is not from my urgent desire to help the innocent — about average. In any case one of them, Karl Watson, is a right villain (though not a murderer). It’s not because of my urgent desire for fame or money. True, two of them are notorious but everyone’s been banging on about them, not just me. I am something of a lone voice where the Croydon Playboy murder is concerned though, I only know about it at all because of a piece by Medium’s very own John Welford.
| So what is drawing me in? |
I think it must be the light they shine on British governmental institutions. Not, curiously, the British courts. (Maybe a little, the British courts. Maybe a lot, the British courts, but that’s for another time. It’s all the time.)
* The only governmental institution that was to blame for the Post Office scandal was the Post Office.
* With Lucy Letby, it is the prosecutory authorities and the state of the NHS.
* In the Croydon case, it was mainly bent solicitors and sleeping policemen.
But that’s not shining a light. That’s just an old grouser grousing about the state we’re in. Which isn’t bad all things considered.
| Unless nothing is being done about them. |
That would be a serious matter. It would demonstrate the state we’re in is not fit for purpose. It is one thing being incompetent, it is something else being sublimely indifferent to incompetence. That would mean things can only get worse. Which is bad enough, all things considered.
| So let’s just see, shall we? |
Post Office. It’s taken twenty years just to get the show on the road. None of the victims have really been compensated. None of the miscreants have been prosecuted. The Post Office is still there, completely unchanged.
Lucy Letby. Well, the jury’s still out. As it were. But now the Guardian has weighed in from the left and the Daily Telegraph has trained its guns from the right, there is nowhere for the political classes to go. Except to ground. I would say six months is enough to see whether our masters are zombies.
Croydon Playboy Murder. This is done and dusted. And nothing has been done and dusted.
| Gladys, fetch my passport. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A follow up piece
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Lucy Letby. What now? Aug 18, 2024
It would be nice to know what degree of panic
is going on behind the scenes over the the Letby case.
Normally it’s safe to say ‘zero’ — the British legal gallimaufry is famously, in some ways meritoriously, immune from the concerns of the workaday world. But this is the first time the mass media has been tearing strips off them from the off. And that means, basically, a country of seventy million people who know one of their number is languishing in prison for crimes she didn’t commit. Crimes that never even happened. Is that a sustainable position?
Basically, yes. The independence of the judicial arm is a reality in Britain. If they decide to tough it out, which they normally do, Ms Letby will rot in gaol until they bury her body in quicklime. The bench operates on the principle: “It is better a thousand innocent people suffer than one judge has his actions questioned.”
But maybe, on reflection, on this occasion, under these very particular circumstances, they would prefer the whole thing to go away as quickly and quietly as possible. Least said, soonest mended. That’s where I can help, I have an unusual skill set in these areas, so here is one of my customary ten-step plans
1. There are always half-a-dozen enquiries going on into NHS hospitals that have committed enormities of one kind or another.
2. The next one that features maternity units will allow some dim governmental figure to announce in a written answer pushed out on a quiet Friday, ‘The findings of this report may lead to the drawing of parallels with the Lucy Letby case which has therefore, as a precautionary measure, been referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.’
3. The CCRC declares the original trials to be ‘unsafe on the grounds of an inadequate defence’. Not because the QC in question was at fault or the trial judge unreasonably disallowed contrary expert witnesses, but by the nature of the evidence. ‘Too complex for a lay jury to easily follow.’
4. The original verdicts are therefore set aside and a retrial ordered.
5. Technically that means Lucy Letby hasn’t been tried yet so she can be freed on bail. There is after all small chance of her decamping, re-offending, interfering with witnesses etc.
6. The Crown Prosecution Service announces that due to the passage of time, the complexity of the issues (or whatever), a retrial is not in the public interest at this time.
7. After a bit, Lucy Letby is offered a King’s Pardon for time served.
8. Lucy Letby angrily refuses. “I cannot be pardoned because I didn’t do anything.”
9. They give her a pile of cash anyway under some pretext or other.
10. We all move on.
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