Lucy Letby : innocence vs guilt is the WRONG question
Before looking for suspects one must first establish whether any crime has been committed at all.
If you turn up and find some guy lying face down with an axe lodged in the back of his head, then one can quite reasonably assume foul play.
But when you have an ‘unusual’ cluster of deaths of babies in a neonatal unit that is looking after babies who are not very well to begin with what’s the equivalent of the “axe in the head” here?
I’m referring, as the title implies, to the deaths of babies in the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal baby unit in 2015/2016 which have, partly, been attributed to the actions of Lucy Letby who was a nurse there at the time.
She was tried and found guilty of causing (some of) these deaths.
The case caused outrage and Letby was pilloried in the press. But everything rests on the assumption that such heinous crimes were committed at all. If you’re told that babies were deliberately murdered then, of course, the guilty party must be some kind of monster.
The problem with innocence vs guilt as the primary consideration (and framing) is that, implicitly, it assumes there exists a crime to answer to.
What are the grounds for even thinking there was a crime to answer to, in this case?
What statistical analysis was performed to demonstrate that an unusual cluster of deaths was overwhelmingly more likely to have been a result of murder, than any other possible explanation?
And, surely, this is the first thing that needs to be established beyond any reasonable doubt?
What likelihood does one need to put on ‘foul play’ in order to begin a prosecution in the first place? Suppose one did a statistical analysis and came to the conclusion the deaths were 90% likely to have been a result of foul play would this be enough?
Of course not.
This is very important because the impression is that Letby went on some murderous rampage killing 7 babies, and yet a further 10 babies died in that same time period.
If 7 babies is sufficient to be ‘unusual’ enough of a pattern to claim an overwhelming likelihood of foul play, then why isn’t 10?
These 7 deaths were murder, but these 10 deaths were not?
Does this even make sense?
Even if we take a figure of 3 as being the ‘expected’ number of deaths (in 2013-2014 there were 4 deaths on the unit and in 2014-2015 there were 3), then we have the ‘Letby’ 7 deaths being classed as sufficiently unusual to be overwhelmingly likely to have been murder, and the other 7 deaths not being seen in the same way.
What were the grounds for thinking the “Letby 7” constituted a statistically significant cluster, whereas the other 7 (over and above the ‘expected’ value) were not?
Were there 2 serial killers operating? (this is sarcasm, by the way)
A new analysis by Prof Fenton throws into question whether even the totality of 17 deaths in the 2015-2016 period constituted a sufficiently unusual pattern to warrant a criminal investigation.
In my view Letby is wholly innocent. Not because she’s the wrong suspect for the crimes, but because it’s not overwhelmingly likely that any crimes were committed in the first place.
There are no crimes she is innocent (or guilty) of. If there are no crimes in the first place, the question of innocence vs guilt is meaningless.
The first thing that is essential, then, is to establish beyond any reasonable doubt the existence of the crime.
That, clearly, has not been done in the Letby case.
Well quite. But if there had been, say, criminal negligence in terms of the upkeep of the facility that led to higher mortality rates, it makes complete sense (i.e. there is a motive) why any organisations and people who were responsible for said upkeep might be interested in promoting the existence of a series of crimes that can be pinned on a scapegoat.
How we've become so beholden to statistical analysis is even to the exclusion of other evidence is staggering. There's multiple natural explanations for this uptick including death spirals in related communities or areas in what used to be known as the death in threes in a family phenomena. That happened in my family in 2016, 2016, and 2018. I happened to be the last person physically present in three of those cases, though two were visiting them in hospital/hospice before their bodies shut down of old age/natural causes. Some people attract to the energy of those dying for metaphysical reasons we don't entirely understand. and those dying attract to those people likewise. Beyond that of course, the hospital might have been trying to cover up high infection transmission rates, changes in management or administration or staffing or any other of number of issues that could have also led to a higher than expected number of deaths. I think it's criminal that the court didn't mention the other baby deaths which looks like malicious prosecution.