I never followed the Lucy Letby case in great detail. However others have and they have expressed doubts about the evidence.
If she is not guilty, then she should be freed as soon as humanly possible. Every second she serves is an outrage. This is why I believe the Criminal Cases Review Commission should move to have the case reopened as soon as possible.
While it does so, the prison authorities should be instructed to make strenuous efforts to keep her from harm. The courts, likewise, should start behaving as if it was possible for trials to go wrong.
I am baffled by the Appeal Court’s swift rejection of her request for leave to appeal. Are these eminent persons interested in justice, or in procedure? The record of our courts, in putting injustice right — slow and reluctant — is bad enough as it is.
Indeed. If she is innocent then there should be a proper appeal process, the evidence properly re-examined and she should be released. There was much criticism at the time for her refusal to attend the sentencing or to show remorse. This is the great conundrum in the British legal system – it assumes guilt upon conviction in defiance of evidence aplenty that innocent people do get wrongly convicted. Yet, when a prisoner repeatedly professes innocence and refuses to show contrition, they are denied parole. It never occurs to those responsible that actually, maybe, this person is telling the truth and you cannot show contrition for something you didn’t do.
An explosion of serious, well-researched journalism on both sides of the Atlantic, casting doubt on the verdict, has, in recent days, changed the weather. It is no longer possible to dismiss all doubters as conspiracy theorists.
This seems to be a familiar pattern. If you dare to challenge the orthodoxy, you are a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if Letby is guilty as charged or not. I have not been privy to the evidence against her. But I do not forget that those who went to jail for infanticide around thirty years ago were condemned on the testimony of Roy Meadows, a charlatan who was peddling his own brand of woo and the relevant authorities took him at face value. Every one of those women who went to jail went there while innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted on the basis of spurious evidence.
And when I first wrote in defence of Ms Letby, in September last year, public opinion was pretty heavily against her. What I didn’t like about the case — and still don’t like — was the vagueness of the evidence and the way she was never in fact presumed to be innocent in practice.
Nobody ever saw Lucy Letby harm a baby. Nobody has ever come up with a reason why she should have done. Keeping case notes is not evidence of murder. Nor are Facebook searches.
Indeed so. Again, Roy Meadows’ ghost looms large over this one.
God preserve us from “experts”.
This was a horrible series of events so it seems somebody must be made responsible. It is not far removed from, “my cow has died; let’s find a witch and burn her.”
It was also very convenient for the NHS to have a single criminal perpetrator to blame for the unusual amount of deaths on that baby unit, rather than (perhaps) its own administrative and operational negligence being responsible for many of them.
In a very similar Canadian case, the targeted nurse was exonerated and the organisation had to accept accountability. It echoes.