Lucy Letby

As I have jury service coming up in a few months I find myself being more interested by news stories about court proceedings than I would otherwise have been. As such, I’ve been following the Lucy Letby case. She is a neonatal nurse who last week was convicted of murdering 7 babies. Overall I think it is very odd because none of the evidence seems particularly strong and I don’t think I would have reached the same conclusion that the jury did. Much was made of a supposedly confessional note that she had written, but having read it I think it’s a bit of a leap to consider it a confession instead of a mental outlet of someone under an incredible amount of stress. Some people are very willing to mentally entertain the idea that they have done something wrong when accused, even if they haven’t. I think the strongest evidence is the statistics, but I’m not convinced you can find someone guilty of multiple individual murders by statistical aggregation, and statistics is fraught with caveats anyway. You can prove a lot of nonsense with data if you are selective about what data you publish, and it can be difficult for an observer, especially one not well versed in statistics, to tell what data is not there.

I have tried to do more reading on this. It’s a very frustrating experience. The first thing is that news articles post-verdict are absolutely ghoulish. It’s just peering into someone’s rather banal private life. Even the BBC put out an article saying “what I learnt about Lucy Letby…” (spoiler alert: the author learnt that she had a crush on someone, she cries in high stress scenarios , she has a pink fluffy dressing gown, and other equally fascinating facts). The focus on her text messages is silly. They are only sinister if you assume she is a serial killer referring cryptically to her serial killing. Otherwise they’re just the exact same type of boring everyday messages that are on everyone’s phone.

News articles are quick to point out that deaths stopped after she was moved off the unit, but (following on from the concept of proving nonsense with statistics,) they never say if the unit is still treating the same number of patients, and other sources say that the unit was “downgraded” and no longer treats more serious cases.

I think you could find her guilty on the balance of probabilities, but not beyond reasonable doubt.