On the 27th January 1591, a woman called Agnes Sampson from East Lothian, Scotland, was garrotted and burnt for the crime of witchcraft. She was accused of raising a storm to sink the ship transporting Princess Anne of Denmark to Scotland to marry King James VI. The ship safely docked in Norway and the King joined the Princess there where they married before returning to Scotland.
Leading up to her death, Agnes was tortured and confessed to creating a storm which speaks to the level of suffering she must have endured at the hands of her torturer to confess to such obvious nonsense. In addition she was stripped naked, her body shaved and then closely inspected for the witches’ mark. It’s not hard to see why a man – her jailer/accuser – would want to imprison, strip and inspect the body of a vulnerable woman. It’s clearly sexual abuse on top of torture, false imprisonment, and murder. It’s telling that most of the people executed for witchcraft were women. These murders were not public lynchings by the mob but state-sanctioned by people of intellect in the judicial system. Agnes Sampson was tried and found guilty in a court of law on what is clearly a nonsensical accusation.
We like to think we’re better today. That times have moved on and that is certainly true to some extent. We no longer garrotte and burn people at the stake or charge people for witchcraft. However one thing has not changed which is we still like to look for someone to blame when things go wrong. Witch executions in the late middle ages increased during times of crop failures and economic turmoil. When people are starving they look for someone to blame which usually ends up being the atypical, poor and vulnerable woman who lives alone.
I believe this is exactly what has happened to Lucy Letby. A hospital ward in England noticed a spike in deaths and looked for someone to blame. That someone was Lucy Letby. The entire case was predicated on two statistical blunders: a spike in deaths on the ward and a duty roster chart. John O’Quigley from the department of statistics at University College London describes the spike in deaths as the “lottery fallacy” which says that because the chance of winning the lottery is ridiculously small, around one in one hundred million, the winner must have cheated. He published a paper in April – Suspected serial killers and unsuspected statistical blunders – in which he explains how easy it is to be led astray by statistical blunders like this when examining clusters of events.
The second statistical blunder is the duty roster used to link Lucy Letby to incidents on the ward. On this John O’Quigley says,
‘According to the prosecution, it is clear evidence; it’s nothing of the sort and any statistician – a first year undergraduate in statistics – could show that’s nonsense. You really don’t need a sophisticated understanding of statistics to see that it is a complete crock.’
‘All it actually shows is that when the suspected nurse was on duty – she was on duty.’
Mistaken statistics may have fuelled the witch hunt but the prosecution presented other evidence in court. For instance, Lucy Letby wrote notes blaming herself for the deaths and she searched the internet for the families of victims. Neither of these things is evidence of a confession or a serial killer at work. I sometimes Google search the families of victims of tragedies because I care and I feel badly for them. I want to see how they’re doing and hope they’re managing ok.
Then there’s the attempted insulin poisoning of two babies but according to Science on Trial, the blood tests are unreliable, there was no evidence of tampering of any bags, and no replication tests were ordered. Further, the lab itself states on their website,
“Please note that the insulin assay performed at RLUH is not suitable
for the investigation of factitious hypoglycaemia. If exogenous
insulin administration is suspected as the cause of hypoglycaemia,
please inform the laboratory so that the sample can be referred
externally for analysis.”
No blood samples were referred externally for analysis because no one suspected foul play and indeed it’s unlikely there was any foul play at all.
There was also evidence presented on skin discolouration to indicate air injected into blood vessels. The prosecution referenced a 1989 paper but didn’t check with any of the authors of the paper to make sure they were interpreting it correctly. Since then one of the authors has come forward to say the discolouration experienced by babies in the Letby case did not match those in his paper. The defence submitted this as new evidence in their application to the court of appeal but it was denied on the basis that it could have been presented by the defence during the trial.
It seems unfair that someone should be denied an appeal due to failings by their defence team and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the defence did a bad job when they didn’t call a single witness in a complex case that required expert knowledge of statistics and neonatal healthcare. It should be a requirement for a jury to hear from unbiased experts in these cases without requiring the defendant to pay witnesses. Most people don’t understand statistics or insulin tests or air embolisms without expert knowledge. We can’t expect a jury, a judge, the police or lawyers to understand either.
Lucy Letby is now facing life in prison. Her application for appeal was rejected and all that remains is an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). But the CCRC has its own problems after failing to act sooner in the Andrew Malkinson case with Malkinson saying it “obstructed my fight for justice and cost me an extra decade wrongly imprisoned”. There are now calls for the head of the CCRC to be removed from her role.
Without political intervention Lucy Letby will remain incarcerated for many years in what is a terrible miscarriage of justice. At least now the court restriction on reporting has been lifted we’re seeing some good journalism on the issue and a growing chorus of experts arguing her case. I’ll pop some links below but first, an excerpt from The Justice Gap which I think sums up the situation really well.
The irony is not lost on Steve Phelps. As he puts it, Lucy Letby has been ‘let down by every single arm of the state’ starting with the fact that the babies died because the NHS in that hospital was ‘so under-resourced and understaffed and in chaos’.
The police ‘investigation’ started from the premise that they ‘already had a suspect’; and then the CPS brought a case based ‘largely on the evidence of a retired paediatrician who didn’t even have licence to practice while he was advising the police’. The trial was ‘a travesty’ with Lucy’s defence calling just a single witness.
As he puts it: ‘If you go full circle, having been refused an Appeal she will end up in the CCRC which, like the hospital in which she worked, is now under-resourced, understaffed and unable to deal with a case as complex as this.’
New Yorker article: definefA British nurse was found guilty of killing seven babies. Did she do it?
The Telegraph: Lucy Letby: Serial killer or a miscarriage of justice?
The Guardian: Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence
This week Private Eye magazine joined the crusade with an article first written back in September 2023 but only published now the court restriction has been lifted.
rachel.blog 
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