Lucy Letby denied leave to appeal

[Viviennemary]

Just heard on the news Lucy Letby the convicted serial killer has been denied leave to appeal. Good decision I think. She should stay behind bars for the rest of her life.

With respect, you're missing my point. Obviously people aren't saying she's young and pretty so couldn't be a killer. But are people inherently biased towards young pretty women in the sense of assuming they can't do bad things? I think so! If she wasn't young, or pretty, or a woman, would so many people be questioning the validity of her sentence or writing articles about her? No I doubt it.

I've never said its baby-killer-haters vs baby-killer-sympahisers, and I agree totally that our justice system should be held to a rigorous standard. What I'm saying is i think there are miscarriages of justices against other groups (BAME, men, old haggard folk!) where people don't care - I personally think the reason LL gets so much scrutiny of the process if because people are bias to think she can't possibly have done it and view information with that bias.

Not that the above precludes scrutiny of her conviction - but if it's solely about justice I think there are probably more deserving people to champion based on the evidence on which LL was convicted.

The point is that you cannot look at this in isolation. It cannot be divorced from all the surrounding evidence pointing the finger directly at Letby. As pointed out, Letby herself accepted that insulin was administered to these babies, and there was no expert witness who looked at the evidence who disagreed either.

Law Society Gazette, New Law Journal. Equivalent publications in the forensic medicine field.

Well, Auriol Grey is neither young nor pretty yet she had thousands of people campaigning for her release and calling her innocent despite being found guilty by a jury. And she did have it overturned after a retrial.

So, just because LL is young and pretty doesn't mean she shouldn't be allowed the same opportunity to challenge her conviction or that people are biased for supporting this right.

I'd love to know whether that article actually was fact-checked. If it was, I don't understand how that reference to Gill and Adams got through.

I don't understand why the right to appeal is a part of the debate? She undoubtedly had a right to appeal, she's exercised it, she hasn't succeeded.

Because some people think that those who support her appeal and question the evidence means they think she is innocent because she is young and pretty.

Well it will be interesting if we ever see the four points on why exactly she wasn’t allowed to appeal.

Either way, for Letby as it is, even if some miracle happened, she was exonerated and set free, she’s hardly likely to get married and have kids now is she, unless by sperm donor. She’ll always have doubt and suspicion hanging over her.

And in my opinion, that wouldn't have happened if Auriol Grey was convicted of killing multiple babies!

And I agree that none of this means LL shouldn't be allowed an opportunity to challenge her conviction- I said that in my last post. She has challenged it, that challenge failed. I disagree that people aren't biased though, which is fine - not everyone has to agree on everything.

Why do you think that means she'll never get married and have children? Plenty of guilty people get out of prison and go on to have families.

That New Yorker article is very selective about the evidence it chooses to highlight. Why make a big deal of the fact that she didn't google air embolism but not mention that she had attended a training course that covered this just before the first death? And no mention of the fact that she had falsely completed notes for babies she had not been caring for at the time. Or that she/her defence did not dispute that someone had added insulin to the bags.

Also, IIRC the prosecution didn't actually 'rely' on the statistical evidence anyway (and certainly not in the same way as it was relied on in eg Sally Clarke's trial) - it was presented more as something that had been put together by the consultants and which had triggered their initial concerns and led to the police investigation.

There’s a lot of finger pointing certainly, but a notable absence of hard evidence.

That LL accepted insulin was administered at the trial proves nothing.

You also have to remember that a lot of expert advice is actually just opinion. Opinion based on years of knowledge and experience, yes, but still opinion nonetheless. That's why one expert will say one thing and another will say something different. Experts are not Gods. Personally, I put more faith in hard evidence than in opinions.

I agree that we should challenge all potential miscarriages of justice. It could well be that there are many (of less tabloid interest) who were incarcerated even though innocent. There most likely are. It’s happened before. All of these cases matter because they point to quite scary issues within our justice system and that affects all of us.

The halo effect doesn’t actually work in the way you describe though. The halo effect works if, say, a pretty young woman needs help with a broken down car. However, if the finger of blame is pointed at a pretty young woman for something like this our press goes crazy and she is instantly assumed to be guilty by everybody. It’s immediately ten times as salacious. I haven’t heard a word of support for her, only disgust and horror, until this one article came out vs the 10,0000 Daily Mail ‘Baby Killer’ articles we’ve seen thus far. Our press, especially the tabloids, love an evil woman story. It sells.

It is therefore true that LL probably has had more press coverage than many, but I’m sure we can all agree that the vast majority of it has been extremely salacious and condemnatory. I don’t believe that anyone has issues with her conviction now because she’s young and pretty. On the contrary our society loves to string up a young pretty woman, particularly for gruesome crimes like this. If it was popular to have sympathy for such a woman we would see articles reflecting that, but we don’t. At least I haven’t and I’d challenge anyone to produce one. The press know what the public want to see and that hasn’t been in any way sympathetic to her thus far.

All that aside, if there are issues with the conviction they should be examined regardless of that. If there is a miscarriage of justice here that is still a huge issue regardless of whether or not there is much more press interest in this case vs another. I would say the same no matter what she looked like. We should be arguing the points raised and not circling around this issue, which is wholly irrelevant to whether or not she was wrongfully convicted.

The New Yorker has a notoriously rigorous fact checking process. I don’t believe that they would tank a century long reputation for Lucy Letby.

No, it isn't taught in schools and that lack of logic shows up all the time these days. Facts are immaterial to beliefs.

Yes but there may be potential jurors on this thread. It's entirely possible that people in a position to judge her guilty or innocent may now read that article and be unduly influenced by it.

The CPS have caused the magazine to be pulled from newsstands for a reason, so she can receive a fair a trial as possible!

How do you know this?

Jurors are prohibited from discussing their deliberations by law.

*How do you know this?

Jurors are prohibited from discussing their deliberations by law.*

It's in the New Yorker article. A complaint was made but it seems like the juror was still allowed to serve

Yes, this one careful article might prejudice her trial, but not the 10,000 ‘baby killer!’ headlines that have been splashed everywhere the whole time.

Because there’ll be too many men who will think she did do it. She also seemed to only have met the doctor so far at her work. No one else.

We will see it. It's simply being held back until after her retrial, to avoid prejudicing it.

Depends what you mean by "hard evidence". Criminals tend to be quite good at making sure no-one sees them committing their crime, and the vast majority tend to get convicted on circumstantial evidence. That doesn't meant that it's somehow not evidence or that it should be ignored.

But how on earth could a competent fact-checker not notice that they were citing a report that is not just wildly inaccurate, but is very well known to be wildly inaccurate?