Misunderstandings about how the British justice system functions are threaded through this case. I think a lot of this misunderstanding comes from familiarity with American courtroom dramas and televised trials while most British people (thankfully) may never set foot in a British court.
To take one example, the frequent question “why didn’t the defence call experts?” Well, the thing is, they tried to. For example:
On Day 3 of the trial the defence made a motion to call three of their expert witnesses. They wanted each of their experts to testify back to back with the prosecution experts, to avoid many months of prosecution case for each count before they could begin addressing any of it.
The prosecution objected to the Defence’s proposal to interleave the experts (prosecution expert for one charge first, then defence etc) and they wanted Letby to testify first. The judge agreed. This is procedurally sound, technically, but in a complex case like this where 22 charges were presented in one trial it is very arguable that this approach put the defence at a great structural disadvantage.
Letby (in her police interrogation) had agreed to things like timings and Baby K being paralysed under morphine which Dr. Hall disputed and which we now know were untrue. Dr Hall identified several problems in the prosecution narrative that Letby had accepted during her gruelling police interrogations, long before any defence experts were consulted.
Letby was clear in the interrogation that she had no memory of Baby K, so she just accepted everything the police stated about that event - not allegations about any malfeasance - just that the events (timings, medications, and other supposed facts) had happened as she was being told they had.
In the police interview facts around the Baby K case were largely based on door swipe data and Dr Jayaram’s account. The trouble is that both the door swipe data and Dr Jayaram’s account would later prove to be nonsense, but it was too late by then for her to object to what she had naively accepted in her police interview. At trial she could (and often did) contradict what she said in her police interviews, given what she later learned, but this was usually framed by NJ as ‘lying’ or backtracking. This is completely alien to people, even Britons, who are more used to U.S. courtroom dramas where defence experts can be deployed tactically in the middle of the state’s case.
The defence was out manoeuvred. Interleaving was refused and the defence had to wait until after all 22 counts of Crown evidence were presented. The defence were therefore structurally disadvantaged: when they finally could have brought in expert witnesses, the jury was already saturated with months of prosecution narrative.
Meanwhile, Dr Jayaram and Dr A gave entirely different accounts in court compared to what they said in police interviews, yet their later versions were accepted without question, and the earlier contradictions brushed aside. As usual in this case, there’s one rule for the consultants and another for Lucy Letby.
Is that fair? Many would say it is not. This is just one example of how the complex and often unwieldy apparatus of British justice operates. It’s definitely not perfect. Many expect it to be common sense or more straightforward.
This is a great example btw of how you should never agree to being interviewed by police without a lawyer present, no matter how innocent you are. Innocent people often think they can “just tell the truth” and nothing bad can happen. But if you don’t know the technicalities, you end up accepting false premises, and those answers can be locked in as evidence against you, as they were against Lucy Letby.
(Portions of the relevant Day 3 transcripts pictured)