AIBU to suggest the Letby trial shows madness of UK legal system

[Neversofaraway]

The babies had post mortem exams, death certificates written and say the cause of death was natural causes.
12 amateurs in the jury say the babies were murdered.
Then, inquests into deaths are started.
What will happen if the inquests decide it was natural causes after all? No wonder the inquests are delayed.
Shouldn't the inquests be done before a murder trial? If there is concern shouldn't the cause of death be established before a trial and not expect a jury to decide on such tricky matters when even the doctors are struggling?

If you read (for example) Dr Hindmarsh's testimony on how insulin administration could have happened, or Dr Bohin's evidence on how baby P may have been injured, you get a sense of how clearly (or not!) information was delivered at the trial. It's very useful to have things in written form, especially detailed or technical information. You can go back and check and compare. But the jury couldn't do that with the expert witness testimony.

It's the judge's job to sum up all relevant evidence for the jury to use at the end of the trial, and Judge Goss did so, taking five days. It's all online now. lucyletbyinnocence.com/judges-summing-up.html

But for the jury? They sent a request for a written copy to help in their deliberations. It was refused.

But for the jury? They sent a request for a written copy to help in their deliberations. It was refused.

This is absolutely shocking. How can that be defended?

These days we know a lot more about the way people process information in different ways. We need to start thinking about how best to cater for that for jurors, especially in particularly complex trials where there's a huge volume of evidence.

That’s all completely normal in any jury trial. Trials aren’t presented on paper. Part of what juries do is assessing the quality of the witnesses, how they respond under cross-examination, etc. The judge instructs them on the law and reviews the evidence in the summing up.

Yes, that's right. In most cases, little or none of that information is subsequently available to the public. Lucy Letby's case is different in that regard. So it's possible to see much of what the jury heard.

I'll admit I do not have enough expertise or medical education to competently dissect the medical evidence presented. I don't understand much of it. There are sources that summarise it in a way I do understand. Private Eye and the Jolly Contrarian are good for this, but then I have to accept that I am reliant on third parties being a) knowledgeable and b) unbiased.

Going back to what I posted earlier about looking at who is speaking and what they have to gain, I am happier to put my trust in the experts speaking to these publications than the likes of DE, but I do accept that both parties could be wrong.

However, there are other aspects of the case that I do understand that I find equally concerning.

Dewi Evan's involvement, despite his history of being a controversial expert witness, and despite the fact that the Lord Justice Jackson was so concerned about the quality of evidence DE presented in other cases that he wrote to Judge Goss to caution against allowing him as an expert witness against Letby.

Many of the statements DE has made publicly about the case are concerning to me, including that he prides himself on "winning" cases, which is so far out of the scope of his role as an expert witness that alone should have had him removed as an expert witness. There are other problematic statements he has made, but this is the most worrying.

The Cheshire Police went witness shopping. Before finding DE, they consulted various other experts who were unable to find any evidence of murder.

The way the circumstantial evidence was misrepresented - the diary, for example, much was made of her writing "I killed them," etc. The fact that she also wrote "I am innocent," "I have done nothing wrong" on the same note was ignored.

The handover notes she brought home, the way these were spoken about had people believing they were confidential medical notes. They weren't. Also, it was never explained why these were classed as "trophies" when less than 5% of them pertained to the victims in the case.

The Police deferred to Jayaram et al during the investigation, who worked backwards from Letby being a murderer and sought to find evidence to support this.

There's more that worries me, but this is what sticks out the most.

I don't know if she is guilty, but I have no doubt that the investigation was flawed from day one and her conviction is unsafe.

But in this trial, which stands and falls on the medical data, it was crucial for the jury to be able to see it written down. Even a jury of medics would have struggled without transcripts to evaluate the data in detail.

This principle would apply to any technical data not specifically medical.

The fact that this was asked for and not granted raises the uncomfortable possibility that someone on the jury had an adjustment need that wasn't accommodated, which isn't great.

But juries don’t receive transcripts during trials, at least in England. They take notes and they can ask the judge to go over any evidence that has been given.

If they have access needs I assume they inform the usher, who informs the judge.

I think that is the point of the thread, the UK legal system, as it stands, is not suitable for complex technical or medical cases such as Letby or the PO scandal.

Which is why our system will not work in cases with reams of science or tech data.

Sorry missed this, exactly.

I know. To be clear, I'm not objecting to the fact that the jury wasn't given a transcript because I think that was some sort of breach of procedure. I am pointing out that having the transcripts gives technical and detailed information in an accessible form, which can be read and revisited. It means that rhetorical tricks, leaps of logic and circular reasoning are easier to spot. These problems abound when you read the expert evidence for this case.

Separately, I suspect that cross-examination to establish details (like when counsel and witness put their heads together and mull over a calculation, assisted by interjections from the judge), isn't the clearest way to offer a scientific theory or explanation. This is far from being the only problem with this trial (or from being a problem only with this trial). But I think that it would be very hard to read the transcripts and argue that the jury were put in the best possible position to weigh up the scientific evidence. That's before we get to problems with the witness system, disclosure, and excluded evidence.

Exactly this.

While there are some problems specific to this case, other issues are systemic. For example, Dewi Evans didn't create the system where he could give factually incorrect evidence in good faith to the court, without expert scrutiny of it. The individuals in the prosecution team aren't the ones who made it possible to give dodgy statistical evidence, they just did their jobs in an adversarial system.

There are risks that were identified long before the Letby case. Hence for example the Royal Statistical Society's many publications on use of statistics in the legal system starting in the 00s, and the Law Commission report in 2011.

Maybe these issues didn't cause an MOJ in this case, perhaps she did kill at least one baby. But they could next time. This is the point lots of us are making. It goes well beyond Letby. Meanwhile we also don't have a system that can be relied on to remedy MOJs promptly, and the head of the CCRC had to go last year because of the problems within that organisation.

Thanks, I take on board the point about the difficulties with highly technical and medical evidence.

The nature of a lot of evidence will have got a lot more technical over the years as technology has improved/increased.

Im not completely sure that a case like this is really so different from other cases with highly complex technical evidence, whether that be blood, dna, firearms, or other scientific evidence, especially where new or disputed techniques are involved.

Juries aren’t experts and they aren’t meant to be.

Also I think it is one thing when the defence calls expert witnesses who actively dispute the prosecution evidence (as often happens, especially with psychiatric evidence), another thing when the defence only calls two witnesses.

Presumably juries have access to the items/documents entered in evidence as part of their deliberations. For long or complex trials maybe we could have statements summarising someone's witness testimony available as a piece of evidence? Like taking notes but an official version. So the jury are still there for the "nuance" of the live questioning, but they also have something accurate to look back on.

I'd also be in favour of experts not being for either side but only presenting agreed science to the jury.

Well the same risks and criticisms would also apply to other cases with a similar volume of evidence that requires expertise to assess. I think this goes to the point that some of us have been making, which is that these are problems that could happen again if juries are expected to assess expert evidence whilst not having specialist knowledge or training themselves. The Letby trial is unusual in having so much evidence, but not unique.

It's fine if people think the defence should've been conducted differently, and they may be right, but it doesn't affect the underlying weaknesses within the system.

And also worth emphasising that there are ways to address the evidence problem other than expert juries. It might be possible to keep the current jury system and instead approach the commission of experts in a less adversarial way.

I agree with you.

Or maybe it was just that the jury had different recollections of what had been said and wanted to check their facts. That they were denied this is equally concerning.

I'll admit I do not have enough expertise or medical education to competently dissect the medical evidence presented

Same here, but that's why I need a simple overall sanity check: how often are these experts wrong? In a blind review of records, how often do they flag as "suspicious" those events which Letby could not have caused? That's the check that Royal Statistical Society says is important, and is also common sense. This check was not done in this case, but even from just what's known: (1) some events were flagged as suspicious that were clearly not (e.g. stomach air in Baby C); (2) some events initially flagged as suspicious were later reclassified as not; (3) some stated criteria for suspicion (e.g. crying or rashes) are so non-specific that they'd likely flag many cases in a blind review.

The issue of not knowing the experts' error rate also applies to defense experts, with two differences: (1) we can't measure it because there are no "definitely murder attempt" events to test them on, and (2) we don't need them to be right beyond a reasonable doubt.

Juried sometimes get it wrong.
But they are orders of magnitude more likely to be right that people on the internet.

That's true as a baseline matter: if all we knew about a case was that the jury convicted and "people on the internet" disagreed, the safer bet would be that the jury was right. But we know much more than that. The level of problems with the case, and the level of people pointing out the problems, are "orders of magnitude" higher than in most cases.

This ^

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