I watched an ITV documentary: Lucy Letby; Beyond Reasonable Doubt? It’s an analysis of the evidence used to prosecute the NHS neo-natal nurse for the murder of seven newborn babies and the attempted murder of eight more. She is serving 15 concurrent whole life sentences.
It's very disturbing for a number of reasons. It's told from the perspective of Letby's latest barrister, Mark McDonald and appears to be part of his strategy to draw attention to her defence case and to his application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. There is no pretence of balance but maybe that's not the intention of the programme; it's trying to balance what is suggested was an unbalanced prosecution.
The current problem is that the Criminal Cases Review Commission can only review a case if new evidence has come to light. McDonald's case is built on the (unstated but inferred) assertion that the defence team in the cases was at best incompetent, failing to call expert witnesses whose testimony would have contradicted the state's expert witnesses. Indeed they called only one witness in her defence, a plumber testifying to sewage issues. Further, evidence of two of the state's main witnesses now having rowed back on their statements is presented, which I guess you could argue is "new" evidence.
McDonald assembled a team of "world-renowned" (and to me, a lay person, convincing) experts who produced a substantial report which essentially claims the convictions were based on circumstantial ("she must have done this because she was around at the time") evidence and misleading medical and statistical claims and are therefore unsafe.
It's a powerful case but I found myself wondering how I, if I were on the jury, could make sense of the medical data as presented. If there were no alternative opinions presented by the defence, I would have to believe the doctors, wouldn't I? As a person with both a brain and a sceptical bent, I'd have liked to question some of the evidence but that isn't the role of a juror. Is a lay jury really the best way of deciding such a case? It it were a civil case and you were required to make a judgment on the balance of probabilities, perhaps. But I can't see how twelve lay persons, as "good and true" as they may be, can judge a prosecution's case proven beyond reasonable doubt in cases where medical evidence is the primary basis of the case. Section 43 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 provides for a trial without a jury in serious fraud cases if "It would be too burdensome or unfair to expect a jury to follow the evidence." Are medical cases not similar?
There's more to this programme than I've written here but I came away feeling that there are questions that need to be answered and, if our justice system in the form of the CCRC is more concerned with following its rules rather than searching for truth and offering Lucy Letby a fair hearing, I don't like it at all.
I agree. Many in the legal world take the view that some cases are far too complex for a jury trial. Fraud being one of them as well as cases which run for over many weeks. The opposition comes from highly paid posh barristers. Guess why.
ReplyDeleteI’ve followed the Letby case since it started and given the pre publicity and the toxic relationships in that hospital with Drs pitched against nurses and management against both, it needs not just an appeal but an inquiry into the entire situation.
Without being privy to all the evidence - much of which seems not to have been disclosed (why) it’s impossible to have any sense of the truth.
And it’s not the first time that there have been serious miscarriages of justice in our courts.
The most interesting discussion I have heard related to the role of expert witnesses in our system. Both sides can produce one world renowned witness to support their case, and often the jury is not helped to understand statistical relevance. In this case, no one properly investigated or explained the number of deaths in the hospital where Letby worked that would have happened anyway, and statistics across comparable hospitals. So the argument is that expert witnesses give opinion in isolation, and only if you consider the whole picture is it possible to see that she may have been responsible for some but not all, or none at all. Let’s see how it plays out.
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