The New Yorker article is cleverly written, but is as replete with whataboutery, obtuseness and evasion as any prosecution case.
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You are not listenimg, because you enjoy arguing as recreation. I said LL herself conceded that someone poisoned those infants.
The NY article is tendentious in that section in service of its overall claim. There is clear hard evidence of insulin-poisoned infants in Chester. Who poisoned them? They were poisoned by someone. That reality is fact, however and whoever administered the insulin.
I am not going to get into argument as recreation when infants were killed and maimed for life by an evil and depraved person.
I do not need ‘evidence’ for a personal observation.
As said, I consider this topic too tragic and too appalling for argument as recreation.
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The case is built on circumstantial and statistical evidence of a kind that is notoriously vulnerable to mistaken interpretation.
I haven’t conclusively made up my mind either way as to the woman’s guilt.
But it does seem clear to me that a lot of people have and will not be swayed either way, that a lot of people’s reputations rest on the conviction remaining in place, that this is the sort of conviction that is “too big to fail”. If it were to be overturned there are serious implications for the whole British state, not least a further major loss of trust in British state institutions as a whole.
The British state has a less than stellar record of admitting miscarriages of justice in a timely manner - Bloody Sunday, the treatment of the Guildford Four/Birmingham Six/the Maguires etc., the Bridgwater Four, Hillsborough, the Windrush Scandal, the Post Office scandal. None of this is evidence in and of itself that Lucy Letby suffered a miscarriage of justice, but it is to say that Britain has a long record of miscarriages of justice and attempts to cover them up.
Absolutely. Throw away the key.
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Was thrown away, thankfully.
A bizarre and ungraspably tragic case.
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That’s a backtrack.
You don’t understand the difference between probably and conclusively.
The only far right propaganda and general uncomfortable reading on this site all come from the same poster.
Did he ever consider the turn of events that led him here I wonder ? It’s tragic
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My personal observation is that her behaviour after her arrest is unlikely to be consistent with being a serial killer.
That the case is so tragic means the conviction should be tested in the most robust manner possible.
This forum and all other forums on the internet are for recreational argument. They serve no other function. Sometimes the topics are serious, more often they’re frivolous. But all topics are the subject of recreational argument.
Bizarre post
Two very worrying paragraphs:
Among the new suspicious episodes that Evans said he flagged was another insulin case. Evans said that it had similar features as the first two: high insulin, low C-peptide. He concluded that it was a clear case of poisoning. When I asked Michael Hall, a retired neonatologist at University Hospital Southampton who worked as an expert for Letby’s defense, about Evans’s third insulin case, he was surprised and disturbed to learn of it. He could imagine a few reasons that it might not have been part of the trial. One is that Letby wasn’t working at the time. Another is that there was an alternative explanation for the test results—but then, presumably, such an explanation could be relevant for the other two insulin cases, too. “Whichever way you look at this, that third case is of interest,” Hall told me.
Several months into the trial, Myers asked Judge Goss to strike evidence given by Evans and to stop him from returning to the witness box, but the request was denied. Myers had learned that a month before, in a different case, a judge on the Court of Appeal had described a medical report written by Evans as “worthless.” “No court would have accepted a report of this quality,” the judge had concluded. “The report has the hallmarks of an exercise in working out an explanation” and “ends with tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside Dr. Evans’ professional competence.” The judge also wrote that Evans “either knows what his professional colleagues have concluded and disregards it or he has not taken steps to inform himself of their views. Either approach amounts to a breach of proper professional conduct.” (Evans said that he disagreed with the judgment.)
Fair enough. Sensible points there.
I think this topic is way beyond “serious”.
The mass murder (in my view genocide) of people in Gaza is way beyond serious but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be the subject of discussion.
I agree entirely with second comment.
But I have no idea what first comment might mean.
I do not believe in argument by avalanche.
I do believe any argument should be made on its own merits, not in a crypto Calvinist fashion on the equivalent of original sin.
That may be, but why did this hospital in particular have so many deaths?
My view is that her behaviour and demeanour is consistent with somebody who did not do the things she was convicted of and inconsistent with somebody who did do the things she was convicted of.
This is not a smoking gun of her innocence, but if she did do it, she’s probably also the most gifted actor to have ever lived.
Chance is a possible explanation.
In the below case the chance of two siblings dying from Sudden infant Death Syndrome was put at 1 in 73 million by a paediatrician. But this was bullshit.
This paragraph from the article touches on the misuse of statistics in the case of Lucia De Berk, a Dutch nurse who was initially convicted as an “angel of death”, who was later acquitted.
In September, 2022, a month before Letby’s trial began, the Royal Statistical Society published a report titled “Healthcare Serial Killer or Coincidence?” The report had been prompted in part by concerns about two recent cases, one in Italy and one in the Netherlands, in which nurses had been wrongly convicted of murder largely because of a striking association between their shift patterns and the deaths on their wards. The society sent the report to both the Letby prosecution and the defense team. It detailed the dangers of drawing causal conclusions from improbable clusters of events. In the trial of the Dutch nurse, Lucia de Berk, a criminologist had calculated that there was a one-in-three-hundred-and-forty-two-million chance that the deaths were coincidental. But his methodology was faulty; when statisticians looked at the data, they found that the chances were closer to one in fifty. According to Ton Derksen, a Dutch philosopher of science who wrote a book about the case, the belief that “such a coincidence cannot be a coincidence” became the driving force in the process of collecting evidence against de Berk. She was exonerated in 2010, and her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Dutch history. The Italian nurse, Daniela Poggiali, was exonerated in 2021, after statisticians reanalyzed her hospital’s mortality data and discovered several confounding factors that had been overlooked.
Well, you are obviously thinking of the footage of LL being arreated for the final time in the early morning at her house. We both saw shock, true. But I would point out that LL had been arrested, questioned and bailed several times by that stage. By then, LL would have known, at very least, she was under deep suspicion. So I read her evident shock in different fashion – logically different fashion, I would say.
Where we do agree, or so I imagine, is on the nigh unfathomable nature of LL’s involvement. How did someone of her previous conduct start doing what she did to infants? I do agree this facet involves a kind of analytical vertigo. There were no warning signs before the lethal sequence’s onset.
Contrast Wayne Couzens raping and murdering Sophie Everard. How and why that evil and depravity came about is plenty parseable: bad seed, misogyny, violent pornography, cocaine. What emerged in recent times about WC’s prior conduct was emimently predictable.
But LL… The mind staggers.