Far better article than New Yorker one, in fairness. Thanks for posting.
I continue to think ‘understaffing’ is far from an adequate criterion for explaining how 14 infants ended up dead or maimed.
But there it is. Bar a confession and/or clear DNA evidence of some sort, criminal cases are rarely 100% clear. Which is why there is the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ rubric.
The “awkward squad” in grauniad are now asking questions
Im calling bolox on this anyway.
This article is not strictly connected to the Letby case, but at the same time deeply relevant.
Sweeney is one of the people who are questioning the Letby convictions.
Kathleen Folbigg who is mentioned in the article and at the time of writing was still in prison had her convictions overturned some months ago.
Child abuse is an evil thing but it’s always worse when the perpetrator is the state. Twenty-two years ago this month, Sally Clark was convicted of murdering her two baby boys, Christopher and Harry, and blaming it on cot death. She was sentenced to life in prison. There was a secret sentence, crueller even than that. The murder charge meant that in the family court, behind closed doors, she lost the right to be a mother to her surviving son, and that extra cruelty broke her. The British state committed child abuse by depriving her third boy of his mother for no good reason.
The question at the heart of Sally’s tragedy – and those of Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony – was not, “Who murdered this child?” but, “Was there a crime?”. And the truth was there had been no crime. In none of these cases was there any good evidence of child abuse, let alone child murder. There is a fourth case, that of Kathleen Folbigg, an Australian mother who lost four children. She is still in prison. These tragedies are examined in a major new series by Discovery +, released this weekend, on which I am interviewed.
Back in 1999 Professor Sir Roy Meadow was a kind of child abuse god, author of The ABC of Child Abuse and star witness for the crown. He advanced “Meadow’s Law”, that “unless proven otherwise, one cot death is tragic, two is suspicious and three is murder” and told the jury at Sally Clark’s trial that the chances of someone like Sally, a middle-class, non-smoking mother, having two cot deaths was “73 million to one”. This was an arrow that shot though Sally’s defence and one, it seemed at the time, for which there was no answer.
My interest in Sally’s case was all Martin Bell’s fault. Had my old journalist pal from Bosnia not stood for election in Tatton in 1997, he would not have made friends with the chaplain for the prison where Sally ended up. The Reverend Pauline Pullen pushed me up against a wall and jabbed me with her finger: “You’re the investigative reporter. Everybody in that prison, the cons, the screws, even the governor knows she’s innocent. Go on, Sweeney, do your job.”
I had recently left the Observer for BBC Radio 5 documentaries and luckily my producer, Bill Law, was already on the case. The more Bill and I dug, the more the evidence against Sally crumbled to dust.
The statistic “73 million-to-one” that Meadow used against Sally was, according to Peter Donnelly, professor of statistics at Oxford University, “just plain wrong”. The odds of a middle-class non-smoking mother having a cot death were 8,543-to-one. Sally lost two boys so 8,543 times 8,543 equals, roughly, “73 million-to-one”. It’s a schoolboy error to multiply odds in this way. By way of analogy, the moment a rank outsider wins the Grand National, the odds of it doing it again the following year drop massively. The true number the murder trial should have heard is that once you have suffered one cot death, the chances of a second are 60-1. The statistic Meadow gave the court was poisonously untrue.
Professor Sir Roy Meadow’s database was founded on court cases, not science. Photograph: Chris Young/PA
Meadow’s claims to be a scientist of standing fell apart when we learned that his database was not founded on laboratory science but on 81 court cases.that he had, in the words ofProfessor Jean Golding, “cherry-picked”. To save space, Meadow had shredded his research database so it was impossible to go through his workings. Jean Golding, professor of epidemiology at Bristol, compared his scientific rigour to “stamp-collecting” and said that he was not a reliable witness.
But it was Meadow’s Law that really took the biscuit. More boys than girls die from cot death which means that it is in some way genetic, though we don’t understand the exact mechanism. Our Radio 5 Live documentary on Sally Clark in 2001 ended like this: “Unless proven otherwise, one cot death is a tragedy and two cot deaths are a tragedy and three cot deaths are a tragedy.”
Mothers found guilty of killing their children are the lowest of the low in the British prison system. Word got back to us that, after our documentary was broadcast, the other prisoners were less cruel to Sally. Meanwhile Steve Clark, Sally’s husband, went through the mass of medical evidence not heard by the court. He found bacteria test results showing that baby Harry had Staphylococcus aureus in his spinal fluid, indicating he could have died from natural causes.
Angela Cannings suffered three cot deaths so, according to Meadow’s Law, she had to be a murderer. He gave evidence against her at her trial and she was duly convicted in 2002.
For BBC Real Story we investigated Angela’s family tree. The court had heard that there had been two cot deaths in Angela’s family but that was not thought to be a gamechanger. I had a hunch that there might be more in Angela’s Irish family. Assistant producer Sarah Mole went to the Dublin records office and discovered that Angela’s grandmother had had a cot death and her great-grandmother two.
After our programme went out Angela Cannings’s solicitor, the late Bill Bache called me. To my dying day I will remember the wonderment in his voice. “John, your programme…” “What is it, Bill?” He went on to explain that Angela’s half-sister, a woman Angela did not know existed, had got in touch to say that her two babies had both suffered life-threatening events. They were rushed to hospital and lived but the genetic pattern was crystal-clear.
Donna Anthony suffered two cot deaths and she, too, had been convicted on the evidence of Meadow. Once again, there was no credible evidence that she had committed any child abuse, let alone child murder.
In 2003 Meadow gave evidence against Trupti Patel, who had lost three babies and therefore, according to Meadow’s Law, was a murderer. But this time the jury got it, understanding that there is some kind of genetic factor at play, and she was cleared.
That same year, Sally Clark and then Angela Cannings were freed. Two years later, Donna Anthony was freed. George Hawks, her solicitor, explained: “She was convicted of the worst crime any mother can be convicted of – the murder of her own babies – but there was no direct evidence that she had done any such thing. She was condemned by theory based on suspicion which was masquerading as medical opinion, and it was completely wrong. The case against Donna was completely flawed and she is absolutely shattered about what has happened to her over the last seven years.”
The case was theory based on suspicion masquerading as medical opinion. And it was wrong’
George Hawks, solicitor
Meadow’s work was not done. In 2005 Angela and Ian Gay were found guilty of manslaughter, following the death of their adopted son, Christian. The prosecution built their case on Meadow’s 1993 paper “Non-accidental salt poisoning”. The trial judge cited Meadow’s paper five times during his summing up.
For Radio 4’s File on 4, I spoke to both Professor Golding and Professor Ashley Grossman who questioned the science behind Meadow’s paper. Once again, nature – in this case diabetes insipidus which can raise salt level to a lethal state – was to blame rather than deliberate salt poisoning by two people. They, too, were freed.
Meadow was struck off by the GMC. He appealed and won, with one judge dissenting, and to this day his supporters defend him. Discovery + approached him for a comment but he did not reply.
In 2004 Meadow’s ex-wife, Gillian Paterson, suggested that he was a misogynist. She said: “I don’t think he likes women… although I can’t go into details, I’m sure he has a serious problem with women.”
Poor Sally never got over her enforced separation from her surviving child. I was doing battle against the Church of Scientology in Florida in 2007 when the news broke that Sally had died. I had to apologise to two ex-members of the church I was interviewing and walked away and burst into tears.
I remain haunted by her case and the others, and the fact that in the 21st century a witch-hunt, powered by ignorance and prejudice, had the power to destroy wholly innocent women. I fear that the same thing is happening in Australia, that Kathleen Folbigg, too, is a victim of a monstrous injustice.
Sally Clarke is probably not the best example.
How is the death rate on the ward since this lady was removed?
Id say it has gone down, but they’ve also been reclassified so no longer take very sick babies and I’d say they’ve made a load of other changes too which would make it hard to compare.
There are also a number of other deaths which occurred when she wasn’t around and of babies she didn’t treat.
There’s an interesting article in the independent (UK) about her today.
What’s the gist of it?
I’m more and more convinced she’s innocent.
Agreed.
As a student of science, I’d be interested to know this also.
Read the indo article.
They won’t release one of the poor baby’s scans because of privacy, but it shows cause apparently.
Can you fire it up?
Will do when I get a minute
There’s a new circus in town this summer, and its butterfly-themed banners are emblazoned with the name of a nurse called Lucy Letby. Increasingly, vocal supporters would have us believe that the 34-year-old has been wrongly convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill seven more for which she has received 15 whole-life prison sentences.
Pitching her as a loving nurse whose life of selfless dedication has been wilfully destroyed because of a problematic neonatal unit in need of a scapegoat for the babies that died on their watch, she emerges as a perfect heroine, you might think, for the next Netflix blockbuster.
Except that in the real world, the evidence tells us there has been no miscarriage of justice. Letby was convicted by not just one, but two, juries at two separate trials. Having spent nights and early mornings compiling a 17,000-word timeline of that lethal year at the Countess of Chester Hospital, like them, I have no doubt of the culpability of this nurse.
And according to the time-honoured workings of the UK legal system, she actually is the real deal – a convicted serial killer who murdered the most vulnerable infants in her “care”, causing untold devastation to their parents and all who loved them.
Barring a confession as to why she committed such an evil act, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to know. Indeed the puzzlement which surrounds this absence of a motive – beyond the notion of a disturbed mind – has created a vacuum that is being filled by amateur sleuths convinced of her innocence.
While they create hot wind and hysteria, however, the rest of us would do well to cast our minds back to the scrawlings on Post-it notes, which were found after a police search on her home. “I am evil I did this”, she’d written. “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them [and] I am a horrible evil person.”
It was the closest to a confession the jury would get from the nurse who was convicted, in part, by the words tucked away on a scrap of paper in one of her diaries.
Of course, her supporters will direct you to some of the lines that could be interpreted as indicators of innocence: “I haven’t done anything wrong,” for example. And “Why me?” but these weren’t the ones that resonated most deeply with the original jury who had all the other evidence before them.
Throughout the trial, the one-time Ellie Goulding fan steadfastly maintained her innocence. Even as security guards led her out of court, she cried out “I’m innocent.” It was an echo of her mother’s own anguished cries when the first guilty verdicts were returned last August. “You can’t be serious,” Susan Letby shouted out in court. “This cannot be right.”
The “Letby Is Innocent” bandwagon started to really gather momentum with a 13,000-word article published in The New Yorker earlier this year. The timing of this piece, which questioned the logic and competence of the statistical evidence in her trial, was mischievous given that the retrial over one of the babies, Baby K, was about to begin.
As a result, the article was referred to the attorney general for investigation as a possible contempt of court. While online versions were banned from UK websites, a British audience quickly found a way to read it while proceedings for her second trial were active.
David Davis, the Conservative MP, seized on the issue, suggesting the court order was “in defiance of open justice” and demanded a review. The then justice secretary, Alex Chalk, had to remind him – as if he didn’t know – of the need to protect the neutrality of an imminent trial.
The spark of social media interest was already smouldering by the time the retrial got underway. A small but passionate cohort of Letby supporters turned up at Crown Square in Manchester, queuing for places either in Court 7 or the overspill seats in Court 16. Many wore yellow butterfly badges similar to one their heroine had once worn on her scrubs.
Last weekend, the ante went up a notch when the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed there were errors in some of the time-swipe data presented in the original trial. This threw into question some of the precise timing of another nurse’s return to the neonatal unit and the possibility that Letby hadn’t actually been the sole nurse on the unit at a key point in the evidence.
But we’re talking of events eight years ago, and for half the trial there was actually zero door swipe data because the hospital had somehow failed to save it. There was also no CCTV to monitor because none had ever been installed. Ultimately, whether Letby was the sole nurse or not, the key evidence lies in the recollections of Baby K’s designated nurse, Joanne Williams, and the lead paediatrician, Ravi Jayaram – what they saw, heard and sensed in real time.
Jayaram, who already held suspicions about Letby and was therefore on high alert, recalls walking in and seeing the killer standing beside the infant’s incubator but doing nothing to intervene as her oxygen levels dropped to critical levels.
They could see how she had moved so deftly in the shadows, so often protected by the trust of colleagues who made the fatal assumption that she cared as much for the babies on the unit as they did
Letby’s very capable barrister, Ben Myers KC, questioned whether Jayaram’s account was “truthful” and alleged he had exaggerated the situation in the court proceedings simply to make things worse for his client and thus make the charges stick.
Jayaram, however, said that he was certain of what he felt and that it was a matter of “infinite regret” that he had not called 999. “I only wish I had the courage to do that,” he said, adding that he had been in “unchartered territory” feeling an “element of denial” that a carer in their midst could be a serial killer.
To many observers, however, the entire prosecution case felt like a lacklustre affair. For much of the time I sat watching the trial, it felt as though Nick Johnson KC, the crown’s lead barrister, wanted to keep the tone as “beige” as the woman in the glass-panelled dock behind him.
Emotion was kept to a minimum. Very few of the babies’ parents gave live evidence, their accounts were generally reduced to written statements read out in rushed monotone by a junior barrister. Many of the medical witnesses appeared behind screens, and the married registrar Letby was said to be in love with was among those granted anonymity which felt unusual in the context of a major trial.
There were other times, too, when the prosecution seemingly became its own worst enemy, most notably when it refused point blank to publicly release a key X-ray image that showed a white line of air tracking a dead baby’s spine which would show how air was deliberately forced into their tiny bodies.
While the jury was given sight of an X-ray, the public were denied that opportunity. At the time the CPS said it was because the image formed part of the baby’s private medical records. The fact that it was a key element in a landmark murder trial didn’t seem to register in their thinking. Perhaps some of Letby’s supporters would change their minds if the CPS released it retrospectively. However, they have said this isn’t something they will do.
The X-ray also underpinned the evidence of the prosecution’s main expert witness, retired paediatrician Dewi Evans, who under an intense cross-examination repeated time and time again his belief that infants had been deliberately injected with air.
His evidence was questioned by Myers’s closing speech to the jury and in an appeal against her original convictions by Letby’s defence team who argued his evidence should be disregarded. Her lawyers claimed he had “constructed theories designed to support allegations … rather than forming and presenting an independent opinion on the facts”.
However, this appeal was rejected and Evans found it to be “thoughtful, fair and correct”. His evidence was found to be sound.
The original jury was bombarded with reams of files, medical notes, and yes, a welter of door swipe data. One of the most emotional moments came when a female paediatrician told how she effectively begged the transport team from a higher-level hospital to take away the one surviving infant from a set of triplets.
It is to the parents of her victims, all of them still trying to grieve for their lost babies, that our minds must turn
His brothers, both viable for all their diminutive size, had already died by Letby’s hand and the colleague sensed that this baby, too, would be in “mortal danger” from the nurse if he remained in Chester. His transfer was authorised and, today, he is a thriving eight-year-old.
Myers had every opportunity to call some of the medical experts now being quoted in The New Yorker and elsewhere. He chose not to. Indeed, the only witness he did call, aside from Letby, was a plumber by the name of Lorenzo Mansutti. His knowledge extended no further than drainage problems unconnected to the charges, so for many observers, it remains a mystery as to why he was asked to give evidence at all.
For all the paucity of Letby’s defence, there was some sympathy for Myers’s view that his client was often being damned if she’d been on the unit at certain times and damned if she hadn’t.
Having heard the evidence over a period of 10 months, the jury was effectively asked to decide whether Letby had been an innocent passer-by in a series of unprecedented deaths and near deaths, or a deadly killer eventually caught out by a “constellation of coincidences” that had no other plausible explanation.
And at the end of that process, which took weeks of diligent deliberation to complete, they returned the largely guilty verdicts that will keep Letby behind bars until her dying breath
Suddenly, for all the woolliness of the case as it unfolded, they could see how she had moved so deftly in the shadows, so often protected by the trust of colleagues who made the fatal assumption that she cared as much for the babies on the unit as they did.
Many of these people counted her as a friend, and when she broke down in apparent distress over those dying on her watch, they instinctively reached out in support. Their sense of betrayal must now be complete.
But it is to the parents of her victims, all of them still trying to grieve for their lost babies, that our minds must turn. Throughout the legal process, they have had to confront the horrific reality that Letby, the nurse who seemed anxious to comfort them in their darkest moments, and who even sent some of them sympathy cards, was in reality the cause of their pain.
Now they have the challenge of coping with unsubstantiated noise about the safety of her convictions and the blind faith of some who, unlike the jury, didn’t spend months sitting in court considering the evidence, that she is innocent.
Today, these parents who have experienced the deepest loss are resolute in their condemnation of Letby, and content that she is behind bars and will remain there.
The pro-Letby campaign has been described by Peter Skelton KC, who represents some of the families of her victims as “grossly offensive and distressing”. One mum, whose baby the former nurse tried to kill, told The Times: “You don’t want to see her face, you don’t want to hear her name, you don’t want to hear people shouting that she’s innocent. She’s not innocent, she was found guilty in a court of law.”
Meanwhile, Cheshire Police are continuing the second phase of Operation Hummingbird, sifting through further material that may amount to a catalogue of further historic attacks by the woman now ranked as the most prolific baby killer of modern times.
Next month, Lady Justice Thirlwall will begin her inquiry into Letby’s killings and the failings in hospital systems she was able to exploit. Would all that really be happening if there was any genuine concern over her conviction?
Letby’s barrister is engaging with no one – neither the media nor the conspiracy theorists. But still, the fevered circus rumbles on with little thought to the new pain being caused to the parents who had hoped the nightmare they had endured was finally coming to an end.
That’s a poorly written piece full of motivated reasoning and non sequiturs. The author would have been better off reducing it to three words: “trust me, bro” because they don’t have much else. Which is sort of the problem with the verdict. It very much seems like a “trust me, bro” verdict.
It is similar to the NYT article you place so much faith in. I’ll speak to you about it, but I think you are wrong on this one.
