New Yorker magazine alert thread

Just read that thing from max:

"Because everything online manifests itself through national-chauvinist lenses, there’s been a fair amount of defensiveness over the verdict and media coverage of the trial on the part of Britons online, who have an understandable distaste for Americans on social media doing drive-by assessments of the fairness and sanity of U.K. criminal procedure or speech law. The r/LucyLetby subreddit seemed threatened to split along trans-Atlantic lines; on Twitter, Americans were often accused of having “true crime brain.”"

That's a case of too much online, to me. I wouldn't take the US vs UK shitposting each other as indicative of anything about this case.

On twitter quite a few people in the UK have posted long threads doubting the verdict of this case as soon as it arrived (that's how I got to know a bit more about it at the time). I wouldn't be at all surprised if Aviv picked up on one of those threads from a random and started to use it as basis to build her story on it (I've yet to read the piece).

actually i think posting on social media is also in violation of contempt of court

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60d4a59dd3bf7f7c3716c60d/Contempt_of_court_-_fact_sheet.pdf

Contempt of court refers to behaviour that undermines or prejudices court proceedings and interferes with the administration of justice, or creates a real risk of that happening. The same rules apply to members of the public as they do to journalists, especially when posting on social media.

Think before you post – could your message stop someone having their day in court?

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty – juries must decide on the basis of evidence, not your posts.

We all have a right to talk about what we see, hear, and read in the news – but make sure you know how to stay on the right side of the law.

Your post could mean a trial is delayed or stopped because a fair trial isn’t possible–don’t get in the way of justice being done.

Contempt of court can be punished by a fine or up to two years in prison.

hopefully anonymous posts on a plain-text message board are ok though

I'll be allowed one post a day under the King's pleasure.

flag post (to police)

brits understand that for every negative post about their dear courts, the king gains an extra cancer cell

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/05/impossible-to-approach-the-reporting-the-way-i-normally-would-how-rachel-aviv-wrote-that-new-yorker-story-on-lucy-letby/

re: how aviv found out - another journalist she works with alerted her to it while the trial was under way - they both noted that the case seemed to rely on flawed statistical reasoning and aviv noted the similarities to the lucia de berk case

arguing the merits of the case is whatever, it’s just funny that the knee-jerk british reaction on ilx was “it’s actually good that we made scrutiny of our judicial system illegal”

no one has done this - i'm not british (thankfully) but i attempted to explain the context behind the reporting restrictions given that americans seemed to think them totally unthinkable & there seemed to be widespread confusion around their circumstances but i don't think anyone seems to think that the restrictions work well with the circumstances around the retrial (i think this is a particularly bad edge case for the laws), or that there aren't broader issues with how the restrictions are applied. who is supposed to be taking the pro-uk position here?

Interestingly, there was an article published in the UK press just after the verdict that makes many of the points of the New Yorker piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20230831200620/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/24/lucy-letby-appeal-internet-sleuths/

max says the contempt of court laws are good actually

he basically has the same position with me - the broader principle is worthwhile but the laws aren't working well with the particulars of this case.

xp it's fascinating the amount of disavowing that article feels the need to perform before it's comfortable actually getting to the arguments that the case was flawed (arguments that seem measured and reasonable, and are made by people with relevant expertise who don't give any indication of being crackpots):

It was a thorough trial, with the jury reaching a decision based on witness testimony, Letby’s diaries and notes, and expert evidence. Yet a week on, the conspiracy theories are already circulating

It’s a theory which, barely a week after the Letby verdict was handed down, is extremely hard to entertain. It sounds like the kind of mad claim that swirls around dark corners of the internet long after a case is closed. It may be just that – a far-fetched, baseless theory. It may have just enough weight to it to merit a true crime podcast – one of those addictive series cut from the same cloth as Serial, which spawned an irrepressible wave of true crime podcasts. Scott Bonn, a criminology professor at Drew University, has found that true crime triggers an addictive fascination – and the Letby case has already drawn interest.

Did any British people post in defence of anything on this thread? Please show me those posts if so.

Or indeed those posters.

Telegraph piece using "true crime" label as a slur. But its a confused piece, alternating between that and some begrudging acknowledgment of the response from the verdict.

Its what people don't get about twitter and certain online spaces. You have a lot of people who are extremely attentive to things, and in certain contexts are performing more checks than people who are paid to do it.

It's not exactly "longform" but it's worth mentioning Private Eye and Computer Weekly both did extensive ongoing reporting on the Post Office, years before the story became common knowledge. It's always felt to me like there's plenty of investigstive reporting happening here, just not necessarily with the safety cushion of New Yorker prose. (ITV news, for example, has done amazing ongoing work on housing and the hostile environment, maybe these stories get less zeitgeisty online juice because there's less of a "true crime" angle).

IMO Aviv is one of the best NYer writers going at the moment - I'm really interested to read the story (when I get time). My sense, not paying much attention, was that it was open-and-shut as far as Letby was concerned, but that (as usual) institutional negligence would get a pass.

These are good shouts.

Also even if the link to the New Yorker investigation worked here I reckon it wouldn't get much further in terms of sparking off a public conversation. People don't really know of The New Yorker here in enough numbers.

What might work is a film/TV serial on the case. Like with the Post Office scandal.

As a former private eye subscriber, agree on the worth of the long pieces in the back, which often cover ground client journalism doesn’t give a fuck about, but it’s extremely frustrating that stories (like the PO scandal) only get traction when some other outlets choose to run with them. Even though basically everyone who works in the media pays more attention to Private Eye than a decent % of publications out there. Private media run by oligarchs - bad; state media in thrall to (and in many cases run by) the Tories, also bad. But we’ve been posting about this problem for years on the ukpol thread. 🙃

Private Eye ofc not without its problems, I ended my subscription because it was becoming extremely transphobic and it tainted everything else in the coverage.

I feel like I'm missing something. there is a huge amount of investigative journalism in the UK about miscarriages of justice. The Birmingham Six, Stefan Kizco.. there have been whole TV programmes dedicated to taking another look at convictions. There are problems - notably institutional disengagement in recent years. But it's not like there's some kind of special culture in the UK of not caring, or laws that prevent newspapers or websites or broadcasters from doing their own investigations - just as long as a trial or appeal aren't pending!

Good piece about the history of this sort of thing here
https://theconversation.com/how-the-uk-press-is-failing-victims-of-miscarriages-of-justice-191710

I didn’t click your link so it may mention it already but the Guildford Four iirc had sustained interest in their cases partly due to media coverage by writers openly questioning the convictions, as well as the long campaigns by family etc.

Following the failure of the 1977 court appeal, a number of 'lone voices' publicly questioned the conviction; among them were David Martin in The Leveller, Gavin Esler and Chris Mullin in the New Statesman and David McKittrick in the Belfast Telegraph. On 26 February 1980, BBC One Northern Ireland aired Spotlight: Giuseppe Conlon and the Bomb Factory, which contained an interview by Patrick Maguire and the BBC's Gavin Esler.

It does mention that case yes. (And also points out that long running TV investigative strands like Rough Justice no longer exist)

I can't read the New Yorker article because I'm in the UK but it is wild to me that people think that she might be innocent.

Yes, correlation does not equal causation and statistics are not a strong basis for a conviction because people don't understand maths. But that's not what happened here: the medical evidence, the suspicions of colleagues, the diaries and notepads, the behaviour around bereaved parents, the proven lies in her testimony. That's what got her convicted alongside the statistics, and from what I've seen from the discourse around the NY article, this isn't being addressed in the same way?

And the jury did this correctly: she wasn't found guilty of everything she was accused of, because there wasn't enough evidence to make a secure conviction in those circumstances, even though it would seem "obvious" to make the judgement based on coincidence.

Here's the article: https://archive.ph/TgC1X

It does talk about the medical evidence (it says that the evidence about air embolism was so weak the defence thought there was no case to answer), the diaries and the suspicions of colleagues - '“No objective evidence to suggest this at all” is a quote from one of them.

the medical evidence, the suspicions of colleagues, the diaries and notepads, the behaviour around bereaved parents, the proven lies in her testimony

Leaving aside the medical evidence — which seems scant? — those other things all look different depending on whether you think she's guilty or not. If you assume she is, then they can look damning. If you think maybe she's not, they can look like the bewildered and frightened responses of somebody increasingly aware that other people think she's a murderer.

the medical evidence being dubious is the key reason to have doubts about the case - without any actual evidence of foul play, it's unclear whether any crimes took place at all, and everything else is circumstantial and can be interpreted consistently with guilt or innocence

we had a similar case here in aus (kathleen folbigg) where a mother was convicted of the murder of her four children who had repeatedly died before the age of two, based on the idea that it couldn't be a coincidence and some diary entries expressing guilt that could be interpreted as suggesting she'd caused them harm. she was exonerated last year after 20 years due to new evidence suggesting that all four of the deaths were likely due to rare genetic conditions that the children had

xpost I don't think that's any different to all the people saying "she seemed so nice and caring to me" who were already her friends and family members, or people she was encountering in a professional context where she would be disguising any crimes she was committing.

The article feels like it's cherry-picking information to make a point. There's plenty out there that is indicative of her guilt. I don't disagree that if you had to convict based solely on the information available in this article, it wouldn't be enough to ensure justice.

I think it's telling that the article ignores the part of the trial where her infatuation with one of the unit's doctors was discussed, which has been speculated to be the motive for her murders.

you're missing the point, the circumstantial stuff isn't evidence of her innocence, but it also isn't at all evidence of her guilt without actual evidence that a crime has occurred - which is what seems very dubious. it's very possible to interpret that circumstantial stuff to fit either narrative

Right. She could be a person with any number of social/psychological issues (as many people are!) without also being a murderer. We see this all the time obviously, prosecutors will use anything they can find in a defendant's background to try to make them look bad, regardless of their bearing on the actual charges.

lol boxedjoy busting in like “well, i can’t read any actual investigative journalism bc it’s banned by my government, but based on the speculative bullshit insinuations about her character in the tabloids i think she did it”

I think it's telling that the article ignores the part of the trial where her infatuation with one of the unit's doctors was discussed, which has been speculated to be the motive for her murders.

lol come on

to reiterate a point k3v made, it’s not a crime to be bad at your job (or to have a crush on your boss)

specualative insinuations are a key part of this article though - the idea that she was a nice girl focussed on her career, as told by people who knew her in her life? As if her friends are going to come out and say "well actually, I thought she got off on killing babies but she was good value on a night out"

The reporting I've seen here in the UK has been very much, we don't know what her motives were and it's all speculation because there is nothing to run on. If anything, the angle I've seen is that she was normal, ordinary, "live laugh love" furniture blandness. The idea there's been any kind of speculative insinuations is wild to me because the best they've come up with is that her own birth was difficult for her mum. The suspicions of colleagues weren't borne out of "she's different to us" misunderstandings of social cues - she was regarded as popular, liked, capable. She wasn't the weirdo outsider stereotype of a serial killer at all.

Babies died when she worked, they stopped dying when she wasn't working, the time of day they died changed when her shift patterns changed. She wrote notes suggesting she was guilty, she lied in court about multiple issues, her colleagues risked their own reputation and careers with what would be bold, serious and life-ruining accusations, and a jury convicted her on charges where they could be certain but not on all of them.

It's not a crime to be bad at your job or have a crush on your boss. It's on record, however, that the only time she got upset and emotional in the dock was when this boss testified. She cried when he appeared, but she didn't shed tears over being accused of murdering vulnerable babies and stalking their parents during her testimony. You could argue that she was just numbed to discussing it after a decade of dealing with the accusations, but I find it hard to believe, especially with the article suggesting she was an easily-startled figure in court.

I would love for her to be innocent, and for no crime to be committed, because I would rather live in a world where freak mathematical anomalies are more believable than a person trusted with caregiving is a murderer. But having followed the case, read far more articles than this, had this horrific case be part of the news landscape in our country for months - it just doesn't add up to me. We're saying that juries don't understand mathematical probabilities, but we're trusting them to understand medical practices that Letby herself claimed in testimony it was reasonable to not be aware of as a skilled, experienced trained nurse.

xpost
Not all of the coverage in the UK has been 'speculative bullshit'. There was a good BBC documentary, for example, once the trial was over.

she didn't shed tears over being accused of murdering vulnerable babies

I never put any weight on this kind of thing. People don't have control over when they cry or don't cry, everybody reacts differently. The worst (which I've seen in person) is when somebody tries to make it seem like they're crying on the witness stand but you can tell they really aren't.

lol boxedjoy busting in like “well, i can’t read any actual investigative journalism bc it’s banned by my government, but based on the speculative bullshit insinuations about her character in the tabloids i think she did it”

many, many years ago, when I was in my late teens and I thought I wanted to be a news journalist and studying to become one, I did a few weeks work-shadowing at one of Scotland's biggest news publications. One of the journalists I was with told me about a very high profile teenage murder that took place a year or so before I was there, and how frustrating it was to have to be reporting neutrally on proceedings when it was very much clear to everyone that the accused was guilty due to having knowledge of the crime that only the killer would have known. I'm not saying that what happened here was an open-and-shut-case in the same way, but I can imagine it would explain why there was so many articles ready to go as soon as she was convicted. In his teen murder case, he had his piece sitting ready to go and printed the next day because he knew writing it in advance would not be a waste of time and effort.

if you want an example of how horrible media reporting and true crime enthusiasts can be in the UK, look up the death of Nicola Bulley. A woman who fell into water and drowned, whose body remained unfound for three weeks. Every part of her life speculated on in the media - her struggles with alcohol, the menopause, her marriage and family. I actually think Bulley's problems were reported in a far worse way than anything that could be dredged up about Letby, because the information available was simply more for the media to work with. Even in our dismal landscape it felt like a real nadir for this country.

_she didn't shed tears over being accused of murdering vulnerable babies_

I never put any weight on this kind of thing. People don't have control over when they cry or don't cry, everybody reacts differently. The worst (which I've seen in person) is when somebody tries to make it seem like they're crying on the witness stand but you can tell they really aren't.

they found multiple documents relating to the babies that died in her home, and her search history showed she had done extensive, obsessive-levels of social media searching for families of those that died. You could argue she was just too involved, and wanted to follow-up on them to see how they were coping from a position of caring about them. And you could argue that she had the documents because she wanted to never forget what happened to these children who she was responsible for.

I don't think that considering when she did or didn't cry is the issue - I think more, it is that you could use that to paint a picture of her just as easily as you can from having her friend Cheryl say "I never saw any signs of psychological issues." Reactions and emotions aren't facts but it is a truth that they shape our perspectives, and this article leans into that emotional perspective from the start as much as any tabloid speculation that she was a damaged individual. As I said - you could imagine that she simply didn't have any tears left to shed after ten years of being accused of such a horrific crime, but you could easily twist it to suit an opposing agenda.

lol boxedjoy busting in like “well, i can’t read any actual investigative journalism bc it’s banned by my government, but based on the speculative bullshit insinuations about her character in the tabloids i think she did it”

― flopson, Monday, May 20, 2024 9:59 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it’s wild like an entire population of peter sellers from being there

I was reading the article and while I was doing so I started thinking about the hospital trust. The post-2010 NHS reforms have gutted the organisation. I took a look at the Care Quality Commission’s reports on the hospital and one dated 2016 mentions that the hospital makes use of a lot of “agency staff” - this is something that’s a red flag in terms of adequate long term coverage for care, because agency staff should really only be used to cover gaps, not as long term bridges to conceal major staffing shortages. I also saw that the CQC has continued to downgrade the hospital’s status and the oldest reports, which only go back to 2013, seem to indicate a clear decline in patient care and outcomes.

Of course, correlation isn’t causation.

It’s very easy, though, to see the line drawn between a unit being panicked and distressed by all these extra deaths, and looking for a convenient scapegoat. Knowing about the staffing levels, it’s almost inconceivable her defence didn’t repeatedly draw a line between her availability and the short staffing on the unit. Of course she was there all the time - the unit was chronically understaffed!

Basically the tl;dr is that there’s no conclusive evidence based on reading this piece and some others, so unanimous conviction, the comments about the judge and the refusal to change out the juror are appalling. The stuff about the medical files being found throughout her home, which is not mentioned in the NYer article, is really suspicious to me and I can’t think of a reasonable explanation for it that would aid Letby’s case, which is why I imagine the article omitted it. But the rest of the evidence doesn’t really stand up and in the end, yeah, it’s institutional failure all the way down afaict but nothing will be done about it and neither party cares about solving these problems that are leading to unnecessary outcomes for patients in the NHS’s care.

* so unanimous conviction makes absolutely no sense to me.

if she was consumed with self doubt and worried she’d fucked up and missed something i can imagine her taking files home to see if there were any connections. it is maybe unusual but then so is scrawling “I KILLED THEM ON PURPOSE” or whatever - she was breaking down mentally

It sounds to me like she knew she was under suspicion/investigation for quite a while before charges were actually filed. First by her own employer and then subsequently by the police. In that kind of scenario it's not hard for me to understand why she'd be documenting/researching everything she could about the cases, the families, etc. Also, if you look at it from the point of view of someone who believes they are innocent but is plagued by fears or concerns that maybe somewhere somehow they DID do something wrong, then feeling guilty, reading about the families, self-recrimination (like the notes the police found), all of those could be part of spiraling anxiety about the whole thing. I mean, that's a hell of an isolating, crazy-making thing to go through, the mounting suspicion, the sense that people are sort of conspiring against you — which they were, in a sense! They were trying to pin murders on her.

Which is just to say, it seems to me like everything aside from actual physical evidence of involvement in deaths — of which there seems to be very little — could be understood both from the perspective of a guilty person and a wrongly accused person. (Particularly a wrongly accused person who may be under a tremendous amount of stress to begin with and/or have some mental health issues.) I mean, you could argue the opposite, which is that an actually guilty person who KNEW they were guilty wouldn't write more-or-less confessions and leave them lying around the house.

I’m pretty sure it’s a bit more serious than unusual, it may well be criminal and is a suspicious thing to do in a situation where the police were investigating these cases. Having said that, that’s not why they pinned suspicion on her in the first place, it’s what they found out when they got an arrest warrant I guess. Did their records management even flag up the missing files?

Yeah the so called confessional notes are clearly someone falling apart. The texts to colleagues back that up.

And as we know from plenty of experience with wrongful convictions, they most often arise when investigators believe they know who did it from the start and then filter all the information they receive through that basic assumption. It sounds like the cops in this case — who are of course programmed to look for murders and madmen — kind of did that, much more than the hospital administrators who took a more nuanced approach to the complexities. Cops just hear, "7 babies died" and figure someone must have killed them.

In that kind of scenario it's not hard for me to understand why she'd be documenting/researching everything she could about the cases, the families, etc.

Yeah, it does sound bad and maybe she wasn't reacting very rationally. And also obviously maybe she did kill the babies. But even something like that again sounds to me less plausible behavior for a calculating killer who's trying to get away with something. You're careful enough to give secret lethal injections to a dozen babies but careless enough to leave all this stuff around your house?

There really isn’t enough evidence to provide for conviction. I think the fact she was clearly struggling and writing all those upsetting notes - relatable - is indicative of someone under severe mental distress and the prosecution absolutely leaned on taking those at face value, and the jury was only happy to follow.

The trial and case is just so ugly that I feel that even a mistrial would have been awful for her personally. They’d have to change her identity and resettle her overseas.

The NHS still has their records on paper??? Or were these just printouts (not something they could be noticed as missing)?

Some hospitals do and some have electronic. It sounds like this one had paper records. See earlier comments re defunding of service etc etc

Oh yeah, I kinda forgot about 'trusts' and how the hospitals are all autonomous entities even though they're part of the NHS.

Thanks Andrew Lansley!

Idk who that is, bc I'm American (but work in health care software).

writing about criminal justice and policing is fraught because there are several journalistic angles

- Reportage of facts, the status of an investigation/trial, etc. which should theoretically be dispassionate
- Analysis of the process of criminal justice, whether the system works effectively or if defendants are railroaded, coerced, etc.
- Determining why this was possible -- do we have ways of identifying, as a society, why people commit certain crimes and can we address systematic shortcomings that either incentivize or enable bad actors

I'm much more interested in the latter two, because the first often leans into tabloid fodder.
I don't think a society without bad actors exists, but one where they're less likely to have an opportunity to commit those acts is possible. One nurse who seemingly did ghastly things is an outlier that the legal system addresses, but a system where a high-risk hospital ward is under-staffed, under-resourced, and regularly asked to provide care they're not qualified for, is a systemic failure. If you don't have the latter, you greatly diminish the likelihood that the former can exist.