New Yorker magazine alert thread

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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-63214073

the NY article claims that nobody saw Letby physically harming one of the babies, but this seems to suggest otherwise.

the hospital administrators who took a more nuanced approach to the complexities

in the context of the underfunded, understaffed, failing NHS Trust - I think it's just as easy to believe that an investigation into outlandish claims and drawing more attention to the weaknesses of the unit was something everyone wanted to avoid. If the outcome had been that she was highly incompetent to the degree that multiple babies were dying in her care, it would still have been a huge scandal.

We talk about a conviction "beyond reasonable doubt." I think a reasonable person, when presented with the evidence, would conclude that she was guilty. Not based on maths alone, not based on medical science alone, not based on tabloid fodder about the person she is alone, but because together the evidence indicates that she is guilty. The only 100% airtight convictions are those based on legitimate confessions, and I think it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to conclude that her presence around the deaths, her diaries, her stockpiling notes, her social media searches, her lies on the stand - they can all be waved away with plausible explanations. I think it's reasonable to expect a neonatal unit for exceptionally premature babies to have high mortality rates, and I think it's reasonable to imagine a nurse working there to be de-sensitised to infant death, and I think it's reasonable to imagine the level and quality of care to be poor at Countess at this point. But coupled with the statistics, which themselves alone do not prove anything - I think the conclusions are fair.

The parts about her texting her colleagues in distress could be a sign of mental distress, but they could also be an example of assimilating expected human beahviour, performing grief and upset in a way as to seem normal. I don't think that's unreasonable to suggest - with hindsight.

The article points out that the deaths could not be fully explained as proven murders. They couldn't prove the babies were injected with air or insulin. But from the other perspective, they also couldn't prove why these babies died with conditions consistent with those explanations if those weren't the causes.

I really want to be wrong about this, the jury to be wrong about this, for it all to be a horrible coincidental spike, because the idea of a person killing babies for thrills is gruesome. But one article, written by someone overseas, discrediting the testimony of Dr Evans - one witness in a ten month trial - it fills me with unease. I think there's been some great stuff posted today in this thread to challenge assumptions and provide reasonable explanations for some of the evidence. But on the balance of probabilities and inconsistencies I still don't think it's enough to convince me that she isn't guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

The idea of trial by a jury of peers hinges on the idea that we can be trusted with the ability to draw our own conclusions. There are people I know I wouldn't trust to follow the green lights of a fire exit in a supermarket. It's not a great or perfect system. But what is the alternative? That isn't meant as a rhetorical gotcha-style question, I would genuinely love it if there was an alternative that made sense.

The NHS still has their records on paper???

I attended my local A&E 18 months ago and was sent to a specialist hospital six miles away. I had to take a printout of my conditions and symptoms with me because they couldn't be sent digitally. I love the NHS but it is ridiculous in 2024 that this is the way it operates.

xp Well, one alternative is to have a good defense lawyer and strategy. Which regardless of anything else it doesn't sound like she had.

Just read this. Was thinking that if austerity/NHS underfunding was a cause then what about other maternity wards? This is just horrendous.

"In the past ten years, the U.K. has had four highly publicized maternity scandals, in which failures of care and supervision led to a large number of newborn deaths. A report about East Kent Hospitals, which found that forty-five babies might have lived if their treatment had been better, identified a “crucial truth about maternity and neonatal services”: “So much hangs on what happens in the minority of cases where things start to go wrong, because problems can very rapidly escalate to a devastatingly bad outcome.” The report warned, “It is too late to pretend that this is just another one-off, isolated failure, a freak event that ‘will never happen again.’ ”"

Not to say Letby is innocent because she was being used to cover things up. Bringing up past cases in other countries and so on isn't an argument either, nor are statistics, as compelling as all this might be.

It might be there is only enough proof for one conviction...

Anyway I found the NYer article very convincing, but (unrelated) we did have a case here of intentional abuse by a NICU nurse and I don't even think it made national news. I also know multiple nurses who work on they unit and they were pretty traumatized by a coincidental string of deaths recently (well after that nurse was gone).

https://www.wpr.org/health/nicu-nurse-charged-injuring-several-infants-madison-hospital

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

sorry I just hate to see walls of true crime text wasted like that

if only the UK had the same justice system that did the right thing like with OJ Simpson, George Zimmerman and Casey Anthony

American lawyers are threatened by the idea of UK lawyers telling them they "need to stay in their lane."

You get a lot of head-on collisions that way.

"WHICH 'laaaaaaaaaane'?" *crash*

boxedjoy must admit, your posts merely convinced me even more that she is innocent ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ikr it seems like people are responding to concerns about the uk media with… facts about the case they got from the uk media? Very confusing

― brimstead, Monday, May 20, 2024 3:44 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

if you’ll allow me a moment of levity — this is exactly what I was going for with this reference and I’m glad someone acknowledged it!

OJ Simpson, George Zimmerman and Casey Anthony were all insanely high-profile tabloid fodder cases and more spectacle than legal example. The fact that they come to mind and not the many, many people who have been released from prison (and those who should be, but are not) after their sentences were overturned says more about us (or US, maybe) as a society than anything else

The Simpson case was, and feel free to rip me apart on this, a step in a societal shift in realizing that the system was set up to take shortcuts, mishandle evidence, and assume shoddy work would either pass muster or be essential to taking cases to trial. It wasn't an indictment of a system that lets people off easily, it was an indicator of how easily others without a high-powered team of lawyers could be sent to jail regardless of the strength of evidence.

fwiw i don’t care if she actually did it or if the us or uk have a better legal system, i just wanted to tease ppl who i perceived as defending the contempt of court law’s restrictions on reporting. but apparently i was wrong and 100% of poster itt are in agreement that it’s a bad law that restricts incentives to produce and disseminate independent investigative reporting on mistrials and should be repealed, so we’re all good 👍

The idea of trial by a jury of peers hinges on the idea that we can be trusted with the ability to draw our own conclusions. There are people I know I wouldn't trust to follow the green lights of a fire exit in a supermarket. It's not a great or perfect system. But what is the alternative? That isn't meant as a rhetorical gotcha-style question, I would genuinely love it if there was an alternative that made sense.

― boxedjoy, Monday, May 20, 2024 2:40 PM (two hours ago)

realistically the only alternative is trial by judge (or a panel of judges) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bench_trial). you can also look into the civil law/inquisitorial justice systems like what much of Europe uses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial_system) where the judges have an active role in factfinding as opposed to being passive referees.

i don't think this trial was served by the adversarial system here which led to the sort of shape-fitting by the prosecution that the NYer article highlights.

one thing i’m still not clear on. is what ppl like boxedjoy keep referring to as the “statistical evidence” actually statistical evidence? like did they state a null hypothesis and calculate a p-value? or does “statistical” here just mean “made a diagram with some patterns that, when lined up together, look suspicious to a group of jurors”? statistics to me refers to the more principled approach of appreciating that such patterns can occur at random (and often occur much more frequently in random data than accords with human intuition) and quantifying the uncertainty inherent in drawing inferences from limited samples, balancing the extraction of information with a desire to limit the rate of false discoveries. my impression from aviv’s piece was that the statistical inference was sketchy too

the NY article claims that nobody saw Letby physically harming one of the babies, but this seems to suggest otherwise.

this is something that the ny article didn't really go into, but the bbc article makes it clear that this was the mother's reinterpretation of what had happened after being told letby was a murder suspect as she did not 'realise' letby was attacking her child at the time. that's not really reliable evidence

The article points out that the deaths could not be fully explained as proven murders. They couldn't prove the babies were injected with air or insulin. But from the other perspective, they also couldn't prove why these babies died with conditions consistent with those explanations if those weren't the causes.

this is 'guilty until proven innocent' thinking. the article points out numerous serious issues with those as explanations for the deaths (or in the case of the insulin test results - attempted murder as an explanation given that no babies actually died from insulin poisoning). there is no real evidence of foul play, which puts the entire narrative of a crime occurring at all into question and without a crime occurring there is nothing for her to be guilty of

they didn't actually use directly use statistical evidence in the trial, but historically when stats have been directly misused at trial (rather than just forming the foundation for suspecting someone like they did here - thinking that it was impossible for all the deaths to be a coincidence because that would be too unlikely) they've usually just had some 'expert witness' say some bullshit that sounds convincing to the jurors, not anything rigorous.

The article points out that the deaths could not be fully explained as proven murders. They couldn't prove the babies were injected with air or insulin. But from the other perspective, they also couldn't prove why these babies died with conditions consistent with those explanations if those weren't the causes.

this is simply not serious thinking

fwiw, it wasn't unserious. I thought boxedboy made good points about cherry picking facts and the possibility of a long-form media piece with the prestige of the New Yorker placing a case in a somewhat false light, especially when inferences are being drawn based on context collapse and hearsay within hearsay. The jury is presumed to have a sacred role in making first-hand assessments of the credibility of the witnesses and defendants using impressions based on body language, having seen the totality of the cases presented. It doesn't negate the possibility of having ineffective assistance of counsel (a basis for overturning verdicts in the US system, if the ineffectiveness prejudices the outcome), or the wrong outcome in this case, but I think it's perfectly fair and not "unserious" to hear perspectives of from people who followed other same press coverage and hear them state they they find other conclusions "wild" so they can be discussed here. I appreciated those posts.

Sorry for the late reply, and feel free to rip this apart, but I think you thought it was important to read the entire New Yorker piece on Hasan Minhaj by Claire Malone before drawing conclusions. I took away the implication you found Malone's piece fair because of its factual accuracy. I think that may have been the case, but I think it's important to look at what's cherry-picked or omitted and why. However, my perspective was that piece suffered imo from what I would call placing a person in a "false light." I kept asking as I read through that piece why she had undertaken the task of fact-checking his entire life, which seem to have been done remorselessly and with blinkers on as to the demeaning prejudices Minhaj had experienced his entire life living in the US. The entire takedown seemed to have been predicated on a single line asserting that audiences cannot distinguish between a comedian in his stand-up role exaggerating his life experiences to make a humorous point, and whether that comedian would be trustworthy in a newscaster role to host a comedy news show along the lines of the Daily Show. I didn't agree with that simple assertion. I believe audiences of the Daily Show are not so simple they needed a stand up bit from a potential host to be fact checked, and I found it a rather vicious example of tone policing from a person who has probably never experienced what Minhaj has lived through. It cost Hasan Minhaj the Daily Show gig without a doubt and to put the subject's "truths" in quotes in the headline was imo a level of elitist punching down that has made me dislike the New Yorker ever since.

no, it is entirely unserious, and the perspectives of people who follow the trial through the tabloids are entirely undeserving of consideration. that they live in a society where basic defendant rights are neither legally enshrined nor prioritized by the populace aren’t my concern.

the minhaj comparison, essentially a tabloid article having nothing to do with defendant rights, is apt in ways you may not appreciate unfortunately!

comparing the court of public opinion to a criminal trial in which a likely legally innocent person is sent away for life… a time for reflection perhaps

any time you have to straw man a person's point to win your argument, you've lost the argument.

your argument really was that vapid

I’m trying to understand what on earth the minhaj case has to do with a murder case and I’m struggling to come up with something other than an obsession with tabloid fodder. could you elaborate?

New Yorker stories in both cases, I guess

indeed

I guess if you live in a country where reporting like this is so unusual it would seem to make sense. I’ve never been to the U.K. (though I hope to someday!), but it reminds me of folks I met in thailand when I lived there tens years ago or so. the fealty to institutions is admirable in a sense but very foreign to me!

a bit sad that those who should know better would line up like this to demonize a working-class woman working extra hours in a broken, male-dominated system, but ingrained misogyny and class discrimination runs deep even in the U.K. I guess

the (male) doctors in charge said she must have done something bad and so it is

It doesn't negate the possibility of having ineffective assistance of counsel (a basis for overturning verdicts in the US system, if the ineffectiveness prejudices the outcome), or the wrong outcome in this case

could you summarize your posts in this thread then? other than dogged defending of a clearly underinformed person I’m confused

there was also something about a celebrity comic I’m still unclear about

did piers morgan have a special on this recently?

a bit sad that those who should know better would line up like this to demonize a working-class woman working extra hours in a broken, male-dominated system, but ingrained misogyny and class discrimination runs deep even in the U.K. I guess

― brony james (k3vin k.), Monday, 20 May 2024 bookmarkflaglink

That's not my read on boxedjoy's posting at all. I think almost everyone here (and certainly UK posters) can see that class and gender dynamic.

that was a teasing retort to the left field minhaj non-sequitur

Ok not read it.

I would hope Letby can get a better defence team for the upcoming trial and that some of the defects in the medical evidence as highlighted in the piece might come up.

Beyond that I am amazed at the certainty many of you have of her innocence. This is just one piece that has possibly left things out and highlighted others to fit another narrative.

look I’m a physician, not a lawyer, I’m no legal expert. I know bad medical reasoning when I see it and the medical/statistical evidence in this case is (tragically) laughable. I don’t expect anyone here to be able to grasp that.

I’m mostly poking fun at the (from an american POV) biographical evidence against her that some are defending. and wondering whether that speaks to a pathological addiction to tabloid news and fealty to institutions that is characteristically british

there's some later replies that I'm still working out my response to - ufo's "guilty til proven innocent" take on my perspective doesn't seem entirely unfair to me - but I'm going to immediately push back on the idea that misogyny is at the heart of this, when narrative reported here was of predominantly male senior managers protecting her from police investigations in the first instance, trying to deal with it internally instead

also, nearly all of my understanding of this has come from the BBC, the Guardian and the independent, and the newspapers in the local area. No news source is perfect but they're not exactly the same as The Sun and Daily Star. Their coverage has mostly* eschewed the Letby personal gossip, with the story being one of how an institution was so weak and underfunded and poorly managed that this happened - not, as is suggested, that the institution itself was infallible

i don't have an issue with raising the possibility that the article was cherry-picking things but k3vin is absolutely right about that quoted section of boxedboy's post being 'not serious' and felicity's post seemed pretty tangential to that.

i don't think there is much of an issue with the article leaving out things that it did though - it raises serious questions about the medical evidence that backs up the idea that crimes actually occurred, which is the core of the case and without that everything else isn't evidence of anything much at all. the only thing i can think of that may have been worth addressing is the claim she was seen attacking a baby - that was at least a claim of something more substantial than all the circumstantial evidence that doesn't actually do anything to demonstrate any crimes occurred and can be interpreted however one likes.