Lucy Letby: the conspiracy theory
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Crime & Punishment
Lucy Letby Edition
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Wild allegations of conspiracy fly back and forth about Lucy Letby’s supporters. Either that “Letbyists” are in part of some elaborate conspiracy to pervert the course of justice already done or that they are deluded and, their entire complaint about the conviction boils down to a conspiracy theory.[1]
It is not always clear how conspiracy theories are meant to work — that is part of their charm — so I have done my best to draw each of them out:
“Defence experts are conspiring”: Ms. Letby was fairly convicted on overwhelming evidence. There is now a concerted effort among certain lawyers and medical professionals to hoodwink the public into believing she is the innocent victim of a miscarriage of justice.
“Hospital consultants are framing her”: Ms. Letby is a patsy. The Countess of Chester consultants conspired to “frame” her for the collapses to conceal clinical failings and broader mismanagement at the hospital, and to retaliate for her whistleblowing and grievance actions.
Now there is also a third conspiracy theory with a good deal more practical significance. JC calls it his “unseen criminal edgelord” theory and he as devoted a separate article to it. Anyway.
Conspiracy theories generally
Let us quickly rehearse the main points of a conspiracy theory so we can compare these first two candidates against them. Firstly, a conspiracy theory must false. It purports to explain an innocent, usually unfortunate, scenario by reference not to sod’s law or some persistent system effect, but some dark confederated deception that is not actually there.
If there is, in fact, a dark confederated deception — you know, that the Vatican laundered money for the mob and financed CIA insurgencies against eastern Europe regimes in the 1970s — that is not a conspiracy theory. That is just a conspiracy.
So, the features of a conspiracy theory:
- Deliberate deception: The “commonsense” narrative is a deliberate deception by persons with the means and motives to obscure the truth.
- Secret knowledge: Conspirators may have “secret knowledge” and ulterior motives that are not available to outsiders, but may be inferred by those believing the conspiracy theory.
- Agents, not systems: Outcomes are caused by malice, not complexity. They are manufactured by conspirators: they do not arise through system effects, coincidence, or error.
- Scale: The outcome implies improbably deep, competent and effective confidential coordination among conspirators over extended periods.
- Sincere confabulations: Sincere believers tend to “infer”' — that is, invent — facts to fill information gaps to be consistent with the conspiracy. Over time, these flimsy inferences harden into corroborative facts.
- Unfalsifiability: The very lack of evidence of conspiracy is evidence of conspiracy. Evidence contradicting the conspiracy is a part of the conspiracy. Also, it is not falsifiable: evidence, whether it suggests “black” or “white”, is taken to confirm the theory. Confirmation bias is weaponised.
The “defence experts” conspiracy theory
The world’s finest neonatologist are colluding, then. Why else would they be campaigning for a child killer? The first thing to say here is that, whoever is orchestrating this conspiracy — is it Ms. Letby, from behind bars? — has chosen a rum way to do it.
Now, a cabal of senior neonatologists, statisticians and legal experts from around the world collaborating to hoodwink the public and the criminal justice system into believing a bang-to-rights serial murderer is innocent would certainly count as a deliberate deception. It would, in fact, be a doozy.
But it is not clear what their motive would be. What does a retired Canadian neonatologist, or a New Zealand expert in insulin testing, have to gain — what do they expect to achieve — by wantonly perverting the course of justice like this?
And are they hiding secret evidence that these collapses were murders? If so, presenting reasoned arguments as to why they are not, and opening those arguments to public scrutiny, seems an odd way to do this.[2]
Nor are their claims unfalsifiable.
To the contrary, they have publishing reasoned medical opinions based on analysed data, have made it available to whoever asks for it, and have expressed no small frustration that Cheshire police do not want to read it. The Cheshire constabulary, other interested experts and indeed we misfits, ghouls and “poundshop Poirots” of the internet community — all are cordially invited to critique their opinions. Some — mainly armchair sleuths, it must be said — have done so.
In any case, this is hardly some secret cabal. Everything is on the record.
So, if it is a conspiracy, this one comes with significant personal reputational jeopardy. If they are traducing their hard-won reputations as leaders in their fields, they risk exposure not just as conspirators, but as fools.
For those still in medical practice, the latter is probably worse.[3]
And in what sense has anyone kept anything secret?
Mr. McDonald keeps bringing his conspirators along to interminable press conferences. He has shipped significant professional criticism for not keeping things secret. Among barristers, grandstanding really is not the done thing. It is certainly not the done thing amongst secret conspirators.[4]
And lastly: if this is a conspiracy, it is not going awfully well: Ms. Letby is currently in prison for fifteen whole-life terms, and has exhausted her formal rights of appeal.
“She was framed” conspiracy theory
Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?
- —Henry II, of Thomas Becket
We do not need to spend long on this, because I am not aware of anyone seriously advancing it, but it is occasionally advanced as a strawman ad hominem against those arguing there has been a miscarriage of justice. let’s say the allegation is that someone in hospital management framed Ms. Letby as a serial murderer, to conceal general mismanagement at the Countess of Chester hospital.
Quite the extreme reaction.
It certainly counts as “deliberate deception”, and you could infer it is motivated by a wish to avoid criticism of management for the poor care that otherwise might have led to a spike in collapses, but it is not easy to see why anyone would think “allowing a suspected serial murderer — remember, the consultants were suspicious from late 2015 — to roam the hospital unchecked for months on end” would look any better from a management perspective than “unusual cluster of infant collapses” or “underwhelming clinical care”.
Especially since the the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s damning review had long since been published in any case.
Nor does framing Ms. Letby out of spite add up. Conspiring to put a “turbulent”, but innocent, nurse away for multiple murder just because she took a personal grievance for bullying — and won — seems a bit petulant from senior consultants like the “gang of four”. Come to think of it, that is taking bullying to a whole new level, isn’t it? There is little public information about other employment grievances taken at Countess of Chester Hospital, but we would know about it had other complaining types been sent away for life. So why start?
Now: the grievance might have some bearing on how things developed: could buried personal enmity have contributed to the soup of cognitive bias in which the consultants stewed as the investigation gathered pace? Possibly. It would be the first thing I would raise when cross-examining the consultants, if I were allowed.[5]
But simple resentment is a long way from the orchestrated covert campaign of victimisation that a conspiracy theory would require.
Which leaves the respectable conspiracy theory. I talk about that here.
I mention this last one because a large strand of it runs through the prosecution’s case against Ms. Letby. A curious thing about this case is the lack of direct evidence of the allegations levelled at Ms. Letby. What evidence there is, is circumstantial, it is weak, the corroborating evidence is “after the fact” — often, a long time “after the fact” — and it has the qualities of unfalsifiability in it that are common in conspiracy theories.
See also
References
- ↑ The redoubtable Liz Hull from the Daily Mail has put it this way:
She’s a scapegoat, they claim, for a failing NHS hospital; condemned to die in jail by a flawed and biased justice system.
- ↑ Generally, the “Lebtyists” have been fastidious, scrupulous and even tedious in their insistence on laying out what they have to say before the world’s media. The Pitchforkers, it is more subtle: unstated: unseen: ineffable. See Lucy Letby: the ineffable truth.
- ↑ Go on, then. You know you want to: “HOW CONVENIENT SO MANY OF THESE SO-CALLED EXPERTS ARE RETIRED.”
- ↑ Sayeth one KC: “Calm, mature, considered reflection is the hallmark of our profession.” We don’t rock the boat, dear boy.
- ↑ The issue was raised in court in the jury’s absence on 18 August 2023, but it is not clear from contemporaneous reports whether Mr. Justice Goss allowed the grievance to be raised in evidence or cross-examination.