Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Although incredibly rare, it is possible to become prime minister without having a seat in the House of Commons. Out of Canada’s 23 prime ministers, just five have done so.
Incredibly rare? 5/23 is just under a quarter. Journalism these days…
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Another thing to note. There was a second trial on a single count, which went to appeal. The main witness was not the principal expert (Dr Evans) in the first trial. The trial relied on direct evidence of a doctor who was involved in the events. The defence could have, but did not, call expert evidence - once again.
The appeal was only on a jurisdictional point. There was no appeal on questions like 'No case to answer' or 'the baby might have died from natural causes and here is the evidence' or 'use of evidence that should not have been allowed'. etc.
In practice, suggestions that Letby is innocent have to cover each and every count. It's no practical use to say she may not have done 10 of them. She has to be comprehensively out on all counts or else she is still a child killer/attempter.
This one count and the appeal may be a place to start. If she is guilty on this one, the rest needs to be looked at in the light of it.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Yes, the defence has the really good reason that they are lawyers and lawyers do not understand statistics, which is how we repeatedly get into this mess. Nor are they medical experts.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Although incredibly rare, it is possible to become prime minister without having a seat in the House of Commons. Out of Canada’s 23 prime ministers, just five have done so.
Incredibly rare? 5/23 is just under a quarter. Journalism these days…
No proofreading before publication?
The incidence of British Labour prime ministers is rarer still. Which makes Starmer extraordinarily rare ?
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Another thing to note. There was a second trial on a single count, which went to appeal. The main witness was not the principal expert (Dr Evans) in the first trial. The trial relied on direct evidence of a doctor who was involved in the events. The defence could have, but did not, call expert evidence - once again.
The appeal was only on a jurisdictional point. There was no appeal on questions like 'No case to answer' or 'the baby might have died from natural causes and here is the evidence' or 'use of evidence that should not have been allowed'. etc.
In practice, suggestions that Letby is innocent have to cover each and every count. It's no practical use to say she may not have done 10 of them. She has to be comprehensively out on all counts or else she is still a child killer/attempter.
This one count and the appeal may be a place to start. If she is guilty on this one, the rest needs to be looked at in the light of it.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Another thing to note. There was a second trial on a single count, which went to appeal. The main witness was not the principal expert (Dr Evans) in the first trial. The trial relied on direct evidence of a doctor who was involved in the events. The defence could have, but did not, call expert evidence - once again.
The appeal was only on a jurisdictional point. There was no appeal on questions like 'No case to answer' or 'the baby might have died from natural causes and here is the evidence' or 'use of evidence that should not have been allowed'. etc.
In practice, suggestions that Letby is innocent have to cover each and every count. It's no practical use to say she may not have done 10 of them. She has to be comprehensively out on all counts or else she is still a child killer/attempter.
This one count and the appeal may be a place to start. If she is guilty on this one, the rest needs to be looked at in the light of it.
I wonder which is the more likely miscarriage, that she's innocent on all the deaths she was convicted of, or guilty of some she wasn't charged with?
I'm not sure of that. The woman is either a hideous monster or subject to an egregious miscarriage of justice. The scale is probably 50/50.
My greatest concern is the defence team opting not to present statistical evidence which would appear to have been favourable to Letby.
There is a little bit of irony attached to the campaign when we also have dozens of people who are serving indeterminate sentences for the most minor of infringements and have been in jail for 20 plus years, all on the whim of Mr Blunkett, and no one gives a whimper about them.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Although incredibly rare, it is possible to become prime minister without having a seat in the House of Commons. Out of Canada’s 23 prime ministers, just five have done so.
Incredibly rare? 5/23 is just under a quarter. Journalism these days…
3 were in the 1890s. 1 was in 1926
There is been 1 case in almost 100 years. And that was Turner, who asked the governor general to dissolve parliament soon after he won the leadership following Trudeau’s resignation.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
April 23, 1941. Lindbergh actually sounds more reasonable than Trump.
...France has now been defeated; and, despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months, it is now obvious that England is losing the war. I believe this is realized even by the British government. But they have one last desperate plan remaining. They hope that they may be able to persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force1 to Europe, and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.
I do not blame England for this hope, or for asking for our assistance. But we now know that she declared a war under circumstances [that] led to the defeat of every nation that sided with her from Poland to Greece. We know that in the desperation of war England promised to all these nations armed assistance that she could not send. We know that she misinformed them, as she has misinformed us, concerning her state of preparation, her military strength, and the progress of the war.
In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances. But we in this country have a right to think of the welfare of America first, just as the people in England thought first of their own country when they encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds. When England asks us to enter this war, she is considering her own future, and that of her Empire. In making our reply, I believe we should consider the future of the United States and that of the Western Hemisphere.
It is not only our right, but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively, and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend...
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Yes, the defence has the really good reason that they are lawyers and lawyers do not understand statistics, which is how we repeatedly get into this mess. Nor are they medical experts.
Good lawyers are not experts in specific aspects of their cases. They are experts in the law and in building/refuting strong cases.
If they didn’t understand the statistics they would have sought professional experts to explain it and studied until they did understand it.
As the Legal 500 put it:
“Ben is exceptionally hardworking and time and time again masters the most serious and complex technical information. In terms of advocacy, Ben is a true heavyweight of the Bar and with good reason, as he is able to bear the immense pressure of some of the most daunting and distressing cases brought before the courts with unwavering professionalism and integrity.” The Legal 500 2024
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Although incredibly rare, it is possible to become prime minister without having a seat in the House of Commons. Out of Canada’s 23 prime ministers, just five have done so.
Incredibly rare? 5/23 is just under a quarter. Journalism these days…
No proofreading before publication?
The incidence of British Labour prime ministers is rarer still. Which makes Starmer extraordinarily rare ?
Expect Carney to swiftly call an election even from behind.
Two pollsters already have the Liberals ahead, albeit most behind still. There seems to be far less herding than we've seen in other countries so no clue who is right.
If I were Carney I'd go for the momentum play and go for a quick election while Trump is bullying Canada but before he's doing anything more sinister to them.
If he gets a new term then he has a platform to outlast Trump's official term in office.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Although incredibly rare, it is possible to become prime minister without having a seat in the House of Commons. Out of Canada’s 23 prime ministers, just five have done so.
Incredibly rare? 5/23 is just under a quarter. Journalism these days…
No proofreading before publication?
The incidence of British Labour prime ministers is rarer still. Which makes Starmer extraordinarily rare ?
Time for Europe to tell Trump where to go, IMO. It's becoming clear he's trying to negotiate the capitulation of Ukraine. Which has not in either our or Europe's interest.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying this makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
My eldest son did jury service. The judge was the Dad of one my other son's best friends. I wonder whether my eldest would have been allowed onto that jury if either had realised at the time.
Random law fact, in the current ITV series – A Cruel Love, the Ruth Ellis story – Nigel Havers plays his own grandfather, who was judge in that case.
Another random fact is that I knew her daughter Georgie. She was a model and i worked with her quite often. She was nice but foolishly chose to sell her story to the NoW and then went downhill fast. The story was serialised and contained such headlines as 'I've had those same feelings myself.....'. She ended up marrying a friend of mine who she messed up rather badly and died aged about 50 of cancer.
What his instructions were we don't know. But to suggest that he was just going through the motions is nonsense. The defence applied to have all the charges struck out on the basis that there was no case to answer. That is relatively unusual. It is not "going through the motions" in any sense. Myers himself is an experienced advocate. Note that he got an acquittal in the case of Inspector Duckenfield over Hillsborough.
Why the defence did not call as witnesses the medical experts they had is the big unanswered question. Another one is why Letby herself accepted that one of the babies had been poisoned by insulin.
The defence took the view that undermining the chief prosecution witness was their best possible approach. The jury disagreed with them.
As to why Letby accepted that the babies had been poisoned by insulin - she was effectively trapped by the prosecution barrister into accepting his claim that the evidence meant that someone had been doing so. A better briefed defendant might have refused to make a claim either way on the basis that they didn’t have the expertise to make such a judgement.
For the jury, once the idea that /someone/ was poisoning babies became the accepted truth, their conviction of Letby was probably inevitable.
I thought she accepted the insulin poisoning claim during her police interview. Not just in court. I may have remembered incorrectly of course.
The other point which gets overlooked is that she was also convicted of attempted murder charges. Not seen much engagement with that aspect.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Another thing to note. There was a second trial on a single count, which went to appeal. The main witness was not the principal expert (Dr Evans) in the first trial. The trial relied on direct evidence of a doctor who was involved in the events. The defence could have, but did not, call expert evidence - once again.
The appeal was only on a jurisdictional point. There was no appeal on questions like 'No case to answer' or 'the baby might have died from natural causes and here is the evidence' or 'use of evidence that should not have been allowed'. etc.
In practice, suggestions that Letby is innocent have to cover each and every count. It's no practical use to say she may not have done 10 of them. She has to be comprehensively out on all counts or else she is still a child killer/attempter.
This one count and the appeal may be a place to start. If she is guilty on this one, the rest needs to be looked at in the light of it.
I wonder which is the more likely miscarriage, that she's innocent on all the deaths she was convicted of, or guilty of some she wasn't charged with?
I'm not sure of that. The woman is either a hideous monster or subject to an egregious miscarriage of justice. The scale is probably 50/50.
My greatest concern is the defence team opting not to present statistical evidence which would appear to have been favourable to Letby.
There is a little bit of irony attached to the campaign when we also have dozens of people who are serving indeterminate sentences for the most minor of infringements and have been in jail for 20 plus years, all on the whim of Mr Blunkett, and no one gives a whimper about them.
Well if it's 50/50 she should be freed. I can't say I've done a deep dive but from what I have read my view is she did it. I know that's a different question to whether the convictions are "safe".
That’s not true. There is plenty of other evidence. The deaths and other serous events were when Letby was on duty. She was observed failing to act when a baby was ill, and observed acting suspiciously around another baby. She stole their medical records, kept them at home and claimed she’d been unable to securely dispose of them despite possessing a paper shredder. There are the initials in her diary that match key dates. There are her notes to herself that talk of guilt. There was other evidence that the deaths were unnatural.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
A link to “sources I’ve seen” please
That’s doesn’t sound like a typical policy for helping a crashing patient when time is of the essence
On poking the record, that was her own testimony that nurses would often wait for babies to “self-correct” if levels were not dangerously low. I don’t know if this was corroborated by other staff during the trial.
Again, this one of those “if you think she’s guilty then obviously she’s lying to cover herself, but if you think she’s innocent then she was just following the standard of treatment as she understood it at the time” things.
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
What his instructions were we don't know. But to suggest that he was just going through the motions is nonsense. The defence applied to have all the charges struck out on the basis that there was no case to answer. That is relatively unusual. It is not "going through the motions" in any sense. Myers himself is an experienced advocate. Note that he got an acquittal in the case of Inspector Duckenfield over Hillsborough.
Why the defence did not call as witnesses the medical experts they had is the big unanswered question. Another one is why Letby herself accepted that one of the babies had been poisoned by insulin.
The defence took the view that undermining the chief prosecution witness was their best possible approach. The jury disagreed with them.
As to why Letby accepted that the babies had been poisoned by insulin - she was effectively trapped by the prosecution barrister into accepting his claim that the evidence meant that someone had been doing so. A better briefed defendant might have refused to make a claim either way on the basis that they didn’t have the expertise to make such a judgement.
For the jury, once the idea that /someone/ was poisoning babies became the accepted truth, their conviction of Letby was probably inevitable.
I thought she accepted the insulin poisoning claim during her police interview. Not just in court. I may have remembered incorrectly of course.
The other point which gets overlooked is that she was also convicted of attempted murder charges. Not seen much engagement with that aspect.
IIRC the attempted murder charges were the insulin poisonings - all those babies lived I think. The deaths were all supposed to have occurred via air embolism.
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
In this case it seems that government is avoiding the necessary policy, though.
There is an argument for a certain amount of diplomatic dissembling, but none at all for using that as a basis for our future defence planning.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Another thing to note. There was a second trial on a single count, which went to appeal. The main witness was not the principal expert (Dr Evans) in the first trial. The trial relied on direct evidence of a doctor who was involved in the events. The defence could have, but did not, call expert evidence - once again.
The appeal was only on a jurisdictional point. There was no appeal on questions like 'No case to answer' or 'the baby might have died from natural causes and here is the evidence' or 'use of evidence that should not have been allowed'. etc.
In practice, suggestions that Letby is innocent have to cover each and every count. It's no practical use to say she may not have done 10 of them. She has to be comprehensively out on all counts or else she is still a child killer/attempter.
This one count and the appeal may be a place to start. If she is guilty on this one, the rest needs to be looked at in the light of it.
I wonder which is the more likely miscarriage, that she's innocent on all the deaths she was convicted of, or guilty of some she wasn't charged with?
I'm not sure of that. The woman is either a hideous monster or subject to an egregious miscarriage of justice. The scale is probably 50/50.
My greatest concern is the defence team opting not to present statistical evidence which would appear to have been favourable to Letby.
There is a little bit of irony attached to the campaign when we also have dozens of people who are serving indeterminate sentences for the most minor of infringements and have been in jail for 20 plus years, all on the whim of Mr Blunkett, and no one gives a whimper about them.
Well if it's 50/50 she should be freed. I can't say I've done a deep dive but from what I have read my view fwiw is she did it. I know that's a different question to whether the convictions are "safe".
Oh she's guilty because a jury of her peers convicted her. Whether she did it or not with the evidence currently available I am balancing the scales as even. Until she is awarded an appeal and the conviction subsequently quashed she remains guilty.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
Time for Europe to tell Trump where to go, IMO. It's becoming clear he's trying to negotiate the capitulation of Ukraine. Which has not in either our or Europe's interest.
What his instructions were we don't know. But to suggest that he was just going through the motions is nonsense. The defence applied to have all the charges struck out on the basis that there was no case to answer. That is relatively unusual. It is not "going through the motions" in any sense. Myers himself is an experienced advocate. Note that he got an acquittal in the case of Inspector Duckenfield over Hillsborough.
Why the defence did not call as witnesses the medical experts they had is the big unanswered question. Another one is why Letby herself accepted that one of the babies had been poisoned by insulin.
The defence took the view that undermining the chief prosecution witness was their best possible approach. The jury disagreed with them.
As to why Letby accepted that the babies had been poisoned by insulin - she was effectively trapped by the prosecution barrister into accepting his claim that the evidence meant that someone had been doing so. A better briefed defendant might have refused to make a claim either way on the basis that they didn’t have the expertise to make such a judgement.
For the jury, once the idea that /someone/ was poisoning babies became the accepted truth, their conviction of Letby was probably inevitable.
I thought she accepted the insulin poisoning claim during her police interview. Not just in court. I may have remembered incorrectly of course.
The other point which gets overlooked is that she was also convicted of attempted murder charges. Not seen much engagement with that aspect.
IIRC the attempted murder charges were the insulin poisonings - all those babies lived I think. The deaths were all supposed to have occurred via air embolism.
The sentencing remarks, below, go through the cases one by one outlining the facts as the jury, by their verdicts, had found them to be in the light of the trial. It's a useful, actually the only generally available, starting point for evaluation of the merits or demerits of the case as a whole, including the alleged cases of death/injury.
That’s not true. There is plenty of other evidence. The deaths and other serous events were when Letby was on duty. She was observed failing to act when a baby was ill, and observed acting suspiciously around another baby. She stole their medical records, kept them at home and claimed she’d been unable to securely dispose of them despite possessing a paper shredder. There are the initials in her diary that match key dates. There are her notes to herself that talk of guilt. There was other evidence that the deaths were unnatural.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
A link to “sources I’ve seen” please
That’s doesn’t sound like a typical policy for helping a crashing patient when time is of the essence
Phil appears also to be confusing crashing (cardiac arrest) with desaturation (low blood oxygen).
Having tanked Tesla shares, he now seems determined to make Starlink customers doubt its reliability and flee to the likes of OneWeb. I imagine nation states are rethinking SpaceX too.
I know he still has some true believers but this is not stable behaviour. And why is he trying to reinvent himself as some 'statesmen' of the corbynite 'surrender to prevent fighting' mould?
I do wonder what his boards think. I imagine “for god’s sakes Elon, can’t we just run a business” is quite high on this list.
He's clearly brought something to his various businesses, but there are limits - great strengths can also become great weaknesses. Simply from a perspective of spending his time on government business, trolling people online, and trying to encourage the ousting of democratic leaders in support of the Kremlin, he has less time to spend useful time on business.
The first project Elon worked on at Tesla was the Cybertruck. His record speaks for itself.
All of this was entirely predictable and predicted. By me!
That's not true: Elon has been involved in managing Tesla -and every vehicle design- since the Roadster. Only the original Roadster was not Elon's work.
What is true is that the Cybertruck is the first vehicle where Elon did not listen to the people around him.
That’s not true. There is plenty of other evidence. The deaths and other serous events were when Letby was on duty. She was observed failing to act when a baby was ill, and observed acting suspiciously around another baby. She stole their medical records, kept them at home and claimed she’d been unable to securely dispose of them despite possessing a paper shredder. There are the initials in her diary that match key dates. There are her notes to herself that talk of guilt. There was other evidence that the deaths were unnatural.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
A link to “sources I’ve seen” please
That’s doesn’t sound like a typical policy for helping a crashing patient when time is of the essence
On poking the record, that was her own testimony that nurses would often wait for babies to “self-correct” if levels were not dangerously low. I don’t know if this was corroborated by other staff during the trial.
Again, this one of those “if you think she’s guilty then obviously she’s lying to cover herself, but if you think she’s innocent then she was just following the standard of treatment as she understood it at the time” things.
The whole case is a Rorschach Test.
Protocols would be documented.
A nurse diverging from protocols because they feel like it is not the way that hospitals work. At best that makes her guilty of criminal negligence.
But if it’s her own testimony… well… I guess it must be corroborated by other nurses… or may be she was the only one who did that…?
The case isn’t a Rorachach test. She was found guilty on multiple counts of murder. For some reason she has become beloved of conspiracy theorists. But there is a high bar to say that the entire legal system has failed, which is what their argument is.
That’s not true. There is plenty of other evidence. The deaths and other serous events were when Letby was on duty. She was observed failing to act when a baby was ill, and observed acting suspiciously around another baby. She stole their medical records, kept them at home and claimed she’d been unable to securely dispose of them despite possessing a paper shredder. There are the initials in her diary that match key dates. There are her notes to herself that talk of guilt. There was other evidence that the deaths were unnatural.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
A link to “sources I’ve seen” please
That’s doesn’t sound like a typical policy for helping a crashing patient when time is of the essence
Phil appears also to be confusing crashing (cardiac arrest) with desaturation (low blood oxygen).
Yes - you must be right - the case being referred to here is the one where the consultant said they came in to find her stood by a desaturating baby (who’s breathing tube was dislodged) doing nothing.
Having tanked Tesla shares, he now seems determined to make Starlink customers doubt its reliability and flee to the likes of OneWeb. I imagine nation states are rethinking SpaceX too.
I know he still has some true believers but this is not stable behaviour. And why is he trying to reinvent himself as some 'statesmen' of the corbynite 'surrender to prevent fighting' mould?
I do wonder what his boards think. I imagine “for god’s sakes Elon, can’t we just run a business” is quite high on this list.
He's clearly brought something to his various businesses, but there are limits - great strengths can also become great weaknesses. Simply from a perspective of spending his time on government business, trolling people online, and trying to encourage the ousting of democratic leaders in support of the Kremlin, he has less time to spend useful time on business.
The first project Elon worked on at Tesla was the Cybertruck. His record speaks for itself.
All of this was entirely predictable and predicted. By me!
That's not true: Elon has been involved in managing Tesla -and every vehicle design- since the Roadster. Only the original Roadster was not Elon's work.
What is true is that the Cybertruck is the first vehicle where Elon did not listen to the people around him.
Perhaps he was listening to the wisdom of Donald and RFK Jnr?
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
The claim the prosecution "dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty" is misleading. All deaths were examined first for whether they were expected or not, without reference to whether Letby was on duty, and then the analysis focused on unexpected deaths.
There were numerous deaths that were medically unexpected.
The Shoo Lee commission is organised by the defence.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Trump belatedly trying to help the man he's screwed.
I don’t really get the appeal of Carney though. I assume he wins easily as the other contenders barely get mentioned.
He was anti Brexit which at least showed he knew what he was doing.
So was Liz Truss.
When Loopy Liz got drunk on her hubris, in her bid to ‘surprise us on the upside’ (pace our own Leondamus), we got rid of her within weeks.
Whereas the US faces determined vandalism of the world order for a whole four years, with even an assassin with better aim simply replacing him with a less idiotic version of the same.
Carney would be good news for Canada, but realistically they’re playing the role of Poland in 1939. We might support them but there is nothing we can do to help.
Trump wants Zelenskyy gone and is again pushing for elections and even if he signs the minerals deal won’t re-start military aid or intelligence. So what is the point of these negotiations next week ?
Just come back from a weekend in Oxfordshire with some friends. For context, I am late 40s, they are early 40s, all male. Middle class, good jobs. Some reflections: - Jesus Christ there has been a swing to the right in worldview in the past year. These were previously soft-lefty types - no longer. Though I can confirm Reform are seen as a bit beyond the Pale, and Trump seen as the biggest problem the world faces today. - The Boomers may be the lucky generation, but we 70s children are still luckier than 80s children. Because, mainly, housing costs. - Only two of the four of us have manafrd to breed. The other two - good looking, witty, charming, kind, good jobs, wanted kids - have not been so lucky. Lots of causes, but at bottom just found the right woman too late in life. - Went for a walk in the Cotswolds. Lots of pretty little villages in the Cotswolds and lots of red kites and I had a very pleasant time - but as a landscape - it's fine, but I don't see why it's in quite such demand. - Saw the Duke of Marlborough on his ebike.
What his instructions were we don't know. But to suggest that he was just going through the motions is nonsense. The defence applied to have all the charges struck out on the basis that there was no case to answer. That is relatively unusual. It is not "going through the motions" in any sense. Myers himself is an experienced advocate. Note that he got an acquittal in the case of Inspector Duckenfield over Hillsborough.
Why the defence did not call as witnesses the medical experts they had is the big unanswered question. Another one is why Letby herself accepted that one of the babies had been poisoned by insulin.
The defence took the view that undermining the chief prosecution witness was their best possible approach. The jury disagreed with them.
As to why Letby accepted that the babies had been poisoned by insulin - she was effectively trapped by the prosecution barrister into accepting his claim that the evidence meant that someone had been doing so. A better briefed defendant might have refused to make a claim either way on the basis that they didn’t have the expertise to make such a judgement.
For the jury, once the idea that /someone/ was poisoning babies became the accepted truth, their conviction of Letby was probably inevitable.
I thought she accepted the insulin poisoning claim during her police interview. Not just in court. I may have remembered incorrectly of course.
The other point which gets overlooked is that she was also convicted of attempted murder charges. Not seen much engagement with that aspect.
IIRC the attempted murder charges were the insulin poisonings - all those babies lived I think. The deaths were all supposed to have occurred via air embolism.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Trump belatedly trying to help the man he's screwed.
I don’t really get the appeal of Carney though. I assume he wins easily as the other contenders barely get mentioned.
He was anti Brexit which at least showed he knew what he was doing.
So was Liz Truss.
When Loopy Liz got drunk on her hubris, in her bid to ‘surprise us on the upside’ (pace our own Leondamus), we got rid of her within weeks.
Whereas the US faces determined vandalism of the world order for a whole four years, with even an assassin with better aim simply replacing him with a less idiotic version of the same.
Carney would be good news for Canada, but realistically they’re playing the role of Poland in 1939. We might support them but there is nothing we can do to help.
Based on that analogy, Canada will end up occupied by Russia for 40 years.
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
In this case it seems that government is avoiding the necessary policy, though.
There is an argument for a certain amount of diplomatic dissembling, but none at all for using that as a basis for our future defence planning.
I suspect there is still some hope to avoid the necessary big spend in a short time - defence spend is pretty well nailed on to destroy all the other hopes they had wet social improvements. It's like COVID - take s up all the cash and some.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
The claim the prosecution "dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty" is misleading. All deaths were examined first for whether they were expected or not, without reference to whether Letby was on duty, and then the analysis focused on unexpected deaths.
There were numerous deaths that were medically unexpected.
The Shoo Lee commission is organised by the defence.
That was convenient. All the deaths when letby wasn't involved where perfectly fine and expected?
Trump wants Zelenskyy gone and is again pushing for elections and even if he signs the minerals deal won’t re-start military aid or intelligence. So what is the point of these negotiations next week ?
From our or Ukraine’s point of view ? Not much at all.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Another thing to note. There was a second trial on a single count, which went to appeal. The main witness was not the principal expert (Dr Evans) in the first trial. The trial relied on direct evidence of a doctor who was involved in the events. The defence could have, but did not, call expert evidence - once again.
The appeal was only on a jurisdictional point. There was no appeal on questions like 'No case to answer' or 'the baby might have died from natural causes and here is the evidence' or 'use of evidence that should not have been allowed'. etc.
In practice, suggestions that Letby is innocent have to cover each and every count. It's no practical use to say she may not have done 10 of them. She has to be comprehensively out on all counts or else she is still a child killer/attempter.
This one count and the appeal may be a place to start. If she is guilty on this one, the rest needs to be looked at in the light of it.
I wonder which is the more likely miscarriage, that she's innocent on all the deaths she was convicted of, or guilty of some she wasn't charged with?
I'm not sure of that. The woman is either a hideous monster or subject to an egregious miscarriage of justice. The scale is probably 50/50.
My greatest concern is the defence team opting not to present statistical evidence which would appear to have been favourable to Letby.
There is a little bit of irony attached to the campaign when we also have dozens of people who are serving indeterminate sentences for the most minor of infringements and have been in jail for 20 plus years, all on the whim of Mr Blunkett, and no one gives a whimper about them.
Well if it's 50/50 she should be freed. I can't say I've done a deep dive but from what I have read my view fwiw is she did it. I know that's a different question to whether the convictions are "safe".
Oh she's guilty because a jury of her peers convicted her. Whether she did it or not with the evidence currently available I am balancing the scales as even. Until she is awarded an appeal and the conviction subsequently quashed she remains guilty.
Yes but what I mean (although it's not my opinion) is if the level of doubt to a reasonable person who knows and understands all the evidence is 50% that guilty verdict is wrong.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headington_Shark In 2022, the Oxford City Council made the sculpture a heritage site for its "special contribution" to the community, despite objection by Hanson-Heine, who stated, "Using the planning apparatus to preserve a historical symbol of planning law defiance is absurd."
Worth noting too that Private Eyes MD (Phil Hammond) has been spectacularly wrong at times over the years by presenting very one sided reports. Most notably on Wakefield and MMR. The idea that he is a neutral weigher of evidence is for the birds.
Was Hammond writing MD during the MMR debacle? Not Private Eye’s finest hour...
Private Eye also claimed for years that Hanratty was innocent (although that was Paul Foot rather than Hammond).
But then Private Eye has got a lot of miscarriages of justice right too.
Paul Foot had me convinced.
Foot probably knew more than he could publish. In the end I think he was agnostic on the matter.
One thing that is almost universally acknowledged now is that Hanratty should have been acquitted on the evidence as it was presented to the jury. That is not to say he was definitely innocent (that was and remains unproveable) but the reasonable doubt principle should have been sufficient to get him off. This is where I think the location of the trial and the tabloid witchhunt played a part.
That is my opinion of Letby too. She might be guilty in at least some cases but the trial was a travesty, and its medical and statistical evidence have been thoroughly debunked by outside experts who are actual experts.
Hanratty I suspect was guilty – the coincidence of the gun being found where he had previously advocated hiding guns tipped me over – but I'm surprised Hanratty's sentence was not commuted after the on/off identification.
The coincidence to which you refer is one good reason why he should have been found innocent!
If you had just shot someone, would you really wrap the gun in one of your hankies and stuff it down the back seat of a bus? And even if you were daft enough to do that, would you tell anyone that was a good place to get rid of unwanted goods (which it isn't)? Hanratty was an odious little scrote but he wasn't stupid. The 'bus' story came from Charles France, a petty criminal who Hanratty was living with at the time. Nobody else ever verified it. It's nonsense.
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
In this case it seems that government is avoiding the necessary policy, though.
There is an argument for a certain amount of diplomatic dissembling, but none at all for using that as a basis for our future defence planning.
I suspect there is still some hope to avoid the necessary big spend in a short time - defence spend is pretty well nailed on to destroy all the other hopes they had wet social improvements. It's like COVID - take s up all the cash and some.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
Para 212 of the Court of Appeal upholding Hanratty's conviction:
Mr Michael Sherrard apparently opened the defence at the trial by saying appositely that this was a case “sagging with coincidences”. Just let us consider some of the more striking coincidences in the light of the DNA evidence if James Hanratty was not guilty. He was wrongly identified by three witnesses at identification parades; first as the person at the scene of the crime and secondly (by two witnesses) driving a vehicle close to where the vehicle in which the murder was committed was found; he had the same identifying manner of speech as the killer; he stayed in a room the night before the crime from which bullets that had been fired from the murder weapon were recovered; the murder weapon was recovered from a place on a bus which he regarded as a hiding place and the bus followed a route he could well have used; his DNA was found on a piece of material from Valerie Storie’s knickers where it would be expected to be if the appellant was guilty; it was also found on the handkerchief found with the gun. The number of alleged coincidences means that they are not coincidences but overwhelming proof of the safety of the conviction from an evidential perspective.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
He wasn't charged. The evidence supporting the rape allegation is very thin. You only have to think of the gruesome practicalities to appreciate its improbabilty. It is likely she'd been having sex in the car with Gregson before they were disturbed, which may explain a number of things, including how the panties finished up in police custody.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
He wasn't charged. The evidence supporting the rape allegation is very thin. You only have to think of the gruesome practicalities to appreciate its improbabilty. It is likely she'd been having sex in the car with Gregson before they were disturbed, which may explain a number of things, including how the panties finished up in police custody.
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
Another former defence secretary agrees.
https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/1898751758404378934 Extraordinary statement from the UK's former defence secretary: he'd now be ordering an appraisal on decoupling Britain's military capabilities from the U.S. if he were still in the job: "Sir Ben Wallace, former UK defence secretary, said that, if he were still in post, his first response would have been to commission 'an appraisal of our dependencies and vulnerabilities across international partners — including the US'. This would allow reflection 'on whether there needs to be any strategic changes.'"
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
The claim the prosecution "dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty" is misleading. All deaths were examined first for whether they were expected or not, without reference to whether Letby was on duty, and then the analysis focused on unexpected deaths.
There were numerous deaths that were medically unexpected.
The Shoo Lee commission is organised by the defence.
That was convenient. All the deaths when letby wasn't involved where perfectly fine and expected?
Sounds like police and cps collusion.
Nice logic. In a situation where a number of deaths are expected then a number of those deaths are likely to be non criminal. Usually 100%. If there is one murderer on the scene then some of those deaths will be criminal; but only if there are multiple murderers on the scene will there be criminal deaths unassociated with the murderer Number One. Possible but unlikely.
Of course unexpected deaths can be non criminal - bad luck, stuff happening, sub-optimal care etc.
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
In this case it seems that government is avoiding the necessary policy, though.
There is an argument for a certain amount of diplomatic dissembling, but none at all for using that as a basis for our future defence planning.
I suspect there is still some hope to avoid the necessary big spend in a short time - defence spend is pretty well nailed on to destroy all the other hopes they had wet social improvements. It's like COVID - take s up all the cash and some.
Increased employment in the defence sector or the military might have social benefits.
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
Then I am sure that the defence would have had a really good reason for not presenting this devastating evidence before she was convicted
Yes, the defence has the really good reason that they are lawyers and lawyers do not understand statistics, which is how we repeatedly get into this mess. Nor are they medical experts.
Good lawyers are not experts in specific aspects of their cases. They are experts in the law and in building/refuting strong cases.
If they didn’t understand the statistics they would have sought professional experts to explain it and studied until they did understand it.
As the Legal 500 put it:
“Ben is exceptionally hardworking and time and time again masters the most serious and complex technical information. In terms of advocacy, Ben is a true heavyweight of the Bar and with good reason, as he is able to bear the immense pressure of some of the most daunting and distressing cases brought before the courts with unwavering professionalism and integrity.” The Legal 500 2024
Aiui the Benster is Letby's new brief, not the one at the original trial. But in any case, the problem with not understanding statistics is knowing you do not understand. Those at the first trial did not, one hopes, deliberately balls it up.
As an aside, note that probability and statistics was invented by Blaise Pascal in the 17th Century, along with public transport. One for @Sunil_Prasannan there.
Having tanked Tesla shares, he now seems determined to make Starlink customers doubt its reliability and flee to the likes of OneWeb. I imagine nation states are rethinking SpaceX too.
I'm not sure on SpaceX, especially about alternatives, but nations are already walking away from Starlink, starting with Taiwan working on their own system due to Musk's links with China and his untrustworthiness:
I think OneWeb has its basic network in place, but the satellite factory is still in Florida. It's a good job the Tories did not sell all of it off, but essentially just stopped putting further investment in.
OneWeb is up and running - doesn’t need major investment at its current size.
The real question is about enlarging the constellation. But launch capacity is big limit.
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
“I’m a bait and switch merchant. This is todays’s switch.”
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
The claim the prosecution "dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty" is misleading. All deaths were examined first for whether they were expected or not, without reference to whether Letby was on duty, and then the analysis focused on unexpected deaths.
There were numerous deaths that were medically unexpected.
The Shoo Lee commission is organised by the defence.
That was convenient. All the deaths when letby wasn't involved where perfectly fine and expected?
Sounds like police and cps collusion.
The records were reviewed without reference to Letby's involvement. The defence were able to query the decisions made.
Claims of police and CPS collusion, rather than error, are very serious. There would be multiple criminal acts were that the case. Even Letby's defence teams have never made that charge.
Having tanked Tesla shares, he now seems determined to make Starlink customers doubt its reliability and flee to the likes of OneWeb. I imagine nation states are rethinking SpaceX too.
I'm not sure on SpaceX, especially about alternatives, but nations are already walking away from Starlink, starting with Taiwan working on their own system due to Musk's links with China and his untrustworthiness:
I think OneWeb has its basic network in place, but the satellite factory is still in Florida. It's a good job the Tories did not sell all of it off, but essentially just stopped putting further investment in.
OneWeb is up and running - doesn’t need major investment at its current size.
The real question is about enlarging the constellation. But launch capacity is big limit.
One area where Europe ought to be able to get its act together. It’s not magic, and we have the industrial capacity.
Time for Europe to tell Trump where to go, IMO. It's becoming clear he's trying to negotiate the capitulation of Ukraine. Which has not in either our or Europe's interest.
As a matter of simple realpolitik, if the US doesn't have skin in the game, then it should not be dictating terms. Or even have a say.
A "minerals deal" isn't skin in the game; he could - and likely will - get the same from Putin.
no point in ukr signing this stupid minerals deal if it does not restart military aid.
Don't believe there is value in the minerals but there is a great deal of wealth (and global power) in Ukraine's grain harvests. Just the sort of situation that oligarchs like to take advantage of. If Russia gets control of their agricultural exports, it's yet another weapon that Putin can use, as well as pushing immigrants into Europe.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
A very good Swedish film on Netflix called 'The Breakthrough'. A true story which features strongly the advances in DNA. Well worth watching in any event
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
Just come back from a weekend in Oxfordshire with some friends. For context, I am late 40s, they are early 40s, all male. Middle class, good jobs. Some reflections: - Jesus Christ there has been a swing to the right in worldview in the past year. These were previously soft-lefty types - no longer. Though I can confirm Reform are seen as a bit beyond the Pale, and Trump seen as the biggest problem the world faces today...
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
I’ve been granted a deferment to jury service though it will crop up again at some point.
At which time I will be a potential juror where I simply don’t understand one of the verdicts I can give - Not Proven.
No wonder the criminal justice professionals get puzzled by jury verdicts when you have clueless idiots like me on them.
My late father was on a jury. 2 girls allegedly sexually abused when they were young. One was, unfortunately, a hopeless witness. She had lived a life of drugs and abuse such that she really couldn't speak to particular events or perpetrators. Simply not a reliable witness. The second was crystal clear and very evidently telling the truth about what the accused had done but the jury needed to rely on the first girl to corroborate her account.
They came back Not guilty and not proven, the latter being for the girl they completely believed but could not convict on. I don't know if it gave her any comfort but it is a good example of when the alternative verdict of acquittal allowed them to make a point.
That sounds uncannily like a rape trial I was a jury member on, but we judged the charges on one victim sufficiently corroborated to reach a guilty verdict. Shortly after, guidance on corroboration by a third party was clarified and somewhat extended.
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
Curious.
Would you mind translating into English?
Trump: As the stock market is down I'm going to pretend I don't care and it is all part of my brilliant plan.
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
In this case it seems that government is avoiding the necessary policy, though.
There is an argument for a certain amount of diplomatic dissembling, but none at all for using that as a basis for our future defence planning.
I suspect there is still some hope to avoid the necessary big spend in a short time - defence spend is pretty well nailed on to destroy all the other hopes they had wet social improvements. It's like COVID - take s up all the cash and some.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
He wasn't charged. The evidence supporting the rape allegation is very thin. You only have to think of the gruesome practicalities to appreciate its improbabilty. It is likely she'd been having sex in the car with Gregson before they were disturbed, which may explain a number of things, including how the panties finished up in police custody.
The evidence is that the victim has said she was raped, and DNA from the man she accused of raping her was found on her underwear along with DNA from a second person which as you have noted was almost certainly Gregsten. That's pretty compelling evidence.
He wasn't charged because in that time period it was very unusual to charge somebody with a second offence if they were going to be prosecuted for another offence with a more serious sentence. Why bother trying somebody for rape when he's up for murder and attempted murder, and if he's not guilty of those he's not guilty of rape anyway?
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
Curious.
Would you mind translating into English?
Trump: As the stock market is down I'm going to pretend I don't care and it is all part of my brilliant plan.
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
"Four years is nowhere near enough. I need the job for life."
Just come back from a weekend in Oxfordshire with some friends. For context, I am late 40s, they are early 40s, all male. Middle class, good jobs. Some reflections: - Jesus Christ there has been a swing to the right in worldview in the past year. These were previously soft-lefty types - no longer. Though I can confirm Reform are seen as a bit beyond the Pale, and Trump seen as the biggest problem the world faces today. - The Boomers may be the lucky generation, but we 70s children are still luckier than 80s children. Because, mainly, housing costs. - Only two of the four of us have manafrd to breed. The other two - good looking, witty, charming, kind, good jobs, wanted kids - have not been so lucky. Lots of causes, but at bottom just found the right woman too late in life. - Went for a walk in the Cotswolds. Lots of pretty little villages in the Cotswolds and lots of red kites and I had a very pleasant time - but as a landscape - it's fine, but I don't see why it's in quite such demand. - Saw the Duke of Marlborough on his ebike.
If they think the right will fix housing costs and make it more affordable to start a family I have a deceptively spacious apartment to sell them.
Just come back from a weekend in Oxfordshire with some friends. For context, I am late 40s, they are early 40s, all male. Middle class, good jobs. Some reflections: - Jesus Christ there has been a swing to the right in worldview in the past year. These were previously soft-lefty types - no longer. Though I can confirm Reform are seen as a bit beyond the Pale, and Trump seen as the biggest problem the world faces today...
Would you care to provide some detail please?
Largely, views that we need to be focusing more on things which make money, wind back from net zero, wind back on DEI, stop paying people not to work, etc. That sort of thing.
Just come back from a weekend in Oxfordshire with some friends. For context, I am late 40s, they are early 40s, all male. Middle class, good jobs. Some reflections: - Jesus Christ there has been a swing to the right in worldview in the past year. These were previously soft-lefty types - no longer. Though I can confirm Reform are seen as a bit beyond the Pale, and Trump seen as the biggest problem the world faces today...
Would you care to provide some detail please?
Largely, views that we need to be focusing more on things which make money, wind back from net zero, wind back on DEI, stop paying people not to work, etc. That sort of thing.
Nurses take notes home all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. (I bet intensive care nurses stopped taking notes home after the Letby case though, once they realised it could be used against them.) The notes to herself about guilt are ones the therapist appointed to her by her employer told her to make apparently.
According to sources I’ve seen, it was standard practice in the neonatal department to not “rush to intervene” with a crashing baby (in case you made things worse presumably) but to stand by at first, so that doesn’t really count either.
This is the thing with the Letby case, it’s a pile of suspicious sounding stories that sound like clear evidence of her guilt /if/ you think she’s already guilty. If not? They evaporate into thin air.
The only hard evidence is the insulin poisoning & if that fails, it seems to me that everything else fails with it.
Nurses don’t usually take home the notes of babies that died and stash them under the bed and then lie about not being able to dispose of them.
A therapist told her to write about her feelings. The therapist did NOT tell her to confess to baby murders in those notes. What she wrote in those notes was up to her.
I don’t know what nonsense you’ve come up with around desaturating infants, but, no, you don’t just stand there.
You ignored other points I had noted. There was the time the mother of Baby E described hearing her infant scream, and walking in to find him with blood around his mouth and Letby in the room. Baby E later died. There is the other evidence that the deaths were unexpected and unnatural. There is the association between these deaths and Letby being on duty. And so on.
The association between the deaths and Letby being on duty is because the prosecution dropped deaths when Letby was not on duty. They drew the target around the holes, as it were.
Rather than bricks in the wall of evidence, the case seems to be made of Swiss cheese after statisticians have demolished the statistical case and the international Shoo Lee commission did the same for the medical case. It is not even clear there were any excess deaths at all compared to similar trusts.
While I don't know the details, that isn't necessarily the smoking gun you think it is.
It is possible (and again, I don't know the details, so I am just creating a theory here), that she was on duty half the time, and there were 20 deaths when she was on duty, and 2 when she was not.
The question -from a statistical point of view- is what would be the normal number of deaths? It is possible that you would expect 2-4 deaths in the period, and therefore when she was not on duty there were a normal number, and when she was, there was an abnormal.
The issue (of course) is that statistical evidence on its own should not be enough to convict. Someone is going to win the lottery every week, even if the odds are 16 million to 1 against. That doesn't make them a cheat, that makes them the one person who - ah hem - won.
Having tanked Tesla shares, he now seems determined to make Starlink customers doubt its reliability and flee to the likes of OneWeb. I imagine nation states are rethinking SpaceX too.
I'm not sure on SpaceX, especially about alternatives, but nations are already walking away from Starlink, starting with Taiwan working on their own system due to Musk's links with China and his untrustworthiness:
I think OneWeb has its basic network in place, but the satellite factory is still in Florida. It's a good job the Tories did not sell all of it off, but essentially just stopped putting further investment in.
OneWeb wasn’t a UK government asset that the Tories “sold off”
It was a virtually bankrupt private company that the Tories *invested* in because they saw the strategic value of the capabilities
And IIRC were massively criticised on here for being idiots and wasting money.
The UK's stake in Oneweb was initially 38% aiui, which was subsequently gradually reduced to the current number of ~11% (plus a Golden Share) as the UK Government did not invest in further funding rounds, and a merger into Eutelsat, and a further baillout after a crisis.
Which I think is consonant with what I said .
IIRC I argued in support of the OneWeb investment - a good but high risk / high reward decision.
The way you phrased it implied a decision to sell down. Quite the contrast: the government used our capital strategically and got OneWeb to the point it could get outside funding. Governments shouldn’t, as a whole, be investing for a financial return.
It's a pity in the circumstances - we could trade access to it for access to some French sovereign capabilities. But they now effectively own as much of it as we do.
I'm disagreeing on my wording - it was clear . But I'm not about to challenge you to a Handbags at Dawn duel at the bottom of Low's Gully on our colleague's mountain over it.
With Rawnsley away, today's sunny super Sunday Hardman:
Cutting disability benefits is not just a “for instance” hypothetical, though: it is something that the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is very likely to announce in the next few weeks. [Which will not] sit well for a Labour party that has always struggled to feel comfortable with any kind of welfare cut, even if the public is entirely supportive.
Some of them are now additionally fatigued by the recent cut to international development spending, another policy area that often forms part of a Labour MP’s identity and values. Its MPs have often been drawn into politics to protect people from benefit cuts – particularly the cuts announced in the Tory austerity measures over the past 14 years – and have spent far less time thinking about the overall bill.
Still, few of them will speak out in public against the cuts when they are announced, other than those who have long been outspoken, like Diane Abbott. “Privately, lots of people are raging,” says one MP, but another who is also unhappy about the spending cuts thus far and fearful of what is to come suggests that there will be “very little pushback”. Starmer and colleagues have been busy doing as much outreach as they can to prevent the disappointment mounting too quickly.
Some of the MPs who are particularly opposed to the cuts also happen to be very annoyed with Starmer and Reeves, and quite hopeful that they may be able to remove the former. They won’t speak out because they are biding their time until that bath does overflow and there is a flood of resentment in the wider Labour party that they can then take advantage of. So don’t be deceived if the party seems relatively peaceful and united over the next few months. The tap is still dripping.
I think that's a mistaken framing.
It's not "cutting disability benefits", but the need to unwind a past practice of using incapacity benefits as a way to keep some unemployment out of the unemployment figures.
That was a trend from 2015 approximately. It was also used in the 1990s, if I recall my political history correctly, to reduce official unemployment figures.
Meanwhile Trump tells the Spectator Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre's '...biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not he’s not a Trump guy at all.' Which ironically might boost Poilievre in Canada
Trump belatedly trying to help the man he's screwed.
I don’t really get the appeal of Carney though. I assume he wins easily as the other contenders barely get mentioned.
He was anti Brexit which at least showed he knew what he was doing.
So was Liz Truss.
When Loopy Liz got drunk on her hubris, in her bid to ‘surprise us on the upside’ (pace our own Leondamus), we got rid of her within weeks.
Whereas the US faces determined vandalism of the world order for a whole four years, with even an assassin with better aim simply replacing him with a less idiotic version of the same.
Carney would be good news for Canada, but realistically they’re playing the role of Poland in 1939. We might support them but there is nothing we can do to help.
I think Canada is in a lower probability but higher risk cleft stick than we have.
The UK has to balance between a high level of entanglement with the USA, and consequential damage if they take umbrage as we seek disentanglement and strategic autonomy.
Canada has an economy heavily integrated with the USA and military dependent on it, whilst spending very litte on defence and everything taking 2 or 3 times as much time as needed, and the need to pivot away from integration simultaneously with managing the risks of being next to the USA.
If they think there is a risk of a Usonian military intervention, they may be best pursuing a larger scale version of the Finland strategy, to make themselves indigestible without unacceptable casualties.
But that's only one possible evolution of the circumstances amongst many possibilities.
We have yet to see that Trumpski will use force with allies.
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
Another former defence secretary agrees.
https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/1898751758404378934 Extraordinary statement from the UK's former defence secretary: he'd now be ordering an appraisal on decoupling Britain's military capabilities from the U.S. if he were still in the job: "Sir Ben Wallace, former UK defence secretary, said that, if he were still in post, his first response would have been to commission 'an appraisal of our dependencies and vulnerabilities across international partners — including the US'. This would allow reflection 'on whether there needs to be any strategic changes.'"
Surely that will have been done some time ago (enough serious commentators have been talking about it), and especially given the carefully choreographed cakewalk the Prime Minister has been following?
In diplomacy for all sorts of reasons, including buying time, holding positions which are not credible is all part of the process. When you are playing 'wait and see' along with buying time for remaking policy you say whatever is needed.
Another former defence secretary agrees.
https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/1898751758404378934 Extraordinary statement from the UK's former defence secretary: he'd now be ordering an appraisal on decoupling Britain's military capabilities from the U.S. if he were still in the job: "Sir Ben Wallace, former UK defence secretary, said that, if he were still in post, his first response would have been to commission 'an appraisal of our dependencies and vulnerabilities across international partners — including the US'. This would allow reflection 'on whether there needs to be any strategic changes.'"
Surely that will have been done some time ago (enough serious commentators have been talking about it), and especially given the carefully choreographed cakewalk the Prime Minister has been following?
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
He wasn't charged. The evidence supporting the rape allegation is very thin. You only have to think of the gruesome practicalities to appreciate its improbabilty. It is likely she'd been having sex in the car with Gregson before they were disturbed, which may explain a number of things, including how the panties finished up in police custody.
The evidence is that the victim has said she was raped, and DNA from the man she accused of raping her was found on her underwear along with DNA from a second person which as you have noted was almost certainly Gregsten. That's pretty compelling evidence.
He wasn't charged because in that time period it was very unusual to charge somebody with a second offence if they were going to be prosecuted for another offence with a more serious sentence. Why bother trying somebody for rape when he's up for murder and attempted murder, and if he's not guilty of those he's not guilty of rape anyway?
What happened to her was awful, but she was unreliable and inconsistent in her evidence. I honestly doubt she was raped, and if she was it is most unlikely to have been by Hanratty.
As I have already indicated, there are very good reason to treat the DNA results with considerable caution.
The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.
One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.
By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.
The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.
I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.
I did my latest jury speech on Friday afternoon. It was a relief to get it out of the way by the weekend.
In general, I have found juries very attentive and focused in the High Court, much more so than they tend to be for less serious trials in the Sheriff court. I have had the odd jury who have come back quickly with a not proven verdict that smacked of a reluctance to engage with the evidence but it has been rare, maybe 2 in 40 or so trials that come to mind.
Even when I have disagreed with the jury's verdict I have seen how they got there. More often, I have had very discerning judgments where parts of the charge have been removed showing that they have gone through the evidence carefully.
It is not a perfect system and there is a random element to it but in my view decisions by judges alone, whether on their own or in a panel of 3, would be worse.
Yes, i can see big flaws, but eliminating the principle as some suggest serms counterproductive to me
I think it would be improved by having professional jurors.
In every other job, people get better at it by doing it repeatedly.
Why should this most important function be any different?
Because the exact point is to make it non professional. It opens the prospect of jury nullification if it concludes that the defendants act was illegal but was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Judges and lawyers are about the law.
Juries are about justice.
Those are not the same
You missed that the police and the CPS are just about convictions irrespective of the truth.
Upthread there was mention of Hanratty being tried locally. Perhaps that assisted the guilty verdict - who can know - but we now know that there is overwhelming evidence of guilt (DNA) not known at the time.
One other question WRT jury trials. Would there be any merit in giving defendants in Crown Court trials the right to elect trial by judge sitting alone if they wish, while preserving the absolute right to trial by jury?
I can imagine case - and Letby may be one - where the mixture of the need for technical evidence which most juries will struggle with + the prejudicial atmosphere of a baby murder charge mean that this could serve the defndant and justice better than a jury.
When I first heard about the DNA evidence I was surprised but assumed it was definitive. On examination it turns out to be flaky, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
He wasn't charged. The evidence supporting the rape allegation is very thin. You only have to think of the gruesome practicalities to appreciate its improbabilty. It is likely she'd been having sex in the car with Gregson before they were disturbed, which may explain a number of things, including how the panties finished up in police custody.
The evidence is that the victim has said she was raped, and DNA from the man she accused of raping her was found on her underwear along with DNA from a second person which as you have noted was almost certainly Gregsten. That's pretty compelling evidence.
He wasn't charged because in that time period it was very unusual to charge somebody with a second offence if they were going to be prosecuted for another offence with a more serious sentence. Why bother trying somebody for rape when he's up for murder and attempted murder, and if he's not guilty of those he's not guilty of rape anyway?
What happened to her was awful, but she was unreliable and inconsistent in her evidence. I honestly doubt she was raped, and if she was it is most unlikely to have been by Hanratty.
As I have already indicated, there are very good reason to treat the DNA results with considerable caution.
She was neither unreliable nor inconsistent in her evidence. She picked out Hanratty at the first attempt in an identity parade, having previously failed to identify Alphon at a parade where she thought she was being asked to identify the man who looked most like Gregsten's killer.
Paul Foot claimed she was, based upon falsified documentation. That is not at all the same thing. Foot was not a reliable witness and the more you read about the deliberate lies he and the ironically named Jean Justice told about the A6 murders for - essentially - attention seeking reasons, the more shocking they appear. In particular, the way he behaved towards Valerie Storie (which included threatening letters and false allegations of perjury) was not merely disgusting, he could and probably should have been jailed himself for it.
Incidentally I would be willing to concede there are issues around the DNA on the pants, but there is no reasonable explanation for Hanratty's mucus being on the handkerchief except that he was the killer, and that is shown in claims to the contrary being based on flimsy claims of contamination.
I think I missed the AfD figure by six (158), which seems to exclude me from 10 points by only one seat. In this age of robust approaches to things, should I: demand a recount, find some extra votes for AfD, invent a different figure, legislate that 158-152=5, overturn the German constitution, sue PB and Ben Pointer, or declare war? These all seem acceptable modes of action. Which should I choose?
You could choose to predict accurately of course rather than moaning about how you just dipped out?
Comments
The appeal was only on a jurisdictional point. There was no appeal on questions like 'No case to answer' or 'the baby might have died from natural causes and here is the evidence' or 'use of evidence that should not have been allowed'. etc.
In practice, suggestions that Letby is innocent have to cover each and every count. It's no practical use to say she may not have done 10 of them. She has to be comprehensively out on all counts or else she is still a child killer/attempter.
This one count and the appeal may be a place to start. If she is guilty on this one, the rest needs to be looked at in the light of it.
https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2024/1278.html&query=(letby)
Which makes Starmer extraordinarily rare ?
https://x.com/nbcsnl/status/1898595388917162351
My greatest concern is the defence team opting not to present statistical evidence which would appear to have been favourable to Letby.
There is a little bit of irony attached to the campaign when we also have dozens of people who are serving indeterminate sentences for the most minor of infringements and have been in jail for 20 plus years, all on the whim of Mr Blunkett, and no one gives a whimper about them.
There is been 1 case in almost 100 years. And that was Turner, who asked the governor general to dissolve parliament soon after he won the leadership following Trudeau’s resignation.
I think “incredibly rare” is fair
Lindbergh actually sounds more reasonable than Trump.
...France has now been defeated; and, despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months, it is now obvious that England is losing the war. I believe this is realized even by the British government. But they have one last desperate plan remaining. They hope that they may be able to persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force1 to Europe, and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.
I do not blame England for this hope, or for asking for our assistance. But we now know that she declared a war under circumstances [that] led to the defeat of every nation that sided with her from Poland to Greece. We know that in the desperation of war England promised to all these nations armed assistance that she could not send. We know that she misinformed them, as she has misinformed us, concerning her state of preparation, her military strength, and the progress of the war.
In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances. But we in this country have a right to think of the welfare of America first, just as the people in England thought first of their own country when they encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds. When England asks us to enter this war, she is considering her own future, and that of her Empire. In making our reply, I believe we should consider the future of the United States and that of the Western Hemisphere.
It is not only our right, but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively, and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend...
If they didn’t understand the statistics they would have sought professional experts to explain it and studied until they did understand it.
As the Legal 500 put it:
“Ben is exceptionally hardworking and time and time again masters the most serious and complex technical information. In terms of advocacy, Ben is a true heavyweight of the Bar and with good reason, as he is able to bear the immense pressure of some of the most daunting and distressing cases brought before the courts with unwavering professionalism and integrity.”
The Legal 500 2024
https://www.exchangechambers.co.uk/people/benjamin-myers-kc/#:~:text=Benjamin Myers KC specializes in,v David Barton and others.
"Civil servants told to deliver or leave as Labour overhauls Whitehall"
https://www.ft.com
If I were Carney I'd go for the momentum play and go for a quick election while Trump is bullying Canada but before he's doing anything more sinister to them.
If he gets a new term then he has a platform to outlast Trump's official term in office.
It's becoming clear he's trying to negotiate the capitulation of Ukraine. Which has not in either our or Europe's interest.
Donald Trump has indicated that a mineral deal signing in Riyadh will not be enough to restart military aid or intelligence sharing to Ukraine
https://x.com/SamRamani2/status/1898706032811004042
As a matter of simple realpolitik, if the US doesn't have skin in the game, then it should not be dictating terms. Or even have a say.
A "minerals deal" isn't skin in the game; he could - and likely will - get the same from Putin.
US support to maintain UK’s nuclear arsenal is in doubt, experts say
Malcolm Rifkind joins diplomats and analysts urging focus on European cooperation to replace Trident
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/us-support-uk-nuclear-arsenal-in-doubt-trident-france
The other point which gets overlooked is that she was also convicted of attempted murder charges. Not seen much engagement with that aspect.
Again, this one of those “if you think she’s guilty then obviously she’s lying to cover herself, but if you think she’s innocent then she was just following the standard of treatment as she understood it at the time” things.
The whole case is a Rorschach Test.
There is an argument for a certain amount of diplomatic dissembling, but none at all for using that as a basis for our future defence planning.
The main one is that such testing was not even conceivable at the time so the materials subjected to it had not been kept in accordance with what would now be standard procedures, and that gives rise to number of issues of which cross-contamintion is the most obvious.
There are other problems too. Very little material survived. Notably, the car in which the muder and alleged rape took place had disappeared and could not be traced. Valerie Storie's panties were however available, even though Hanratty was never accused of rape and the matter was barely mentioned in the trial. The DNA on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon was wrapped is easily explained. Hanratty was living with the France family at the time and Mrs France did his washing. Her husband, Charles France, was a petty criminal who could have easily secreted the weapon, wrapped in the handkerchief, down the back seat of the local bus where it was quickly found. France's involvement in the proceedings is shadowy but he seems to have been troubled by the conviction and wrote several letters about it, some of which are still embargoed. He committed suicide about a year after Hanratty was hanged.
None of this proves anything. I would estimate that the DNA result increases the likelihood of Hanratty's guilt from about 25% to, say about 30%. My view, which is widely shared amongst those particularly interested in the case, is that the most likely culprit remains Peter Louis Alphon (the original suspect), probably acting at the behest of relatives and/or friends of Mrs Gregson who were unhappy about the illicit love affair between between her husband and Valerie Storey (although it is very unlikely they actually wanted Gregson killed.)
It is a fascinating case and I would like to think it is studied by prospective criminal investigators, if only as a fine example of how not to conduct a murder inquiry.
The appeal judgement has about 50 pages more.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LETBY-Sentencing-Remarks.pdf
What is true is that the Cybertruck is the first vehicle where Elon did not listen to the people around him.
A nurse diverging from protocols because they feel like it is not the way that hospitals work. At best that makes her guilty of criminal negligence.
But if it’s her own testimony… well… I guess it must be corroborated by other nurses… or may be she was the only one who did that…?
The case isn’t a Rorachach test. She was found guilty on multiple counts of murder. For some reason she has become beloved of conspiracy theorists. But there is a high bar to say that the entire legal system has failed, which is what their argument is.
There were numerous deaths that were medically unexpected.
The Shoo Lee commission is organised by the defence.
Whereas the US faces determined vandalism of the world order for a whole four years, with even an assassin with better aim simply replacing him with a less idiotic version of the same.
Carney would be good news for Canada, but realistically they’re playing the role of Poland in 1939. We might support them but there is nothing we can do to help.
- Jesus Christ there has been a swing to the right in worldview in the past year. These were previously soft-lefty types - no longer. Though I can confirm Reform are seen as a bit beyond the Pale, and Trump seen as the biggest problem the world faces today.
- The Boomers may be the lucky generation, but we 70s children are still luckier than 80s children. Because, mainly, housing costs.
- Only two of the four of us have manafrd to breed. The other two - good looking, witty, charming, kind, good jobs, wanted kids - have not been so lucky. Lots of causes, but at bottom just found the right woman too late in life.
- Went for a walk in the Cotswolds. Lots of pretty little villages in the Cotswolds and lots of red kites and I had a very pleasant time - but as a landscape - it's fine, but I don't see why it's in quite such demand.
- Saw the Duke of Marlborough on his ebike.
Sounds like police and cps collusion.
Not much at all.
Here is Valerie Storie being interviewed.
https://youtu.be/9y_7KiYI0q8?si=vo99vWG8pVrkh3yb&t=787
In 2022, the Oxford City Council made the sculpture a heritage site for its "special contribution" to the community, despite objection by Hanson-Heine, who stated, "Using the planning apparatus to preserve a historical symbol of planning law defiance is absurd."
It’s now an AirBnb I think.
If you had just shot someone, would you really wrap the gun in one of your hankies and stuff it down the back seat of a bus? And even if you were daft enough to do that, would you tell anyone that was a good place to get rid of unwanted goods (which it isn't)? Hanratty was an odious little scrote but he wasn't stupid. The 'bus' story came from Charles France, a petty criminal who Hanratty was living with at the time. Nobody else ever verified it. It's nonsense.
US pushes to remove references to sanctions and Russia’s war in Ukraine from a Canadian draft statement
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/08/america-vetoes-g7-proposal-to-combat-russias-shadow-fleet-of-oil-tankers
Mr Michael Sherrard apparently opened the defence at the trial by saying appositely that this was a case “sagging with coincidences”. Just let us consider some of the more striking coincidences in the light of the DNA evidence if James Hanratty was not guilty. He was wrongly identified by three witnesses at identification parades; first as the person at the scene of the crime and secondly (by two witnesses) driving a vehicle close to where the vehicle in which the murder was committed was found; he had the same identifying manner of speech as the killer; he stayed in a room the night before the crime from which bullets that had been fired from the murder weapon were recovered; the murder weapon was recovered from a place on a bus which he regarded as a hiding place and the bus followed a route he could well have used; his DNA was found on a piece of material from Valerie Storie’s knickers where it would be expected to be if the appellant was guilty; it was also found on the handkerchief found with the gun. The number of alleged coincidences means that they are not coincidences but overwhelming proof of the safety of the conviction from an evidential perspective.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2002/1141.html
TRUMP: "We have an interesting deal with Japan, that we have to protect them, but they don't have to protect us.... who makes these deals?"
https://x.com/KareemRifai/status/1897792955781374142
https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/1898751758404378934
Extraordinary statement from the UK's former defence secretary: he'd now be ordering an appraisal on decoupling Britain's military capabilities from the U.S. if he were still in the job: "Sir Ben Wallace, former UK defence secretary, said that, if he were still in post, his first response would have been to commission 'an appraisal of our dependencies and vulnerabilities across international partners — including the US'. This would allow reflection 'on whether there needs to be any strategic changes.'"
Of course unexpected deaths can be non criminal - bad luck, stuff happening, sub-optimal care etc.
Trump: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that."
So, well played NZ!
As an aside, note that probability and statistics was invented by Blaise Pascal in the 17th Century, along with public transport. One for @Sunil_Prasannan there.
The real question is about enlarging the constellation. But launch capacity is big limit.
Are you one of his marks, william ?
Claims of police and CPS collusion, rather than error, are very serious. There would be multiple criminal acts were that the case. Even Letby's defence teams have never made that charge.
It’s not magic, and we have the industrial capacity.
Would you mind translating into English?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14474877/BORIS-JOHNSON-No-one-liked-happened-White-House-assure-you-wasnt-meant-happen-Trumps-peace-plan-clear-step-brutal-squeeze-Putin.html
or this
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/09/still-uncertain-about-trump-let-boris-johnson-guide-you-on-this-very-compassionate-man
He wasn't charged because in that time period it was very unusual to charge somebody with a second offence if they were going to be prosecuted for another offence with a more serious sentence. Why bother trying somebody for rape when he's up for murder and attempted murder, and if he's not guilty of those he's not guilty of rape anyway?
NEW THREAD
It is possible (and again, I don't know the details, so I am just creating a theory here), that she was on duty half the time, and there were 20 deaths when she was on duty, and 2 when she was not.
The question -from a statistical point of view- is what would be the normal number of deaths? It is possible that you would expect 2-4 deaths in the period, and therefore when she was not on duty there were a normal number, and when she was, there was an abnormal.
The issue (of course) is that statistical evidence on its own should not be enough to convict. Someone is going to win the lottery every week, even if the odds are 16 million to 1 against. That doesn't make them a cheat, that makes them the one person who - ah hem - won.
I'm disagreeing on my wording - it was clear
It's not "cutting disability benefits", but the need to unwind a past practice of using incapacity benefits as a way to keep some unemployment out of the unemployment figures.
That was a trend from 2015 approximately. It was also used in the 1990s, if I recall my political history correctly, to reduce official unemployment figures.
It's certainly a hot potato, though.
The UK has to balance between a high level of entanglement with the USA, and consequential damage if they take umbrage as we seek disentanglement and strategic autonomy.
Canada has an economy heavily integrated with the USA and military dependent on it, whilst spending very litte on defence and everything taking 2 or 3 times as much time as needed, and the need to pivot away from integration simultaneously with managing the risks of being next to the USA.
If they think there is a risk of a Usonian military intervention, they may be best pursuing a larger scale version of the Finland strategy, to make themselves indigestible without unacceptable casualties.
But that's only one possible evolution of the circumstances amongst many possibilities.
We have yet to see that Trumpski will use force with allies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jogbQyYyxSg&t=25s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jogbQyYyxSg&t=68s
As I have already indicated, there are very good reason to treat the DNA results with considerable caution.
Paul Foot claimed she was, based upon falsified documentation. That is not at all the same thing. Foot was not a reliable witness and the more you read about the deliberate lies he and the ironically named Jean Justice told about the A6 murders for - essentially - attention seeking reasons, the more shocking they appear. In particular, the way he behaved towards Valerie Storie (which included threatening letters and false allegations of perjury) was not merely disgusting, he could and probably should have been jailed himself for it.
Incidentally I would be willing to concede there are issues around the DNA on the pants, but there is no reasonable explanation for Hanratty's mucus being on the handkerchief except that he was the killer, and that is shown in claims to the contrary being based on flimsy claims of contamination.
Republicans against Trump
@RpsAgainstTrump
Question: Are you expecting a recession this year?
Trump: There is a period of transition because what we're doing is very big…Ultimately it will be good
(Sounds like a YES to me)