The New Yorker takes on the dubious evidence that led to Letby's conviction and the bizarre UK media restrictions that governed coverage of the case. [CW: infanticide] Rachel Aviv's article paints a picture of a neonatal intensive care unit undergoing the same catastrophic deterioration as the rest of the National Health Service—
a topic the magazine has covered recently—and how an especially competent and determined nurse might just end up at the scene of several patients' deaths because she was called in to help on virtually all difficult cases.
The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four "suspicious events," which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X's next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X's below her name. She was the "one common denominator," the "constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse," one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. "If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It's a process of elimination."
But the chart didn't account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country's most reviled woman—"the unexpected face of evil," as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.
Vanity Fair recently published a piece coming from a more pro-guilt perspective, but retracted that article due to the same strange British press laws that somehow prevent any coverage which might doubt the efficacy of the court system or the quality of the prosecution but
didn't prevent wall-to-wall coverage alleging Letby's guilt before and during the trial (the best I could do was a
Google Drive link to scans of the article; if we can find a better version, I'd ask the mods to add it in here).
Especially strange from the
New Yorker piece were Letby's attorneys' decisions
not to put the NHS on trial—Letby's most obvious trial defense—and instead to insist, along with the prosecution, that the service was getting along fine. Likewise, not to present a single defense medical expert after months of prosecution medical testimony that was...assailable:
The prosecution's pathologist, Andreas Marnerides, who worked at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, wrote that the child had died of natural causes, most likely of pneumonia. "I have not identified any suspicious findings," he concluded. But, three years later, Marnerides testified that, after reading more reports from the courts' experts, he thought that the baby had died "with pneumonia," not "from pneumonia." The likely cause of death, he said, was administration of air into his stomach through a nasogastric tube. When Evans testified, he said the same thing.
"What's the evidence?" Myers asked him.
"Baby collapsed, died," Evans responded.
"A baby may collapse for any number of reasons," Myers said. "What's the evidence that supports your assertion made today that it's because of air going down the NGT?"
"The baby collapsed and died."
"Do you rely upon one image of that?" Myers asked, referring to X-rays.
"This baby collapsed and died."
"What evidence is there that you can point to?"
Evans replied that he'd ruled out all natural causes, so the only other viable explanation would be another method of murder, like air injected into one of the baby's veins. "A baby collapsing and where resuscitation was unsuccessful—you know, that's consistent with my interpretation of what happened," he said.
When so many of us now work in deteriorating systems, doing two or three times our share of work while other people's lives or livelihoods depend how well we do it, it is especially terrifying, if the New Yorker's take is to be believed, to see a single individual scapegoated and sentenced to life imprisonment for the failures of the system she worked in.
Or, if
Vanity Fair (and, if Twitter replies are any indication, most of the British public) has the right of it, some justice may have been done.
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