Lucy Letby
Of course, the only things that meaningfully connect Lucy Letby and Lucy Connolly are their first names and the fact that they are two British women who have become headline news in 2024. Beyond this, however, theirs are flashpoints cases in the mire that is the criminal justice system in Keir Starmer’s Britain.
Lucy Connolly
Letby has already spent four years in prison for the murder of seven infants and the attempted murder of seven more, and the ‘learning lessons’ Thirlwell Inquiry started even while David Davis MP was campaigning against a suspected miscarriage of justice in Parliament.
The tanker of media and public opinion turned dramatically and quickly following an article about Letby’s case in The New Yorker, and careful examinations by Peter Hitchens and Private Eye’s Phil Hammond - yet still Letby languishes, after having told the Judge ‘I’m innocent’ at a subsequent hearing.
Lucy Connolly, wife of a Conservative councillor, was jailed for 2.5 years for an X post following the Southport killings of three young girls, in which she wrote places of worship ‘could be burned down for all I care’ amongst other highly emotive sentiments, cited as incitement to violence. The identity of the alleged murderer had been suppressed for reasons best known to the authorities, so the public was liable to fake news, including a much-read post originating in Pakistan claiming the act to have been carried out by a person with an explicitly middle-eastern sounding name.
Some weeks after Connolly’s sentencing, when the anger over the killings had subsided somewhat, and on the day before the budget, it was revealed that the suspect had indeed kept Jihadist-related materials. This put the conviction of Connolly, along with a number of other people jailed for ‘incitement’ or riot-related offences, in deeply spurious territory. It could be claimed that Labour put societal cohesion ahead of due process, due to what were clearly gradual information leaks.
These information leaks apply too to the Letby case; in which, while the jury trial was pondered for ten months, courtcraft is a powerful persuader, and it came as a shocking surprise to hear that no medical witnesses had been called by Letby’s defence team.
With each revelation the doubts mounted, let alone the fact that Letby’s was a majority verdict rather than unanimous - one can only wonder what the one or two jury members who disagreed with the finding of her guilt must think of the arc of this turning tanker. The Chair of the Thirlwell Inquiry demanded that the public stop speculating on the case due to the feelings of the families of the infants - as if those families wouldn’t want actual justice to be done.
As increasingly with everything else in the public sphere there is a political dimension to these cases, as the right tend to be firmly behind Connolly’s innocence on free speech grounds; and the left behind Letby due to the fact that her nursing friends, colleagues and family have seemingly stood behind her claim of innocence en-masse.
There are many crossovers of course, if not due largely to the fact that what Connolly was convicted seems incredibly trivial, to that of Letby, convicted of the most heinous crimes imaginable. The innocence narratives go that these fresh-faced blondes and brunettes have either been set up, in the case of Letby, or fell victim to ‘New Culture Crimes’ in the case of Connolly, but both wrongfully convicted nonetheless.
Speaking of allegations of new culture crimes, just weeks after Connolly’s imprisonment Telegraph writer Allison Pearson was questioned by police over an X post - but the police wouldn’t tell Pearson which post, or the name of the person who was complaining. With these Kafkaesque tactics Keir Starmer would do well to remember that it was Pearson, along with Julia Hartley-Brewer, who took down his predecessor at the CPS Alison Saunders, following the latter’s apparent determination to imprison every contested sexual encounter in the UK at the height of the #MeToo movement.
The ‘guilty’ voices back the establishment, seeing Letby as a baby-killer who wrote her feelings in notes - which were later discovered to have been suggested to be written by counsellors - and the fact that she was always on shift when the babies died, which turned out to be not the absolute truth either. Guilt for Connolly is claimed in direct incitement to violence no matter the provocation, the few numbers of social media followers, or numbers of glasses of wine drunk before posted/quickly deleted, under a new law which was already controversial itself.
Many on the social mediums of X et al seem to have made up their minds depending either on their pre-existing political stance, or their trust in institutions such as the police and the NHS. Connolly will be out before long, due to the 40% rule no doubt being applied, to serve the rest of her sentence under probation conditions.
Letby is meanwhile serving multiple life sentences, while heavyweight voice after voice, medical and academic, chimes in with seriously-held doubts. Neither of these two Lucy’s (arguably) asked to be, but they have nevertheless become twin figureheads - or victims - of the ongoing, living controversy that is the British justice system.
By Sean Bw Parker
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