'Lucy Letby' by Sean Bw Parker
The public in any country want desperately to trust their justice system. To be a hardworking nurse accused of the worst of crimes - multiple baby murders - is pretty high up on the worst of things that can happen to anyone.
While the public wants to see justice done, particularly a couple of decades on from Harold Shipman’s campaign of profit-making euthanasia, it is also known that big institutions are far from infallible. This has been seen in the NHS countless times, from the infected blood scandal to the millions it is perpetually paying out in compensation.
The National Health Service is the biggest employer in Britain, vastly expensive with a seemingly bottomless appetite, and not averse to finding scapegoats when it needs to. New Labour’s policy of expanding its middle-management to make it more ‘efficient’ has, according to many sources, also made it more difficult to hold to account. Thus, when a hospital such as the Royal Chester is found to have dirty water and large numbers of infant fatalities, combined with a toxic blame culture as seen in various post-trial documentaries, the credulity of the public becomes stretched.
The conversation online since Lucy Letby’s conviction for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of eight more essentially comes down to whether the person wants to see the best in people or the worst, such has been the drip-feed of information uncovered since. There is trust in the institution, and there is trust in the sense of the individual, but if God is anywhere s/he/it works in the individual, not in the group. Any analysis of the terror of groupthink will bear this out.
Perception and persuasion are pulled this way and that by a media that started out reporting on the trial, quickly went to group condemnation of a lone nurse - suspended from her position due to complaints by colleagues such as Dr Ravi Jayaram - and under intolerable stress. This stress, very likely full blown PTSD by now, was evidenced in the notes she wrote to herself about self-hatred, self-doubt and how she was being accused of murdering babies. (Unpublished parts of these notes contained lines such as ‘I didn’t do this’, and similar.)
Has Lucy taken a polygraph test, or been asked if she wants to? Polygraph results are no longer permitted in Crown Court trials, but they are used by probation for ‘guidelines’ for some people on licence, so are still clearly trusted to some extent. They don’t however detect ‘lies’; they detect emotional responses to questions, which is part of the reason they’re not used in evidence as any kind of concrete proof of anything.
If Lucy were a psycho/sociopath, it might be imagined that she would have little emotional response to such a question as ‘Have you ever deliberately caused the death of an infant?’, but judging by her recent statement in Court ‘I’m innocent of this’, that seems unlikely. Individuals can pay for tests themselves - her family or supporters might like to look into organising one. If probation can use polygraph results as an informative source of material for some on licence, there is surely no reason that they cannot also be used as a source of ‘good character’ evidence.
Narcissism is a big conversation in culture these days, and the staggering hubris shown by television-friendly doctor Jayaram, and that of ‘neonatal expert’ Dewi Evans - whose credentials have been questioned by every sceptical commentator involved - are telling of a certain brand of professionalism. This professionalism presents as a ‘me first’ kind of subjective morality, where competition and judgment are everything, and he or she who gets their complaint in first wins.
From all accounts Lucy genuinely doesn’t seem like this type; there is nothing indicating this in her personality profile (the deputy chief investigator going so far as to rather insultingly describe her as a ’beige sort of person’) and the reason more babies died under her care is because she was the most in demand, capable and trusted nurse in natality. The ‘on-shift’ prosecution evidence has long been disavowed as statistical nonsense, pretty much guaranteed to bamboozle an already confused jury.
At the doctors, do you want to know or not know if there is bad news? These are the kinds of questions these professionals navigate every day, and a thousand human-based considerations in between. That’s how the wheat from the chaff is sorted, Lucy seems to have been very much wheat, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that this may have been her downfall. She was well known for her dedication, which might lead to complaints about processes or others, and to some ‘hammer’ professionals, every colleague perceived as difficult is a nail.
While nowadays employers go to Google to check for potential future PR embarrassment (even though this is prejudicial and considered extremely unprofessional), positivity in prison can be maintained by taking in whatever culture is permitted, patience and strategizing for the future; discipline and routine; adopting art as highest value. If and when Lucy is finally exonerated - and it’s looking increasingly likely she will be - there will always be a section of ‘bad faith’ commentators in British society, including those at the NHS, that this process will expose.
Online doesn’t (yet) forget, she will have forever been tarred with someone else’s brush, and this is why nurses are either leaving the service or too afraid to join in the first place. Lucy Letby has been convicted of the most appalling crimes known to society, and to any sane observer it seems that at the very least her convictions are not beyond reasonable doubt. This should always be first and foremost in any prosecutor’s mind, with ‘reputational damage’ nowhere near it. It’s why the British justice system was once the envy of the world.
Following on from the major expose in The New Yorker, every major publisher gradually published their own doubt-pieces, even finally the behemoth BBC. There is a tidal wave of awareness that big institutions do not have the concerns of the individual as the priority value as might be hoped - but the tanker of public opinion seems to be at last turning in Lucy Letby’s favour, and fast.
By Sean Bw Parker
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