A quick question: Presumably, expert witnesses for the prosecution provide written reports to the CPS. Presumably the defence has access to them, too. Presumably these are also made available to the jurors. Are they listed anywhere? Can one request a copy? How can we have "open justice" if scientific documents written by scientists and used in the trial are only available to trial lawyers and to lay jurors (on their iPads?).
"During her subsequent retrial — which led to a further conviction for attempted murder — both the prosecution and the defence accepted that this had been a genuine mistake. Nobody seriously suggests it provides grounds for a new appeal."
It should do, but from the narrow legal point of view it doesn't. The problem here in my opinion is that the the UK legal system has now got itself stuck in a catch 22 situation. The root cause is that “trias politica” is not well implemented in the UK. The judiciary are independent, yes, excellent, but the judiciary also create law on the fly, since judges’ past rulings become part of case law. Now an appeal court judge has recently ruled that pre-existing science cannot be used to reopen a closed case since the defence had access to it and chose not to use it. The appeal court judge chose to completely ignore the actually presented scientific evidence which basically destroyed half of the case again Lucy Letby. (And the rest is equally non-existent, in a well-informed scientist's mind). The CCRC can ask closed cases to be reopened but they only do that if there is new evidence which can be argued to completely change the whole picture presented originally in court, and they will only do that if they believe the court of appeal will accept their submission to reopen the case. The court of appeal includes the same judges who recently have made those rulings in the Lucy Letby case, seemingly expressly to lock it down tight, for ever. Adding some nails to Lucy's coffin.
Now, the CCRC was originally set up - for political reasons - and it was given powers which previously had been the prerogative of the Home Secretary. So it is clear that the only route towards a retrial is that the Home Secretary reclaims the powers which they had delegated to the CCRC. And the only body which can order the Home Secretary to take that step is parliament. Parliament is the sovereign (ie supreme) power in England.
You see how dangerous it is to give the judiciary *too much* power. This is like Iran, where the ayatollahs (ie, “the established church”) have too much power. Trias politica, yes. Separation of the powers. But parliament is sovereign. If the laws are evidently wrong they have to be changed.
The argument that reversing convictions will destroy people's trust in the rule of law is a two-edged sword. Hold off reversing an unjust conviction too long and with stupid legalistic excuses will destroy people's trust yet more. Trust has to be earned. Trust in the criminal justice system is earned by its making wise decisions, recognising errors, and learning from its errors. (As the Dutch system did in the case of Lucia de Berk).
As you say, it was the home secretary who used to refer suspected miscarriages of justice to the Court of Appeal. But restoring the position that existed before the CCRC was set up would still leave the decision in the hands of the judges.
Or are you saying that the home secretary should have the power to quash convictions — perhaps on a vote of parliament?
With all the controversy hovering around this and other cases mentioned by Professor Gill, we must be thankful that the death penalty no longer applies!
That's what the Conservative home secretary Michael Howard — no shrinking violet, as you'll remember — said after the Birmingham Six were finally cleared in 1991.
Having listened to the podcast it appears the hosts may not appreciate the arguments that have been made about the statistical issue, as they do not discuss it beyond a rather brief mention of the timetable. It is not to do with Letby's working timetable being determinative or not, but about the anterior supposition that the cluster of neonatal deaths could not have been random.
The statistical likelihood of such a cluster being random is (apparently) much higher than one may assume. Professor Quigley of UCL has recently published an interesting article on this issue which, without taking a view on Letby's guilt or innocence, suggests a parallel between Letby and the Sally Clark case.
If it a cluster of neonatal deaths could not have been random, the task is to look for a singular cause, whether a murderer, negligence, or something in the environment. Letby's timetable seemed to point toward her. Once there is an accused, everything thereafter is about whether a fair trial was conducted under English law to convince a jury of the circumstantial case that would show she was committing murder. It was. But what if the anterior assumption is based on poor statistical reasoning?
The podcast correctly focuses much discussion on the defence decision not to put forward expert evidence on alternative causes - just a plumber. We do not know the reasons for this, and I do not mean to suggest for a moment that they were negligent in her defence. For one thing, I can imagine why arguing the deaths were simply random would not go down well with a jury. For another, unlike in the Sally Clark case, the prosecution did not rely on statistical claims to bolster the circumstantial evidence.
Nevertheless, statistical assumptions were at work when initial suspicion fell on Letby, and it does not seem that the trial judge or the CoA were presented with the argument that they may have been at fault. This seems to be what is driving much of the attention.
I would like to add that I am not sure that even had this been raised it would have made a difference. The statistical point could work the other way as it implies that NHS critical care services will presumably all have periods where a cluster of deaths occurs due to bad luck or unnoticed systemic failures, but as such situations do not all lead to witch-hunts, we may be confident that those close to Letby had other reasons to suspect her (and there was of course witness evidence given to this effect). The human element of the trial means that those of us not present can never know how the jury made its decision.
Nevertheless, the case and the podcast raise the uncomfortable fact that our legal system requires lay juries to assess scientific expert evidence on the basis of principles of adversarial argument.
Further work by statistician Scott McClachlan using NHS data shows that the number of deaths in the period of interest at the Countess of Chester NICU was much what should have been expected given the acuity of the cases then on the ward. Moreover, we know why the acuity increased (NHS changes in North Wales sending more difficult cases in the direction of Liverpool) and we know why it decreased again (unit demoted to Level 1, where it remains to this day). Thus: there was a spike, and it is completely explainable due to concurrent changes in NHS and hospital policy. The consultant paediatricians who got the police involved should not have been surprised at all by the rise in number of bad events. They should not have been surprised that Lucy was so often present either, given the number of hours she worked and her qualifications, enabling her to take nursing responsibility for the most severely ill babies. See also another statistician's webpage, triedbystats.com; read the RCPCH report with its damning criticism of the management and medical care given by the unit and specifically of the poor supervision by the most qualified medical staff.
An interesting post. I'd add that Jon Robins, writing for the New Law Journal - one of Lexis Nexis's flagship titles - has picked up on similar themes to Private Eye, and others whose comments are mentioned below. Of course, the Court of Appeal had the submissions of learned counsel, and was, by any standard, a formidable tribunal. But even the most eminent judge - and commentator - can stray into error.
So I'm one of your armchair conspiracy theorists, apparently. I am a professor of mathematical statistics, a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, a former president of the Dutch Statistical Society. I worked hard in support of campaigns to obtain a retrial of Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk, British nurse Ben Geen, Italian nurse Daniela Poggiali. All four cases are grotesquely similar. Lucia and Daniela now walk free and the case of Lucia de Berk is now considered one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Dutch legal history. I'm pretty convinced that Ben Geen and Lucy Letby will follow them, though both are going to take a long time. Regarding Lucy Letby, the reason I'm convinced is thanks to knowing a lot of the facts of the case of which you are blissfully ignorant. I'm also well able to judge the scientific evidence as far as it is available, thanks to my work for 50 years in medical statistics; the last 20 also in forensic science (during which time I have advised police investigators and prosecution lawyers as often as defence lawyers). I'm also well able to judge the scientific claims of the prosecution experts in as far as they are public. Their testimony contradicts established science and violates the standard rules for giving expert evidence in criminal courts in England and Wales. Rules which many barristers and judges seem not to know.
I would not for a moment accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist. Please let me know when you publish your assessment of the Letby case and I shall certainly report your findings.
Thank you. I have written extensively on the case at my blog https://www.gill1109.com, and just yesterday posted a one and a half hour YouTube talk https://youtu.be/-ymhptTDJdQ "Statistical issues in cases of investigation of possible medical misconduct - A tale of two Lucy's". This is an expanded version of a half-hour contributed talk, to statisticians and probabilists, at the 11th Bernoulli Society - IMS World Congress on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, at Bochum, Germany, on Wednesday 14 August, 2024, in a contributed paper session on causality. More writings will no doubt follow. Since the trial ended we have learnt a great deal from publicity-seeking prosecution witnesses about the police investigation. A textbook example of the Texas sharpshooter paradox.
Having listened to the podcast I am even more disturbed. The contributors mention of the Post Office scandal cannot provide the comfort suggested it does - not one of those convictions were successfully overturned on appeal to Crim CoA until the chair of the Tech Court (Fraser J) comprehensively dismantled the Post Office *expert evidence* in a civil case - because he was qualified to do so. I also find the absence of any discussion at all of the reversal in the *burden of proof* in the Crim CoA wildly frustrating. In a case mostly involving expert/circumstantial evidence the lack of any real *expertise* of Crim CoA judges compounds the same lack in both prosecution & defence legal teams.
Neither of the contributors were present in court for the trials, read the transcripts of the trials, or read the reports of the experts on both sides & they are simply not in any position to make any judgment on the handling of the prosecution/defence cases here. Reading 58 pages from a Holroyd (I don’t have a high opinion of him as a lawyer) led CoA (+20hrs of a blog) cannot, surely, reassure them. They would be better employed asking themselves the question *how can we be sure the convictions here are really safe* - starting with a presumption that the prosecution &/or defence lawyers didn’t simply *blunder* is hopeless - as we have seen so often but is almost never acknowledged.
I agree that we should never say never should further evidence emerge. Like most of our fellow citizens what we lawyers- and judges- need is a regular “injection” of humility and, as prime examples, I can recall a number of cases where seasoned and learned Counsel- and the solicitors instructing them- had had some scientific/arithmetical calculations round their necks to the extent of a vital missing nought or two. It had taken in some cases my much more numerate Legal Executive (arguably also in any event a better lawyer than me) to put us ALL right. The judges in those cases would most likely have gone along with the common -and wrong- accord of all other lawyers in the case.
As to Matthew Scott’s reminder about the startling wrongheadedness of Denning with the civil case brought by the Birmingham 6, where to start? Did he really say that it was “Bridge,J” who found them all guilty? What of the jury- just bit players?
I have been persuaded- thus far- as to Lucy Letby’s guilt having read many features about the case and I respect the considered view of the journalist who had devoted her time more or less throughout the case to observing those proceedings. We must all, surely, be open to persuasion should something truly new and damaging to the prosecution’s case emerge over all or whichever of the convictions be brought to bear? It was Lord Atkin who declared:” Finality is a great thing, but justice is the greater.”
But that is and must always remain a far cry from the conspiracists who point to an unlikely looking candidate for conviction with an unlikely set of antecedents leading them to assert her innocence and then there is the clutching at straws and the reverse of the police service’s and the CPS’s “case theory” leading any other potential avenue to be discounted or undervalued apart from those claimed to “prove” innocence. To what extent, I ask myself, is the drive towards a “conspiracy” to do with Lucy Letby seeming to be “one of us”?
No need to feel reluctant and I am grateful to you for challenging me. This is a response to the very fair points you make on your own Substack.
You are certainly not a conspiracy theorist and neither is Matthew Scott. But they do exist.
As you correctly say, none of us knows whether Letby was wrongly convicted. All we have to go on is the evidence.
I well remember the IRA bombings in England during the 1970s. I even had a visit from the police who were checking up on people, like me, who had moved house after one of the less well-known attacks.
And I helped cover the growing judicial acceptance towards the end of the 1980s that there had been some appalling miscarriages of justice. I was in the Court of Appeal (sitting at the Old Bailey) when the Birmingham Six were cleared in 1991 (see my book The Search for Justice, 1994).
Last month, in an interview with Chris Mullin for a forthcoming Archive on 4 documentary to mark the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings, I read out Denning’s “appalling vista” quote to show that it was not only Denning who misjudged the reality but also Lord Lane CJ, among others.
The circumstances of these cases were very different. But of course the courts are not infallible, as Andrew Malkinson’s case demonstrates.
Fortunately, we have the Thirlwall inquiry gearing up for opening statements next month. Thirlwall LJ will not look directly at the safety of Letby’s convictions. But if the inquiry uncovers any other explanations for the murders and attempted murders of which Letby has been convicted, I am sure these will be considered by the Criminal Cases Review Commission and, if the commission thinks appropriate, by the Court of Appeal.
So your scepticism may well turn out to be justified. We shall see.
If the convictions are not actually safe then - as techies say - GIGO.
A report properly fulfilling the terms of reference cannot, it seems to me, question Letby guilt - that is, if the Inquiry considers any alternative explanations as being outside of its remit.
You’re right to say that that the Thirlwall inquiry is predicated on Letby’s convictions being safe; as I said, it will not look directly at this issue.
But the inquiry will consider the conduct of those working at the hospital since 2012. If some other explanation emerges for what appear to have been unexpected deaths, I’m sure the Criminal Cases Review Commission will be interested.
A quick question: Presumably, expert witnesses for the prosecution provide written reports to the CPS. Presumably the defence has access to them, too. Presumably these are also made available to the jurors. Are they listed anywhere? Can one request a copy? How can we have "open justice" if scientific documents written by scientists and used in the trial are only available to trial lawyers and to lay jurors (on their iPads?).
"During her subsequent retrial — which led to a further conviction for attempted murder — both the prosecution and the defence accepted that this had been a genuine mistake. Nobody seriously suggests it provides grounds for a new appeal."
It should do, but from the narrow legal point of view it doesn't. The problem here in my opinion is that the the UK legal system has now got itself stuck in a catch 22 situation. The root cause is that “trias politica” is not well implemented in the UK. The judiciary are independent, yes, excellent, but the judiciary also create law on the fly, since judges’ past rulings become part of case law. Now an appeal court judge has recently ruled that pre-existing science cannot be used to reopen a closed case since the defence had access to it and chose not to use it. The appeal court judge chose to completely ignore the actually presented scientific evidence which basically destroyed half of the case again Lucy Letby. (And the rest is equally non-existent, in a well-informed scientist's mind). The CCRC can ask closed cases to be reopened but they only do that if there is new evidence which can be argued to completely change the whole picture presented originally in court, and they will only do that if they believe the court of appeal will accept their submission to reopen the case. The court of appeal includes the same judges who recently have made those rulings in the Lucy Letby case, seemingly expressly to lock it down tight, for ever. Adding some nails to Lucy's coffin.
Now, the CCRC was originally set up - for political reasons - and it was given powers which previously had been the prerogative of the Home Secretary. So it is clear that the only route towards a retrial is that the Home Secretary reclaims the powers which they had delegated to the CCRC. And the only body which can order the Home Secretary to take that step is parliament. Parliament is the sovereign (ie supreme) power in England.
You see how dangerous it is to give the judiciary *too much* power. This is like Iran, where the ayatollahs (ie, “the established church”) have too much power. Trias politica, yes. Separation of the powers. But parliament is sovereign. If the laws are evidently wrong they have to be changed.
The argument that reversing convictions will destroy people's trust in the rule of law is a two-edged sword. Hold off reversing an unjust conviction too long and with stupid legalistic excuses will destroy people's trust yet more. Trust has to be earned. Trust in the criminal justice system is earned by its making wise decisions, recognising errors, and learning from its errors. (As the Dutch system did in the case of Lucia de Berk).
As you say, it was the home secretary who used to refer suspected miscarriages of justice to the Court of Appeal. But restoring the position that existed before the CCRC was set up would still leave the decision in the hands of the judges.
Or are you saying that the home secretary should have the power to quash convictions — perhaps on a vote of parliament?
With all the controversy hovering around this and other cases mentioned by Professor Gill, we must be thankful that the death penalty no longer applies!
That's what the Conservative home secretary Michael Howard — no shrinking violet, as you'll remember — said after the Birmingham Six were finally cleared in 1991.
Having listened to the podcast it appears the hosts may not appreciate the arguments that have been made about the statistical issue, as they do not discuss it beyond a rather brief mention of the timetable. It is not to do with Letby's working timetable being determinative or not, but about the anterior supposition that the cluster of neonatal deaths could not have been random.
The statistical likelihood of such a cluster being random is (apparently) much higher than one may assume. Professor Quigley of UCL has recently published an interesting article on this issue which, without taking a view on Letby's guilt or innocence, suggests a parallel between Letby and the Sally Clark case.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00258024241242549
If it a cluster of neonatal deaths could not have been random, the task is to look for a singular cause, whether a murderer, negligence, or something in the environment. Letby's timetable seemed to point toward her. Once there is an accused, everything thereafter is about whether a fair trial was conducted under English law to convince a jury of the circumstantial case that would show she was committing murder. It was. But what if the anterior assumption is based on poor statistical reasoning?
The podcast correctly focuses much discussion on the defence decision not to put forward expert evidence on alternative causes - just a plumber. We do not know the reasons for this, and I do not mean to suggest for a moment that they were negligent in her defence. For one thing, I can imagine why arguing the deaths were simply random would not go down well with a jury. For another, unlike in the Sally Clark case, the prosecution did not rely on statistical claims to bolster the circumstantial evidence.
Nevertheless, statistical assumptions were at work when initial suspicion fell on Letby, and it does not seem that the trial judge or the CoA were presented with the argument that they may have been at fault. This seems to be what is driving much of the attention.
I would like to add that I am not sure that even had this been raised it would have made a difference. The statistical point could work the other way as it implies that NHS critical care services will presumably all have periods where a cluster of deaths occurs due to bad luck or unnoticed systemic failures, but as such situations do not all lead to witch-hunts, we may be confident that those close to Letby had other reasons to suspect her (and there was of course witness evidence given to this effect). The human element of the trial means that those of us not present can never know how the jury made its decision.
Nevertheless, the case and the podcast raise the uncomfortable fact that our legal system requires lay juries to assess scientific expert evidence on the basis of principles of adversarial argument.
Further work by statistician Scott McClachlan using NHS data shows that the number of deaths in the period of interest at the Countess of Chester NICU was much what should have been expected given the acuity of the cases then on the ward. Moreover, we know why the acuity increased (NHS changes in North Wales sending more difficult cases in the direction of Liverpool) and we know why it decreased again (unit demoted to Level 1, where it remains to this day). Thus: there was a spike, and it is completely explainable due to concurrent changes in NHS and hospital policy. The consultant paediatricians who got the police involved should not have been surprised at all by the rise in number of bad events. They should not have been surprised that Lucy was so often present either, given the number of hours she worked and her qualifications, enabling her to take nursing responsibility for the most severely ill babies. See also another statistician's webpage, triedbystats.com; read the RCPCH report with its damning criticism of the management and medical care given by the unit and specifically of the poor supervision by the most qualified medical staff.
Many good points, well made, Bernard.
Thank you for this very fair and balanced comment.
An interesting post. I'd add that Jon Robins, writing for the New Law Journal - one of Lexis Nexis's flagship titles - has picked up on similar themes to Private Eye, and others whose comments are mentioned below. Of course, the Court of Appeal had the submissions of learned counsel, and was, by any standard, a formidable tribunal. But even the most eminent judge - and commentator - can stray into error.
So I'm one of your armchair conspiracy theorists, apparently. I am a professor of mathematical statistics, a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, a former president of the Dutch Statistical Society. I worked hard in support of campaigns to obtain a retrial of Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk, British nurse Ben Geen, Italian nurse Daniela Poggiali. All four cases are grotesquely similar. Lucia and Daniela now walk free and the case of Lucia de Berk is now considered one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Dutch legal history. I'm pretty convinced that Ben Geen and Lucy Letby will follow them, though both are going to take a long time. Regarding Lucy Letby, the reason I'm convinced is thanks to knowing a lot of the facts of the case of which you are blissfully ignorant. I'm also well able to judge the scientific evidence as far as it is available, thanks to my work for 50 years in medical statistics; the last 20 also in forensic science (during which time I have advised police investigators and prosecution lawyers as often as defence lawyers). I'm also well able to judge the scientific claims of the prosecution experts in as far as they are public. Their testimony contradicts established science and violates the standard rules for giving expert evidence in criminal courts in England and Wales. Rules which many barristers and judges seem not to know.
I would not for a moment accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist. Please let me know when you publish your assessment of the Letby case and I shall certainly report your findings.
Thank you. I have written extensively on the case at my blog https://www.gill1109.com, and just yesterday posted a one and a half hour YouTube talk https://youtu.be/-ymhptTDJdQ "Statistical issues in cases of investigation of possible medical misconduct - A tale of two Lucy's". This is an expanded version of a half-hour contributed talk, to statisticians and probabilists, at the 11th Bernoulli Society - IMS World Congress on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, at Bochum, Germany, on Wednesday 14 August, 2024, in a contributed paper session on causality. More writings will no doubt follow. Since the trial ended we have learnt a great deal from publicity-seeking prosecution witnesses about the police investigation. A textbook example of the Texas sharpshooter paradox.
Many thanks for providing those links..
Having listened to the podcast I am even more disturbed. The contributors mention of the Post Office scandal cannot provide the comfort suggested it does - not one of those convictions were successfully overturned on appeal to Crim CoA until the chair of the Tech Court (Fraser J) comprehensively dismantled the Post Office *expert evidence* in a civil case - because he was qualified to do so. I also find the absence of any discussion at all of the reversal in the *burden of proof* in the Crim CoA wildly frustrating. In a case mostly involving expert/circumstantial evidence the lack of any real *expertise* of Crim CoA judges compounds the same lack in both prosecution & defence legal teams.
Neither of the contributors were present in court for the trials, read the transcripts of the trials, or read the reports of the experts on both sides & they are simply not in any position to make any judgment on the handling of the prosecution/defence cases here. Reading 58 pages from a Holroyd (I don’t have a high opinion of him as a lawyer) led CoA (+20hrs of a blog) cannot, surely, reassure them. They would be better employed asking themselves the question *how can we be sure the convictions here are really safe* - starting with a presumption that the prosecution &/or defence lawyers didn’t simply *blunder* is hopeless - as we have seen so often but is almost never acknowledged.
I agree that we should never say never should further evidence emerge. Like most of our fellow citizens what we lawyers- and judges- need is a regular “injection” of humility and, as prime examples, I can recall a number of cases where seasoned and learned Counsel- and the solicitors instructing them- had had some scientific/arithmetical calculations round their necks to the extent of a vital missing nought or two. It had taken in some cases my much more numerate Legal Executive (arguably also in any event a better lawyer than me) to put us ALL right. The judges in those cases would most likely have gone along with the common -and wrong- accord of all other lawyers in the case.
As to Matthew Scott’s reminder about the startling wrongheadedness of Denning with the civil case brought by the Birmingham 6, where to start? Did he really say that it was “Bridge,J” who found them all guilty? What of the jury- just bit players?
I have been persuaded- thus far- as to Lucy Letby’s guilt having read many features about the case and I respect the considered view of the journalist who had devoted her time more or less throughout the case to observing those proceedings. We must all, surely, be open to persuasion should something truly new and damaging to the prosecution’s case emerge over all or whichever of the convictions be brought to bear? It was Lord Atkin who declared:” Finality is a great thing, but justice is the greater.”
But that is and must always remain a far cry from the conspiracists who point to an unlikely looking candidate for conviction with an unlikely set of antecedents leading them to assert her innocence and then there is the clutching at straws and the reverse of the police service’s and the CPS’s “case theory” leading any other potential avenue to be discounted or undervalued apart from those claimed to “prove” innocence. To what extent, I ask myself, is the drive towards a “conspiracy” to do with Lucy Letby seeming to be “one of us”?
It is very hard to have a different view from you Joshua, and I hope you forgive me - but I have set out a different view at https://emptycity.substack.com/p/lucy-letby-and-miscarriages-of-justice
With reluctance, and respect.
David,
No need to feel reluctant and I am grateful to you for challenging me. This is a response to the very fair points you make on your own Substack.
You are certainly not a conspiracy theorist and neither is Matthew Scott. But they do exist.
As you correctly say, none of us knows whether Letby was wrongly convicted. All we have to go on is the evidence.
I well remember the IRA bombings in England during the 1970s. I even had a visit from the police who were checking up on people, like me, who had moved house after one of the less well-known attacks.
And I helped cover the growing judicial acceptance towards the end of the 1980s that there had been some appalling miscarriages of justice. I was in the Court of Appeal (sitting at the Old Bailey) when the Birmingham Six were cleared in 1991 (see my book The Search for Justice, 1994).
Last month, in an interview with Chris Mullin for a forthcoming Archive on 4 documentary to mark the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings, I read out Denning’s “appalling vista” quote to show that it was not only Denning who misjudged the reality but also Lord Lane CJ, among others.
The circumstances of these cases were very different. But of course the courts are not infallible, as Andrew Malkinson’s case demonstrates.
Fortunately, we have the Thirlwall inquiry gearing up for opening statements next month. Thirlwall LJ will not look directly at the safety of Letby’s convictions. But if the inquiry uncovers any other explanations for the murders and attempted murders of which Letby has been convicted, I am sure these will be considered by the Criminal Cases Review Commission and, if the commission thinks appropriate, by the Court of Appeal.
So your scepticism may well turn out to be justified. We shall see.
Joshua
Thank you Joshua for this considered and informative response. This is my further response at my Substack, which I paste below.
The serious and obvious worry about the Thirlwall Inquiry is that it is expressly predicated on the Letby convictions being safe, see term of reference B at: https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Terms-of-Reference-Thirlwall-Inquiry.pdf
If the convictions are not actually safe then - as techies say - GIGO.
A report properly fulfilling the terms of reference cannot, it seems to me, question Letby guilt - that is, if the Inquiry considers any alternative explanations as being outside of its remit.
You’re right to say that that the Thirlwall inquiry is predicated on Letby’s convictions being safe; as I said, it will not look directly at this issue.
But the inquiry will consider the conduct of those working at the hospital since 2012. If some other explanation emerges for what appear to have been unexpected deaths, I’m sure the Criminal Cases Review Commission will be interested.