The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment
Crime, criminal justice, and our systems of compliance jollycontrarian.substack.com
Episodes
Lucy Letby: you had to be there
The investigation into the actions of Lucy Letby, the trial process and medical experts continues to face scrutiny and criticism, much of it ill-informed and based on a very partial knowledge of the facts and totality of evidence presented …
Waiver of privilege
This is a follow on piece from Lucy Letby: waiver of privilege? It is mainly about waiver in a criminal context. The rules around waiver are more developed in the civil cases, since waiving privilege there is not quite as catastrophic to li…
Lucy Letby — the judge’s direction
In his summing up, Mr Justice Goss instructed the jury that they did not need to be sure precisely how Ms. Letby murdered the infants, as long as they were sure she did:“If you are sure that someone on the unit was deliberately harming a ba…
Lucy Letby: confirmation bias
Take the following hypothetical scene, which describes Lucy Letby’s experience at the Countess of Chester Hospital:Internal investigationA hospital experiences a cluster of deaths and collapses materially in excess of its usual rates for su…
Lucy Letby and behavioural profiling
A leopard goes to the doctor.“Doc,” he says, “You gotta help me. Whenever I look at my wife, I see spots.”The doctor looks at him for a minute and says, “Well, what do you expect? You’re a leopard.”“I know that, Doc. But I’m married to a ze…
Lucy Letby: The ludic fallacy
In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents the “ludic fallacy”: the mistake of applying unvarnished theoretical probabilities to real-world scenarios.Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.Here is h…
Lucy Letby: how the charges were selected
Prelude: A daycare centre in New ZealandPeter Ellis was a childcare worker in Christchurch, New Zealand. A creative, flamboyant and somewhat uninhibited character, Ellis loved his job, put a lot of energy into programme planning, and would …
Lucy Letby: strikingly similar?
Show me a man who believes in conspiracy theories and I’ll show you someone who has never organised a surprise party.—Lee Harvey Oswald.The constant presenceOrdinarily, when a defendant appears on 22 counts of things like murder, there is a…
Lucy Letby: the insulin smoking gun
The test results showing that insulin had been given to them was the only piece of concrete evidence of criminality throughout the whole of the prosecution’s case. It was the closest thing they had to a smoking gun and became the keystone f…
Lucy Letby: The Handover Notes
“Lucy Letby Conspiracy Theorists are Wrong”, Liz Hull, Daily Mail, July 5, 2024.R v Letby, Court of Appeal Judgment, 2 July 2024.Rachel Aviv’s, New Yorker investigation of 13 May 2024.Lucy Letby: initials of babies noted in diary on dates o…
Lucy Letby
Serial murderers of any kind are vanishingly rare in Britain. Wikipedia lists fifty-five, since 1600. But so are miscarriages of justice. Wikipedia lists fifty-four, since 1255.Both narratives are highly improbable. Of all the explanations …
Prosecutor’s tunnel vision
The collection of biases and cognitive gin-traps that can lead prosecutors — those who “prosecute” a particular theory of the world — to stick with it, however starkly it may vary from available evidence and common sense.So named because it…