Unfortunately I think he and Katie might be missing the point of my and Snags’ comments that they read.
Because the emails they shared don’t really contradict our comments, even though J+K present them as if they do. My objection wasn’t that workers in classified environments should be expected to never discuss or post *anything* off topic, that would clearly be unreasonable for humans shut in a closed area. Certainly I’ve had more than a few non-work talks with my work buddies behind a secure facility door. That’s fine!
Rather, my objection is to the notion that discussions about sexual penetration, butthole zapping, and tucking your dick to pee would be considered appropriate for work by any reasonable employee. Jesse can claim it isn’t “explicit”, but that requires a weird definition of “explicit”!
One of the emails talks about some previous attempts to crack down on extraneous discussion. Again, J+K seem to interpret this as a sign that the transition talk is being unfairly singled out. I think it means the opposite - if the higher ups were going after even tame off topic posting, how could they reasonably conclude that much more clearly “not safe for work” content would be tolerated?
This is “laughably obvious example in a sexual harassment training” level stuff here people.
Yeah, if any guy started talking about his penis in work slack, there’s a very good chance he’d get reported, and would either be penalized in some way or outright fired. You can get reported for saying just about anything in the office, including the private sector. Half of the workplace stories on this podcast have been more tame than what was going on here.
Having listened to episode 250 just before listening to this one, I don't think they misunderstood what you said, but I respectfully suggest that you might be misunderstanding the crux of their concern, at least in part. The problem that K+J are highlighting has more to do with the curious importance assigned** to these conversations by Rufo, not by the government. Moreover, this is about *how* these conversations have been singled out and to what end.
Based on Katie's description of Rufo's reporting (and Jesse's dramatic readings), his goal here seems to have been the hyper-sexualization of the content of these conversations. Yeah, it's all super gross and inappropriate, no doubt, but it's not sexual in a prurient way, and it certainly isn't geared toward seeking out sexual acts, either at work or elsewhere. Nevertheless, that is the picture that Rufo wanted to paint, while the prejudicial pink-slipping of the perforated-pelvic-mounded perps on these scandalous grounds was the outcome he sought.
This is borderline sexual harassment training fodder at best. Not all references to procedures being done to naughty parts are themselves naughty. My sense is that what is bothering you and others here is the TRANS-sexual content of these conversation. Hey, it bothers me too. Can't help it! I grew up on "Dude Looks Like a Lady" and "The Crying Game"; like Popeye, I y'am what I y'am. But that doesn't mean my visceral reactions are correct. In fact, I know they're not. I wouldn't be as bothered if I overheard a coupla gals going on about how these new lululemon seams are over-accentuating their camel toe or how the solar-powered Evie pumps feel a bit "too good" sometimes.
But whether it's the unsung conveniences of vaginoplasty, randy breast pumps, or vasectomy commiseration, it all needs to be treated equally. And that goes both ways**; the government can't turn a blind eye to conversations about sex-change procedures while sidelining discussions about penis pump penny stocks or the trials and tribulations of the poofy-pudded yoga pants contingent.
I agree that Rufo is the crux of their concern, but that’s part of what is bothering me and part of why I believe they are over-reading the emails as a refutation of my comment. The issue is that they actually haven’t established that these conversations had “curious importance assigned”, nor have they established that these conversations were “singled out” (well, they were singled out in the sense that they were individually highlighted. Whether they were “singled out” in the sense of being subjected to unfair treatment has not been established).
But J+K very much want it to be true that these conversations were unfairly handled, because it fits their prior that Rufo is a bad actor. So they are letting confirmation bias affect how they read evidence that provides an “out” for the trans talk (maybe lots of inappropriate conversations were going on! Yeah here’s a guy that says unspecified off topic conversations were a problem all the time, that must mean everyone was talking about their dicks!). While applying a much higher level of scrutiny to the Rufo-friendly version of events. (Ooooh his source claimed they said “gangbangs” but didn’t provide a screenshot! What absurd hearsay that no real journalist would *ever* publish (lol)).
Honestly this seems similar to the recent episode with Maurer, where they thought they had a perfect means to mock Musk, but everyone instead was like “wait they groomed and raped how many girls now?!”. This time they thought they had a great reason to rag on Rufo, but the reaction was “wait the spooks were talking about what on work chat?!”. The common thread is, in a rush to go after a favorite lolcow, they badly misjudged how glibly they could get away with covering an underlying issue they know little about, and are now doing a bit of damage control.
Your comment also reflects another problem, the insistence on downplaying the chats with euphemism rather than engaging with the actual language. Even if some references to “procedures” on “naughty parts” might be allowed to slide (and I still believe you are overestimating the degree to which they would be) we are talking about: discussing sexual pleasure from penetration, “butthole zapping”, and a feeling of “euphoria” from no longer having to tuck their dick while peeing. You can’t just justify any conversation by claiming it’s downstream of a medical procedure, therefore fair game.
I would be shocked at a work sanctioned group chat with any intimate discussion of any individual’s medical procedures, because it’s an HR nightmare - they have legal obligations regarding personal information and are on a hair trigger for anything that might threaten that.
I would appreciate if you not project on me your assumptions about my attitude re: trans people. I have no particular feelings about them working at NSA, I’m only bothered in this case by the specific individuals involved seeming to have a serious lack of appropriate boundaries regarding safe-for-work conversations. No, I would not be okay with cis-Alice posting about how great her last piss felt now that she finally got that UTI handled, nor would I be okay with straight-Bob saying that he enjoys getting pegged by his wife again now that his doc zapped the inflamed hemorrhoids off his butt hole.
IF we can establish that similarly work inappropriate conversations were allowed unchecked so long as they weren’t by trans employees, THEN we can rag on Rufo for his inconsistency. Until then all we can say is, yes these were inappropriate, yes Rufo possibly overstate what the quotes meant, and we can argue about whether firing was overkill or not I guess.
You're doubling down in your pursuit of a different debate. This IS about Rufo and it IS NOT about how the government handled these chats. They were very clear that both they and Rufo lacked the awareness necessary to comment on how this was handled _broadly_ or how these conversations stacked up to other conversations had by non-trans employees in the same or similar spaces. This was about how Rufo's manipulation of the content of these conversations was used as a basis for firing these people. That's it.
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But J+K very much want it to be true that these conversations were unfairly handled, because it fits their prior that Rufo is a bad actor.
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Katie admits to that though, so.... this isn't a revelation. And she got push back on it from Jesse, some of which *I* thought was initially unreasonable (was it? maybe a little, but not as much as I initially thought). This was a very nuanced discussion and it did not attempt to obscure Katie's underlying basis. Indeed, she went pretty deep into the origin of her bias in the lead up to her thesis.
The case that Katie very effectively makes is that Rufo's report fits his stated goal -- STATED... dude copped to this a while back -- of altering the narrative on what he regards as progressive cultural excess, be it DEI or trans ideology, neither of which is something that I champion and certainly not something that K+J support.
Again and again, this seems to coming down to is what *you* want to be true. Or maybe a fairer way to say that is that you want to presume a different set of claims against which you can more effectively deploy your preferred arguments.
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This time they thought they had a great reason to rag on Rufo, but the reaction was “wait the spooks were talking about what on work chat?!”.
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No, that was *your* reaction. Is is not THE reaction any more than mine is.
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Your comment also reflects another problem, the insistence on downplaying the chats with euphemism rather than engaging with the actual language. [...] we are talking about: discussing sexual pleasure from penetration, “butthole zapping”, and a feeling of “euphoria” from no longer having to tuck their dick while peeing. You can’t just justify any conversation by claiming it’s downstream of a medical procedure, therefore fair game.
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The euphemism at work here is not "naughty parts", it's "actual language". You are proving Katie's point be repeatedly returning to this angle which is not a complaint about the broad inappropriateness of hyper-personal medical issues -- which includes sexual function, it. just. does. -- but rather a specific objection to one particular class of inappropriate medical issues. NOBODY here is arguing that these conversations were appropriate or that NSA leadership wasn't correct to cite these conversations as abuse of government property (they seemed a bit hesitant, in fact). So what other distinction is there to make? This is Rufo's game and you seem willing and ready to play it.
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I would appreciate if you not project on me your assumptions about my attitude re: trans people
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I'm sure Katie feels the same way. And yet here we are.
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No, I would not be okay with cis-Alice posting about how great her last piss felt now that she finally got that UTI handled, nor would I be okay with straight-Bob saying that he enjoys getting pegged by his wife again now that his doc zapped the inflamed hemorrhoids off his butt hole.
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Based on how you have explained yourself up to this point, I don't think you be okay with either. But I also don't think you'd be as worked up about it. Your willingness to revise and expand the most vulgar, groomer-adjacent language found in those chats proves the point *again* that Rufo's report, as read by Jesse, purposefully missates the nature of these discussions in such a way as to skew the discussion into the specific direction of icky trans sex stuff. You don't seem capable of seeing the difference, so this likely is falling on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, more people have lost their jobs and we're basing our understanding of why this is happening on an unverifiable stream of information from DOGE itself and Enquirer-level sensationalism masquerading as brave reporting.
We have a disagreement about what “the real story” is here. J+K thinks “Rufo is a bad guy” is the real story, I (and others) think it’s “NSA spooks were using government group chats to talk about their genital surgeries in graphic detail”. It’s fine to assign a different level of importance to these things, that doesn’t mean either weighting is objectively wrong. My objection is a concern that J+K are suffering from confirmation bias because of their history with Rufo.
“Actual language” is not euphemism. It’s in the screenshots. If there is any evidence that the screenshots are not genuine, I’ve not seen it and I’ve frankly not even seen any serious discussion that doesn’t presume they are genuine. It’s as “verified” as anything in this whole discussion.
“Revise and expand” “Groomer adjacent” language? I’m just going off the screenshotted quotes, with at most a bit of artistic license in a lame attempt at humor. But butthole zapping is in the quotes! Sexual pleasure from penetration is in the quotes! Euphoric peeing after surgery is in the quotes! I’m not misstating the nature of the quotes (even if Rufo is) because I don’t need to - they are prima facie extremely inappropriate.
Your interpretation requires giving these quotes an additional level of charity and presumption of innocence because they are downstream of gender affirming surgery and therefore, in your opinion, must include sexual discussion. You seem to be asserting any graphic talk about sexual function becomes mere discussion of “personal medical issues” as long as a medical treatment was involved. You’re also baking in a presumption that other hyper-personal medical talk was allowed, without evidence.
You say that “NOBODY here is arguing that these conversations are appropriate”. Well, you certainly seem to be making an effort to minimize their inappropriateness, continually downplaying them as simple clinical discussion. “But what other distinction is there to make?” There is no distinction required, because we have no evidence that any other inappropriate medical talk existed. I am perfectly comfortable saying that anyone else using a government group chat to discuss the details of surgery or medical treatment to their sex organs should be disciplined. Or really any “hyper-personal” medical discussion, but sexual medical discussion is a special case regardless of gender identify or sexual orientation and you can’t pretend it isn’t.
The trans medical discussions are being “singled out” because they are the only similarly inappropriate conversations we know about! The only conversations of any kind we have literal screenshots of. It’s *possible* that other inappropriate talk existed, and it’s *possible* that non-trans persons similarly discussing their genitals would not be similarly disciplined, but that is pure speculation.
As is your presumption of how I’d react to such speculative scenarios, so please stop insisting you know my feelings better than I do.
There’s a world of difference between benign off-topic small talk and graphic discussions about your nether regions.
I don’t have an issue with people commenting on the weather, recommending local pizza places, celebrating the results of a sports game, asking what’s going on with the construction across the street. Normal, inoffensive small talk.
I don’t want to think about anyone’s bodily functions at my job. If your discussions of bodily functions go beyond “I’m heading to the bathroom, could someone monitor this inbox until I get back?” and you’re not in a profession where there are actual work-related reasons to discuss bodily functions, it seems pretty straight-forwardly inappropriate.
The way I think of it is: If Lucy Letby isn’t a uniquely evil angel of death, then the British public need to confront the horrible fact that the NHS is no longer fit for purpose. That is too much for many to take. Rachel Aviv’s article was stunning. There was raw sewage backing up onto the floor of the hospital neonatal unit, for God’s sake.
Absolutely. And some units are so much worse than others - in our local NHS trust of 2 hospitals, one of them is in special measures because of excess mortality in the maternity unit, but the other hospital unit has been held together by scaffolding for years because the victorian architecture is literally crumbling. With family & friends working in the NHS, its all too common to hear stories of severe bullying among staff, scapegoating, and poor patient care. They blame the government for staff morale being low, but its also because the NHS is a monopoly employer that just moves problem staff from one location to another, and the GMC & NMC literally take years to investigate cases of malpractice. My friend has been stalked and harassed by a nurse, as a patient, to the point they couldn't leave the house - the nurse was found guilty by the police & has a criminal record for doing it, but the NMC still hasn't struck them off after over a year because they're still investigating their own "evidence".
the thing is that unfortunately babies die on neonatal units all the time - these babies are really very sick.
But Because random does not mean uniform, it sometimes happens in a way that appears “too clustered” to our dumb ape brains. But in fact that’s just how randomness works. Flip a coin enough times and Sometimes you really do get heads 10 times in a row.
You’ll get runs of 10 heads in a row. Get 100 heads in a row, and it’s much, much more likely that you’ve got a biased coin (it’s literally a one in a nonillion chance, that’s 1 with 30 zeros after it).
Whether 7 dead babies on your watch but no one else’s is “10 heads” or “100 heads” is the question.
Again. across all the hospitals everywhere across a reasonable stretch of time it virtually is guaranteed to happen to some poor nurse. This time it was Letby.
That’s my point. They did do the math, and the people who did the math showed it was like a 1/20 chance this could happen by chance. Which is pretty dang likely. Unfortunately the jury was not shown the correct stats, but cherry picked ones only.
I recommend reading the New Yorker article if you haven’t. It really is very good.
In the context of her therapist telling her to write down the worst darkest thoughts she’d ever had and simultaneously also writing “I didn’t kill them” etc.
The thing actually is, that at the Countess babies didn't die all the time usually, and that's why people there got concerned when they started to drop like flies.
They did though. An average of 2 is still going to yield 6 sometimes. Especially because you have to consider that at SOME HOSPITAL SOMEWHERE (with similar death rates) that’s going to happen.
Again. It’s our dumb ape brains at fault here. Coincidences literally do happen; at predictable intervals.
I salute you. People generally can’t even handle discussions of overlapping distributions. This is a subset of that, where you’re basically saying “the tails exist.”
There are also going to be some neonatal units that see zero deaths, and absent any supporting evidence we can’t attribute that to a miracle working nurse that was attending to every surviving baby.
You said "babies die all the time" on these wards. But you are wrong, they don't, that's the point. Our ape brains may be dumb sometimes but if something is unusual it's worth checking out, and when it was checked out here they discovered a mountain of evidence against Letby. Listen to the podcast with all the evidence from the trial if you want to actually understand the case and not just have an opinion because you read one or two shallow, sensationalist articles.
Yeah there are sometimes weird patterns in randomness.
But if we’re flipping a coin and it’s pretty much 50/50 and then I pull out a coin and get 10 heads in a row and then we go back to the old coin and it’s back to 50/50… it’s certainly possible it’s a coincidence but the better inference is that there’s something weird with my coin.
Here the increase in deaths started when she qualified to work with infants and stopped once she was removed. Again, this isn’t open and shut proof (maybe she was really bad at her job. Maybe the extra attention fixed the problem - and they also did change the age of babies they’d take etc.) but this certainly isn’t a case where the pattern means nothing.
It is. If you have a million hospitals each with 100 nurses all acting identically over 20 years, ONE of them is all but guaranteed to get a streak this bad.
So, I did some math to get a sense of the numbers we’d be talking about here.
Let’s assume that Letby had a 1/5 chance of being on shift at any particular time (that’s about right if she worked 3 12 hour shifts a week plus some allowance for vacation, sick days, and other duties). And let’s for the moment grant the prosecution version of the case: there were exactly 24 adverse events.
The probability of Letby being on shift for all 24 events is 1/5^24, or one in 600 quadrillion. That isn’t a needle in a haystack, that is “a single cancer cell among the normal cells of 20,000 humans”. If that’s the “right” probability - she’s guilty as hell.
BUT the New Yorker article notes the “Texas sharpshooter” fallacy - it looks like the prosecution may have excluded some number of other events without a good reason for doing so, some of which Letby was not present for.
The article didn’t give an exact number, but let’s say there were 50 events total and Letby was on shift for at least 24. In that case we need to calculate a cumulative binomial probability, which you can do with a calculator like this one: https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial
We input 0.2 (1/5) for the probability of success, 50 for the number of trials, and 24 for the number of successes, and the calculator gives us a cumulative probability of X >= 24 of 0.00001, or 1 in 100,000. Still very unlikely, but across large populations, 1 in 100,000 events happen all the time. Not guilty.
Where it really gets tricky is that we can’t just simplify the whole problem that way, because we have the confluence of at least 2 or 3 improbable events. First, that Letby was on shift for an unusually high number of events. Second, her hospital had an abnormally high number of deaths that year. They averaged 2 or 3 but had 8 - we’d need more data to determine how unlikely that was, and stats with small numbers are always dangerous, but naively that seems like a “high sigma”, i.e. very rare, event. Third, the deaths went back down after she left. No idea how to calculate that probability but we have an alternative explanation anyway - the unit was downgraded from level 2 to level 1 so it saw fewer challenging cases. Maybe we should ignore that.
Anyway let’s say 8 deaths is a 4 sigma high event - that would mean it happens 0.003% of the time. Multiply that by the 0.00001 binomial above and we get 1 in 30 billion and oh shit she’s guilty again.
But all of this is EXTREMELY sensitive to your assumptions and how you state the problem, so ultimately I don’t think the probabilities are all that definitive here, on their own.
The British public already knows the NHS is in shambles and dangerously broken down, because we live here and it’s our health system, and there have been plenty of high profile patient safety scandals. It’s one of the biggest political issues in the country. Your perspective is completely distorted because your knowledge of the subject comes exclusively from a single American reporter talking about a single sensational case.
What's irritating is that it's proffered as if one or the other, it's not. Both can be true at the same time. In reading the court trancripts there were untold (and some told) red flags, many whistleblowers who were ignored for years. CEO Tony Chambers stalling police and investigations, then walking scot-free of all culpability is striking enough. Also missing here is any real delve into Letby's psychological makeup; yes she looked 'normal' in her posted pics, but her stoic behaviour in court other than physically leaving her chair and desolving into (the only) emotional display of hysterical tears when the doctor she was potentially having an affair with spoke, has some bearing - this was not a stable individual.
Oh, I rolled my eyes when Katie went on about how ‘normal’ Letby seemed as though it mattered, and I have little interest in how ‘weird’ she might have seemed in court. People are terrible at ‘reading’ someone’s interior mental state from stuff like that; you might as well read her horoscope.
It's worth mentioning that Letby wasn't actually that normal - she was considered "cold" by her assessor when she was completing nursing training, and seemed to lack the ability to pick up on non-verbal signals of anxiety/distress from parents, suggesting a lack of empathy.
Agreed Her parent's actions, too, both before and after the trial are telling. My irritation with the conspiracists is not about strong feelings one way or the other regarding Letby. What inflames me are two things; the dissemination of facts and evidence. I've been listening to Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator), and her most vehement warning are the dangers of fracturing a shared reality. If there are no 'facts', it creates a vaccum for anything at all, and it's never good. I also detest bullies. That these poor broken people are being harassed and having to relive their worst moments is appalling. I recall the same with Nicola Bulley (if you're in the UK, you'll remember it). She fell into a river during a morning riverside walk and drowned. It was clear that that was what happened, yet all these conspiracists came out of their basements saying everything from that it was a police cover-up to her 'husband did it'. I'm surprised they didn't blame the family dog. They harassed him into hiding, this grief-stricken man. Disgusting.
Cards on the table, I think the Letby conviction is probably is unsafe and won’t hold up. That said, I can’t stand the online peanut gallery either, of people with no accountability or skin in the game making themselves the protagonists on the story on online fora. The establishment fucks up all the time but compared to these self-important idiots it’s a paragon of competence. If you let them try the job themselves they’d create a dumpster fire within ten minutes, which come to think of it is the exact situation currently enveloping the US government.
The sewage issue is a red herring - children collapsing didn't even match up to the times the plumber was called to deal with problems in the hospital. This is detailed in this post https://www.reddit.com/r/lucyletby/comments/164jc43/plumbing_on_the_ward_the_plumbers_evidence_and/. Listen to the Trial of Lucy Letby podcast from start to finish, with an open mind - the case is very complex and there is an awful lot of evidence that Letby did it.
I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship between the sewage and the deaths - rather, it’s indicative of how troubled and decrepit some of these hospitals are.
Either the old plumbing was a factor in the case or it wasn't. The Countess had its structural and managerial issues but the reason people started to get worried about babies dying there was because it was very unusual for them to die at such a high rate there. As one of the consultants said - the babies they had there were born, cared for, got well and went home. Deaths were rare and tragic. So many babies dying in such a short time was really, really unlikely, and things like plumbing didn't explain it. What did explain it was the nurse who was witnessed standing over a baby bleeding from its mouth, doing nothing, or another time over another baby who was rapidly desaturating, again doing nothing, a nurse who falsified notes, who seemed animated after babies died, who took home the confidential medical papers of dead children (a huge no-no), who made bereaved parents uncomfortable with inappropriate comments, who never seemed to be affected by the deaths the way her colleagues were, and who wrote "I am evil I did this" and "I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough" in private notes at home.
Listen to all the evidence. She did it. So did Adnan Syed and so did the guy from making a murderer, if you actually look at all the evidence and not just the stuff cherry picked to make a sensationalised headline grabber. I'm tired of journalists challenging convictions because it makes a good story, there are families here who lost beloved children. It's not a game.
SO many things were left out from this podcast, which deserved a far deeper and more honest dive - including the laughable comment by Jesse that he 'thanks god' he's not in the UK given the current shitshow the US has become. They left so very much out; how Letby stalked the parents of the babies she murdered (in the court transcripts) on facebook; how she took home (confidential) records of the vitals - bloodwork, oxygen levels, etc, of some of the babies she murdered and stored them in a pretty little flowered tote bag under her bed. How babies were found with breathing tubes dislodged that they, as preemies, could never have removed themsevles, insulin levels high enough to kill with Lucy being the only attendant. How she 'checked' on babies at night that had been removed, with good reason, from her care. This is the worst reporting I've seen either of them do, sorry guys, I generally love your work, but it is. Btw, I live in the UK, Rachel's article was NOT blocked, we could read it easily - there was a whole reddit thread disecting it. They did try to block it, not against fReE sPeEch, but to avoid prejudicing a jury - at a trial that lasted 10 months!!
Lastly, sneering at that there is 'empathy' for the musically named Lucy Letby because of her looks shows even more ignorance; of COURSE it's because she's young, pretty and blonde - the majority of those who defended her were single 'protective' middle-aged men. Same ones had zero sympathy though, for Shemima Begum. Pretty little blonde Lucy could 'never' harm a flea, right? Jesse might want to (or not) know there's a whole SPEED DATING club dedicated to 'Lucy Letby is Innocent' believers, that's how nuts these people are. I could go on and on. We studied it, hundreds of students, for an ethics and behavioural science class and let me tell you, they left no stone unturned. I feel bad for the parents of these poor babies, their lives are changed forever and this conspiratorial bullshit keeps cropping up, they get phone calls, chased in cars, all for the love of a pretty little blonde thing who yes, was convicted for 7, but harmed, that we know of, dozens, and is still under investigation for two more.
Yes, rules about what the press cannot report and what cannot be said online are there to preserve the chance for a fair trial, because journalists are not legal professionals and don't have the right to influence the jury. The rules aren't dumb, and when I look at what an insane circus high profile American trials become I can't believe anyone would think that that is a better or fairer system.
The New Yorker article casts some serious doubt on the insulin theory, in my opinion (there were babies with high insulin that Letby was not present for, and these were ignored by the prosecution. The test that “proved” it had to be artificial insulin was explicitly not capable of testing for that, and this sample was never retested. Also, I think only one of the high insulin babies actually died?).
The prosecution never seemed had a clear and consistent theory of how exactly she was killing these babies. They’d pivot from theory to theory, method to method, even changing their theories after one was proven wrong (e.g. the test that *proved* Letby injured the kid, that turned out to be taken before she was on shift). No answer for clear alternative explanations - e.g. gas in a scan could easily be postmortem, the first baby that was probably injured by a tube inserted too far by a junior doctor, etc. Just a lot of “well she *could* have done this, and the baby died, so clearly that’s what happened”.
The “stalking” seems to have amounted to Letby searching their public Facebook profiles, among thousands of other Facebook searches she did.
I’ll grant the taking records home is weird, although by that point she seems to have been pretty messed up mentally from the string of deaths, whether she did it or not. Not sure why her choice of folder makes a damn bit of difference.
Anyway there’s way too much out there and I don’t intend to make myself a scholar on this case to the degree necessary to be “sure”, I just want folks to know this comment is substantially underselling the potential issues with the prosecution’s case. There are reasons other than “Letby is white” that UK public opinion swung toward her lately.
Also, sequester your damn juries, don’t threaten foreign journalists with arrest. Especially when your press was allowed to run damaging articles about Letby as soon as she was arrested anyway, prejudicing the potential jury pool from the get go. You saw the article anyway, so it’s clearly not even effective. You’re censoring the free press for no reason. Jesse is right to thank god that he lives in a country where the government doesn’t threaten, harass, and arrest him for doing his job (too bad about Bluesky though).
So tiresome when people speculate, as you've just shown here brilliantly; this is exactly why armchair 'sleths' should be banned from strongly-held opinions - it muddies both fact and evidence. Point in case; they're not 'my damned juries', I'm not British. And of course American exceptionalism rears it's ugly head, as ever - you literally have a 'president' threatening to arrest protesters, violating their first amendment rights. So what, everyone else's govt threats are pearl-clutching but your own? America has become the butt-joke of the planet alienating allies and cosying up to dictators, sit down with this shit, seriously. So which is it, either Britain has censorship in free press or they're allowed to run 'damaging articles'. If you'd actually been in the UK, you'd see they clearly print whatever the hell they want, much to the population's detriment as we saw with false claims about Brexit, you literally have no clue.
As you say, our President is violating our free speech laws. He's been complaining about these laws since before he first ran for office. He personally opposes both the spirit and letter of our first constitutional amendment.
I think you could fairly accuse an American of hypocrisy if they criticize other country's attitudes towards speech while supporting what Trump is up to (JD Vance being the poster child), but I doubt you'll find many of those people in this Substack.
THANKYOU! I found Jesse's comments, including 'what a dumb country' - which didn't seem to be a joke - actually pretty insulting. Yep, America's free speech laws are admirable and hard won. But do J and K really think that the UK restricts trial reporting because we're stupid drones who enjoy being under the thumb of big government? It may not suit their worldview, but there are what we consider good reasons to do it.
And do they really believe that UK judges and juries are idiots? This was a TEN month trial (plus the many inquiries/reports etc into Letby) during which every little detail was discussed. And, despite that, the decision might have been wrong! People may have lied or been mistaken! Letby might be innocent! But for J and K to have such a facile understanding of the trial (to assume it came down to mere statistics) suggests a very poor opinion of UK law in general. And that makes me sad.
I mean, they have a president threatening judges, journalists and pretty much everyone else with imprisonment - someone deliberately fostering hate and fear. He's threatened to arrest and/or deport students exercising their codified rights to free speech - literally what the first amendment is all about - and (gasp) 'prohibits' them wearing masks. But yeah, every other country is the problem. What you wrote is exactly why I was incensed, 'facile' is the perfect word. Don't worry about opinions about the UK, it's not everyones, and I suspect a lot of Americans are defensive of late given the current insanity, they're going through their own growing pains being universally reviled. But yes, it makes me sad too.
Yeah there's absolutely nothing the armchair experts have posted that wasn't available to the jury, they saw all the evidence (she was defended by a KC, not some low rent solicitor) and were convinced of her guilt. Disappointing episode tbh
Just like the UK court system was wrong not to be more skeptical of the importance placed on the statistical analysis of the prosecution's experts, the UK public would be wise to not overreact in another direction by declaring the NHS unfit across the board and ripe for a good DOGE'ing down.
Personal connection to this episode: my 72-year-old mum has been on the “Lucy Letby is innocent” train for years now and got permanently banned from r/LucyLetby for questioning the verdict after getting into several arguments with Gulley (FyrestarOmega). My mum rules, obviously.
"... Because the intelligence community is uniquely positioned to keep the president in check"
Ding ding ding, that email came from one of the #resist types that probably posted in those chat rooms, and is now out of a job.
The intelligence community, in fact, has no role in keeping any branch of the government in check. It is very specifically not included in the "Executive, judicial, legislative" system of checks and balances.
How would the Intel community, who are explicitly not decision-makers for the most part, limit any power of the government? If your answer is " Leaking to the media/congress", then you have to admit that there is no role for Intel to keep anyone in check aside from interference.
If you think it's fine for the Intel community to leak information for " the greater good", then you also believe it was fine when the FBI came out before the 2016 election to announce they were investigating Hilary, and I doubt most people now arguing in favor of the Intel community leaking liked that very much.
And as for the political leanings of the people who work in those communities, they are absolutely to the left of most people. The Intel community has been explicitly trying to recruit them for the past 10 years, but especially the last four. No one remembers the CIA's "I am a cisgender millennial with generalized anxiety disorder" recruitment ad?
It sounds silly, but when Katie and Jesse quoted this person saying “folks,” I thought: this guy’s a Dem. It just seems like a word only left-leaning people use, unless they are a southern character in a cheesy movie.
I wanted to post this as well. The IC are the opposites of a check on the executive, they are agents of the executive, with a duty to carry out the executive’s will. If they don’t like what the executive is doing, they can resign, or just passively do a bad job and hopefully be fired.
The executive isn’t a check on itself, the other two co-equal branches check it, and they all check one another.
Actually, former military guys are extremely common in the furry community, for the same reason that former military guys are very common in MtF communities. 1) It's a career path that attracts shape-rotator types, the kind of geeks who get super into online fandom and 2) the military is a draw for men who are looking to "prove" their masculinity, i.e., gay men and future MtFs; these types of men are basically the backbone of the furry community. It's not at all a coincidence that most of the guys from the Tranch were furries and former military.
I'd be willing to bet, dollars to donuts, that the incidence of veterans is higher among furries than among the general population.
As an aside here, recruiters seem to make a hobby of trying to pull people in as they're heading towards the offices of recruiters from other branches (where I was in Utah, they were all in a single strip mall), and when I was headed to talk with the Air Force recruiter, a Marine recruiter stepped in an gave a very masculinity-focused advertisement (be tough, get all the girls, etc).
I didn't think of myself as gay back then, but somehow that didn't particularly land for me. I joined so I could learn Chinese in a stable position that would give me time to get my feet under me and figure out what I was actually doing with my life. I imagine "proving" masculinity does hit harder for some people, but at least when it comes to Air Force intel, it's mostly just a bunch of geeks and nerds whose plan A paths fell through somewhere, with all the hobbies you'd expect from that crowd.
Interesting insight. Thanks, Trace. I have a geeky family member (he's into Star Trek, comic books, etc.) who joined the Air Force in the 80s because he was interested in engineering, but couldn't afford to go to college. He definitely falls into the former "shape rotator" category of veteran. I wouldn't say his plan A path fell through, so much as it was never presented as an option to him.
I also went to college with a gay veteran who told me he enlisted because he wanted to get away from the small town he grew up in, and like my family member, he couldn't afford college. He was very normie and conventionally masculine, though.
Obviously I wouldn't want to intrude on American "freedoms", but as a Canadian listener whose country seems to be in the bullseye of a new wave of American imperialism, I'm getting really sick of listening to this podcast deriding the political systems and laws of foreign nations that are far more stable and functional than America is proving itself to be.
J+K can say whatever they like, but I can't be the only one finding it off-putting in the current political climate.
Deriding laws that criminalize speech is always the correct thing to do. The United States is better than any other country on the planet on this issue. Our legal system is superior to one that jails people for being mean or for reporting on current events. The UK, Canada, et al. should continue to be ridiculed as long as they continue to enforce these indefensible authoritarian policies.
(To forestall any whataboutism: Go ahead and bash any US policy or action that violates people’s freedoms. God knows they exist. But the above is no less true.)
No country in the world, America included, has fully free speech, as that would allow threats and intimidation, etc. There is always a balance to be had. What annoys me are pompous Americans showing up to a different country, not understanding the history, cultural context, etc. and making sweeping pronouncements that they have the balance right and that if only you poor, ignorant fools would be more like us, how much better off you would be!
JD Vance can keep his asinine opinions to himself when speaking to world leaders, particularly when his motive for doing so is to intimidate other countries into changing their regulations to suit the business interests of Silicon Valley oligarchs like Zuck and Musk.
America has the fewest exceptions, which is why it’s the best country on this issue.
As for “not understanding the history,” perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the idea of free speech as we understand it was created by English and Scottish people, who I imagine would be horrified by the illiberal clowns trampling all over everything they believed in.
No “cultural context” justifies imposing a Stasi-esque regime of speech laws. This isn’t about Americans paternalistically telling others what’s good for them, it’s a simple matter of right and wrong. Freedom is right. Repression is wrong.
When you defend the unjust laws that make you less free than your American counterparts, you sound like an Afghan girl talking about how actually it’s a good thing that she’s not allowed to go to school. (You need to understand the cultural context!) It’s bizarre. If you want to hit back at chauvinistic Americans, “actually I like my lack of freedom” is a really weird way of doing it.
I'm not here to defend every instance of infringement on free speech mentioned on this show - in fact many of them are beyond the pale for my preferences. However, I can see perfectly legitimate reasons why Germany would outlaw Nazi imagery, and perfectly legitimate reasons why courts may suppress the publication of details of current trials (e.g. name of the assailant if that reveals the name of the victim, especially if the victim is a minor), etc. All of these are restrictions on free speech that I'm personally fine with. But I'm not arrogant enough to think that my personal approach is the objectively correct one.
By and large I prefer the Australian system to the American one for many reasons - but a proper constitutional protection of free speech is one thing I think we need desperately. Unfortunately there’s no appetite for it because there haven’t been any outrageous cases to provoke it, and most Australians assume we have more robust protections than we do (because there is a reasonably strong norm of free speech).
I find it quite refreshing when they cover stories from here in the UK - I like hearing how other countries and cultures perceive events here. We can't allow the world to revolve around trump for 4 years, or we're just giving him the excess attention he craves.
As a Brit, I couldn't agree more with our good hosts: UK laws around speech and journalistic freedom are terrible and oppressive. Americans, be happy that posting a youtube video of your dog doing a nazi salute won't result in a criminal conviction, and that anonymous complaints about offensive twitter posts won't lead to the police knocking at the door.
If Jesse were British, he'd probably be doing as much hard time as Letby based on his twitter malfeasance alone.
I only managed to read the New Yorker article after scouring the internet for crude phone pics of the magazine pages, like someone back in the Soviet days getting a hold of crumpled handwritten copies of Western literature.
Tangential question: I read UK football news, and whenever there's a case of someone doing or saying something offensive (e.g. racial epithets from the crowd, nationalist epithets from one player to another, rando on Twitter publicly attacking a player), I cannot find any press outlet reporting what the offensive thing actually was. And I do understand why, for reasons of discretion, some of the major papers would choose to leave this out. But it seems like no one reports it, not even half-censored versions. Is this a strongly adhered to journalistic convention, or would the papers be putting themselves in legal jeopardy for publishing the offensive thing?
As a Toronto-based Liverpool fan, I read such stories too and am confused. They never report what was said. And why do you never see such stories about North American sports. Are Canadian and American fans so much better behaved that they never attack players online? I see such stories from the UK and file them under, "That Would Never Happen Here."
The reporting restrictions around this case were ridiculous. Not to mention the lack of legal recourse Letby currently has. If it takes Americans pointing that out, so be it, they’re allowed to point out the glaring flaws in the UK’s legal system despite their own country’s problems! (I am half British and not American, and I was disappointed and annoyed by the defensiveness with which many British commentators reacted to the New Yorker story.)
The reporting restrictions were only the normal reporting restrictions cases face in the uk. The babies identities were protected and opinion pieces can’t be written while the case or appeals were ongoing. There were daily blogs factually presenting every piece of evidence. I followed them really closely and tbh I’m a bit disappointed with how the evidence is presented here because there’s so much more.
I know they were the normal restrictions, that’s how British people were defending it: “oh but you Americans don’t understand, these are just the rules here!” as if the fact that the rules are bad makes it better? No, it makes it worse! My problem with the restrictions has nothing to do with the babies’ identities being known, that has no bearing on whether she’s guilty, it was the fact that until the retrial was over journalists weren’t even allowed to question whether the initial verdict was based on sound evidence.
I’ve also read and listened to a lot more about the case than was talked about in the show and I think it was a fair summary, but then I also am pretty convinced Letby is innocent.
Do you understand contempt of court laws? They’re actually in place for a really excellent reason- to make sure people get a fair trial. You know how in the US where people are tried and convicted in the court of public opinion before they even see inside a courtroom? Yeah we don’t do that here. So while a case or appeal is going on, journalists can only report facts, they can’t give opinions
I understand the rule, and I lived in the UK for 10 years as an adult. I can actually know about it and just disagree with you. In this case “the rules” meant tabloids could write 1000 articles about how she’s a monster and Private Eye could write 0 articles about how maybe the evidence that any of the babies were murdered at all was quite weak and I think that’s bad! In the US the former would still have happened but the latter would have been able to happen sooner, plus she would have far more rights to appeal than she does in the UK. A lot of things are fucked up in the US (and again, I am not American, don’t live there, and don’t particularly care about defending their legal system) but I don’t believe the UK’s legal system is objectively better than America’s.
But if you think Lucy Letby actually got a fair (re)trial as a result of the contempt of court laws, I don’t think there’s any point discussing this because we’re not going to agree on anything.
The internet is awash with Canadians who think they are the main characters in the story of America's crumbling into a political and economic hellscape.
The world is awash with exceptionalistic, ignorant and arrogant Americans who think they can bully other nations while their bloviated idiotic man-child president cosies up to murderous dictators. Other countries, including Canada, standing up for themselves isn't the damned problem when they're literally under threat by that same political and economic hellscape that wants to economically damage it. What other fucking response to it could there possibly be?
As an American, I hope to hell the Canadians get to be the main characters, if it means they end up humiliating Donald Trump in his stupid crusade to start trade wars with everyone.
We definitely have a lot of problems right now, but one problem we have fortunately less of than the U.K. for sure does is judges telling reporters they can't talk about something. This episode has a great compare/contrast on that issue. The entire news industry in England was forbidden from reporting on a case of immense public interest, and an almost certainly innocent woman was given a whole life sentence to the applause of the public until the ban on reporting was lifted. Meanwhile across the pond, an internet spat wound up with a judge banning one (admittedly obsessive) person from making comments on the internet about another person (who on this subject is definitely a public figure), and a massive apparatus of speech protection jumped in to rectify that. Donald Trump is a sonofabitch, but that is true along with the fact that we've just got way better speech laws here than in the U.K.
I agree with most of what you wrote here, but just to clarify, the news industry in England were allowed to report on the case during trial, so long as they didn't report information that was excluded from the trial. Still too restrictive for my taste, but it wasn't a complete news blackout. You're absolutely right though that a lot of pro-Letby information was censored during trial on the grounds that it wasn't part of the official record.
Also, there's a massive amount of Mormons and ex Mormons in Intel because they're one of the few demographics where the kind of young men who would be interested in that work have no history with the devil's lettuce.
The odds of a normal looking white dude that randomly speaks a language fluently that originates halfway across the planet being Mormon, or at least formerly Mormon, are hilariously high.
Exactly! That's why there's so many of them in 3 letter agencies. This is not a criticism - they're just, in general, much less vulnerable to the usual kinds of blackmail.
The Adams v Gulley shitfight was absolutely classic BaRpod stuff, and I’m not at *all* shocked that it turned out Adams was insane, paranoid and violent. The thing about the pro- and anti-Letby fandoms is that they’re both composed of the same kind of mentally unwell true crime obsessives.
There was a tragic and complicated incident in my area some years ago, involving an unusually eccentric family. Someone(s) in the family were running several Facebook profiles posting prolifically, accusing various entities of culpability (note: bad idea, don't do this.) A news article mentioned the intense interest this was generating in a true crime forum, and being slightly acquainted with some of the principal characters I thought I'd check it out, and HOLY CANNOLI, the discourse was so unhinged, I could not nope out fast enough.
I'm a true crime podcasts listener, though mostly interested in cons and fraud, not violent crimes. Maybe that was why this seemed so off to me, it was mostly speculating on motive, based on...not much evidence. You don't get that with fraud, the intent is a given.
Yes, fraud is my favorite kind of true crime! Not only is it usually not violent, but parsing the manipulative strategies of the fraudster is fascinating. I also like to pretend I'm not susceptible--but we all are !
Yes, same here. Not really interested in sadists or serial killers. Any recommendations? I am enjoying Queen of the Con at the moment. Crimetown may be one of my top five of all time, along with The Dream (MLMs). I also like The Opportunist, and Criminal with Phoebe Judge. And all the Theranos, NXVIM..
I'll check out Queen of the Con and the Opportunist. Gosh--there's Bad Blood, Chameleon, Conspirituality, A Little Bit Culty (lots of MLMs), Exit Scam, The Grift, The Lazarus Heist, The Missing Cryptoqueen, Oh No Ross and Carrie, Persona: The French Deception, Ponzi Supernova, A Very British Cult--not all of these are great so YMMV!
Trust Me is my go-to for cults, I'll check out some of the others. I loved Exit Scam. I listened to much of Oh No but along with Behind the Bastards and Sawbones, I think I drifted away when it was apparent they could poke holes in the logic of everything but The One Thing. I also like Scam Goddess, occasionally. Crypto Island and WeCrashed were good.
I'm in the UK, I've just finished listening to this, and one of the most horrifying parts of this case for me was the sentencing - a whole life order without parole, for a case based on circumstantial evidence. These "victims" were already incredibly unstable, unwell babies with a tiny chance of survival. Compare this to Axel Rudakubana, who stabbed 3 little girls to death at a dance class and critically injured many more, and had ricin in his home - he's on a long sentence but not a life order because he was 17, not 18+. On both cases, the online discussion has deliberately been targeted and stifled by the British state, blaming "prejudicial" reporting, even though some aspects brought out in online discussion forums have been proven to be true. And in both cases, it is the British state defending massive mistakes and underfunding in state organisations - the National Health Service, and counter-terrorism police & MI5.
Nadine, listen to the Trial of Lucy Letby podcast with every piece of evidence against her. You will understand why the whole life order was imposed. There are miscarriages of justice in the British legal system - this is not one of them.
That's your opinion. I'd rather listen to the opinions of the panel of experts in their field who have said this could be an unsafe conviction. A whole life order is completely unnecessary - I could understand not being allowed to practice medicine again due to a breakdown in trust, if the conviction is overturned, but the whole life order has been misused, she's not an imminent danger to the wider public.
There were many experts called in the trial itself - neonatologists, haematologists, paediatric endocrinologists, forensic pathologists. Most of Lee's explanations for the deaths were already discussed in court and ruled out as implausible. The only single piece of new evidence he offered was his own insistence that skin discoloration is not seen in venous air embolisms - but he left out an example that should have been in his review, from a study by Prof Johan Smith, an expert in the field, who described exactly that in a case of venous embolism.
Even if I agreed with you over the verdict, I still think the Whole Life Order is cruel and unnecessary punishment. There are rapists and paedophiles who have been given suspended sentences with no jail time, and really violent homicides including those linked to organised crime that still didn't get a WLO. Its inconsistent and based on public outcry rather than justice being served.
Agree, sentencing often seems senseless in the UK. I think the remedy is to properly issue murderers, rapists and paedophiles with long custodial sentences though, not to let a baby killer off with a lenient sentence. But we can agree to disagree and I appreciate your good faith response :)
I was excoriated here for musing on the purely circumstantial conviction of Alex Murdaugh, to the point where I was pedantically explained-to what circumstantial evidence is. Yeah I know what it is, it’s just remarkable, ok? Rant over; good points.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have much patience for Americans and free speech defenders (which I would generally count myself as) condemning our court reporting rules. Everyone kind of seems to know that sensationalist trial-by-tabloid is a bad thing, so forcing the media to report responsibly in ways that won’t prejudice the jury (and lead to high profile trials collapsing) is completely reasonable. It’s also a fundamentally self-limiting restriction: the trial *will* end, at which point everyone can say what they like. Enough of the dudgeon when some American publication horns in on a British case and tries to tell everyone what the jury should be finding while the trial’s ongoing.
Nonsense, and in this particular case, utterly ridiculous. The British press has spent years publishing articles on the Letby case, all of them freely available to the British public, right now, a google search away. Of course, it's mostly articles painting Letby as a villain, offering information much of which we now know to be misleading or illegitimate. It's funny how a ban only came for an article that posed a serious challenge to prosecutor's case against her.
No, the appeal trial completed and the restrictions lifted, because they only apply during a trial. That’s an essential part of how they work; how do you not understand that?
Edit: just remembered, it wasn’t an appeal trial, it was a separate trial for one of the murder charges that had been broken out from the main set for some reason.
As I say above, reporting during the trial is a public benefit (I'd go as far as to say a right), of dubious net cost to the proceedings (the intent is to protect the jury from prejudice, I would say they simply freeze in time any existing prejudice), and a fiction to enforce in any case.
It was retried because the jurors couldn't come to agreement in the first trial. There were several counts where they didn't agree, but the prosecution decided to retry only one of them.
Also, actually think this through, would you, assuming everything you say is true. All those articles biased against Letby in the press weren’t biased because of court reporting restrictions, but because the press saw it as good business to demonise her. Removing the reporting restrictions removes them for everyone: you don’t just get Rachel Aviv riding in on a white horse to silence everyone with the truth, you get every single tabloid free to rake up all the muck they can find with their own ‘independent investigation’ and then spray it across the headlines. Is this making the problem you identify better, or worse?
To be fair, the idea of reporting restrictions seems reasonable. I would argue that they aren't as beneficial as they seem and for that reason shouldn't weigh against the public good of press freedom and access to information. In this specific case, the media has already painted an unremittingly damning image of Letby. Any jury has already been prejudiced, realistically the only effect of new reporting could be to make it less negative (that turned out to be true). One could think of the opposite scenario, but that just argues that the net cost or benefit of retrictions are zero. Not worth the cost to the public right to information. There will be shady tabloids, there will also be investigative journalism that can do nothing but aid the course of justice.
And in an age of nearly unlimited access to information anywhere in the world, the idea of blocking all information is a fiction. I'd rather have all of the press reporting, not just a selection of foreign sources. Let the crown sequester the jury if they think it's so important rather than try to quarantine the rest of the world.
But it’s not really “quarantine” of information, reporting of active trials still occurs, it’s that the reporting has to be limited to what’s being discussed in court in front of the jury. There’s sometimes additional reporting restrictions enforced during cases - for example if a defendant is to stand trial again for a different crime. And the press is entitled to appeal against reporting restrictions during a court case.
I’m a former newspaper reporter - to get a journalism qualification in the UK you need to know the law around court reporting - and how to appeal against it. In the main I support our contempt of court laws, generally the public’s desire for tittle tattle doesn’t override the need for a fair justice system.
Are you calling the New Yorker piece "tittle tattle"? That's my point, it's not just tabloids, it's also important journalism, and the timely communication of information often matters. The contribution to society of press freedom isn't just titillation.
It’s rather hard to draft reporting restrictions that only apply to ‘tittle tattle’ and not good, responsible journalism, and all the benefits of press freedom can be enjoyed in full once the trial is over: the only demand of the reporting restrictions is that while the case is being decided in court, the press stick to reporting the case put before the jury, rather than effectively trying to decide the case themselves in the public media. It’s not a particularly onerous requirement, it certainly hasn’t suppressed scrutiny of the Letby case, and again I think if the rules were laxer the results would be *far* worse for Letby than the current system.
But that’s exactly my issue, the tabloid muckraking was all allowed prior to the trial, and it was mostly more good-faith stuff that actually got squashed by the reporting restrictions.
Show me an example of the tabloid muck-raking you mean, then, because they’re strictly bound by the same rules as Rachel Aviv. Which is why they sensationalise the case as has been put before the jury, whereas Aviv effectively constructed her own epic case for the defence outside of court procedure and rules. The tabloids are certainly not allowed to consult medical experts to provide interpretations of evidence the way Aviv did.
The New Yorker article mentions that multiple outlets published reporting on the case right after she was arrested and again after she was released on bail. These included quotes from e.g. other patients from Countess. Perhaps it was wrong of me to call these muckraking, but it’s unclear to me why these *wouldn’t* be prejudicial to a possible jury pool while Aviv’s article *was*.
Fortunately we have a body of law clearly setting out what you can and can’t report about in an ongoing trial, and if the New Yorker had cared about following it it could have done everything the tabloids are allowed to. Instead it chose to ignore British law and publish material which would be considered prejudicial while the trial was ongoing, and so was banned in Britain, only for the duration of the trial. Even as a pretty strident free speech defender I think this is reasonable.
Sequester a jury for ten months? Then if a tiny bit of information gets to them during the sequester period, the whole trial is put at risk?
As others have pointed out, reporting restrictions are temporary, from charge to sentencing/acquittal. There could be a case for changing these if the British press could behave themselves- but it’s notoriously bad for printing whatever the fuck it likes before charges are brought (there was a famous case a few years ago where a young woman was murdered and the press went all out on her “weirdo” landlord, accusing him of her murder and destroying him publicly. Then it turned out she was murdered by her neighbor.)
Yes? You’re talking about putting twelve random members of the public in confinement for ten months, unable to go home and see their families. Or what do you think ‘sequestering’ means? Of *course* that’s far more disruptive than restricting (not banning!) how the press reports the story.
If Aviv had new information or evidence, she should have submitted it to Letby's defence counsel. Journalists are not legal professionals and the rules are there to ensure a fair trial by preventing jurors from being prejudiced.
It's so quintessentially British to be all atwitter when Americans comment on British news while themselves enjoying the British pastime of obsessively following and critiquing American news. You people are exhausting.
Lucy Letby is what you get when you take a toxic workforce culture (that particular hospital) and infuse it with life or death stakes and the prestige of physicians. If the statistical argument doesn’t hold water (and apparently it doesn’t), all you’re left with evidence-wise is “Letby was sometimes annoying to work with due to being a bit extra, and this annoyed one doctor so much that he felt comfortable accusing her of murder”.
Having listened to basically every bit of court evidence that was given, this is absolutely not what happened. Letby was well-liked by her colleagues in general. There is a lot of evidence against her, and if you listen to the full podcast about the trial you will get a much clearer picture of what actually happened.
I haven’t listened to the podcast, while the trial was going on I couldn’t really face engaging with it, but I’m a Private Eye subscriber and Phil Hammond is increasingly convinced this is a unsafe conviction at best and a gross miscarriage of justice at worst. Why do you think he, and what appears to be a growing number of neonatologists, are disregarding the evidence that she did it? What they’ve been saying is shocking if true, yet I don’t actually know what the evidence is that she did anything? It can’t just be the spreadsheet of deaths and the scribbled “confession”?
Firstly, I would encourage you to listen to the podcast about the trial if you want to actually understand the case properly. But what do I think about recent developments? Well, first of all I think that Dr Lee is an opportunist who has seen a chance to promote his own image using a famous case - on this podcast we hear about grifters who behave like this all the time, many of whom are high profile, many of whom are doctors (paediatric gender medicine anyone?) it shouldn't surprise us that there might be a doctor who would do this. There are multiple holes in his argument - there are in fact cases of injected air embolisms causing skin mottling, one of which from a south african case he (deliberately?) left out of his clinical review and one that happened to one of Beverly Allitt's victims, a nurse who also killed by injecting air. He also gave dubious alternative explanations for the deaths - he attributed one death to an undetected bacterial infection, but such infections get progressively worse - the baby in question waa transferred to a different hospital for a few days where it improved, then on being returned to the Countess immediately collapsed again and died when Letby came on shift. The liver injury in one of the babies that he attributed to a doctor inserting a cannula was stated by a forensic expert to have been caused by physical abuse, the liver was ruptured to the extent that it could not have been accidental. The police investigation, unlike Lee, consulted not just neonatal specialists, but endocrinologists, haematologists, forensic experts etc. Dr Lee just convinced a handful of his acquaintances about the air embolism evidence, and he does of course sound convincing in his press conference, which I've listened to, so I can imagine why. Plus everyone loves a good story about a miscarriage of justice and nobody wants to believe that a nurse is a baby killer. But he has not just left out important clinical evidence, he has also ignored the mountain of circumstantial evidence against Letby. She falsified notes to make it look like someone else was on duty when a baby collapsed. She took home and stored confidential clinical notes about babies she killed (which is illegal). She seemed to know a baby she had just been with was pale and looked unwell although the colleague she was with said the room was too dark to see if that were the case. She was found standing over a baby bleeding from its mouth by the mother, doing nothing to help, she sent the mother away. She was found by a doctor standing over a rapidly desaturating baby again doing absolutely nothing, until he asked her what was happening. She behaved inappropriately around bereaved parents, she was chatty and animated after babies died, she stalked the parents of dead babies on facebook, she was never affected by the deaths like her colleagues were and refused to take time off like they did when babies died. The police were so anxious not to draw false conclusions that they had separate teams investigate every collapse and death without communicating at all until they were all finished with their investigations - when they finally all met up, the similarities in each case were astounding. Babies didn't just die, they had shocking, unexplainable collapses right after she started shift. The babies had never-before-seen symptoms like the bright pink skin mottling (if not caused by air embolisms, then what was causing these?) or screaming in the most horrendous way in the case of one baby, a sound that "should not have come out of a baby", or bleeding mouths. Letby went on holiday for a week - no deaths. She came back and the deaths began again immediately. Dr Lee has so little respect for the British judicial system that he thought just because the skin mottling was in question Letby should immediately leave jail. He's an arrogant crank, I don't put any stock at all in what he has to say.
It irritates me profoundly to see such a meticulously built case ignored in favour of sensationalism and what is essentially, just another good story. It's not a good story for the families of these babies, it is their lives. If people are going to report on this they should do their due diligence and understand the case. It's just basic respect for the families and for due process.
It is, because K & J have just taken Aviv's article at face value, although it left out gigantic parts of the prosecution's case, and not bothered to understand the case in its entirety at all. Their angle is supposed to be cleaning up internet bullshit and not adding to it. I guess the main angle of the story is about the internet feud between two obsessive, troubled women, neither of whom are reliable voices, but the case the police brought was full of reliable evidence and it was made to sound in this episode as though there was basically none.
Probably why I was angry with it, because it's not usually a 'skim' thing with either. I know Jesse didn't investigate himself, but I've defended both of them (to the point of being on some sort of list on Bluesky - which is hilarious) enough that it's disheartening to have half-truths put out. There's enough of that going around.
A lot of this is just another way of framing what actually has been said. She “didn’t take time off” is actually one of the arguments Aviv puts forth for why Letby was accused: she was a new young career-oriented nurse in a taxed environment who worked any and every shift available to her. Also “she wasn’t affected” could be countered by the fact that she “stalked” the parents on FB and brought home records: she was arguably obsessed and upset that kids died on her watch.
Aviv's article is full of the sort of speculation a journalist might make who has no knowledge of how medical professionals conduct themselves, and who is looking to put a new spin on old evidence in order to raise her own profile. Letby was offered paid leave to recover from deaths; she didn't take it, though her colleagues did. She also found caring for less sick babies she was assigned "boring". You can read plenty about her glib and callous behaviour here, and the excited, gossipy way she discussed babies' deaths https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/15/lucy-letby-discussed-babies-deaths-in-excited-way-inquiry-told. It was simply not normal for medical professionals to be unaffected by deaths - for context, my father was a GP and a stoical man; when a baby under his care died, he lay in bed crying for 3 days. The last thing he wanted was to ever be reminded of the deaths of children in his care, it would have made his job impossible. Letby on one occasion stayed in the room where recently bereaved parents were bathing their dead child - she prattled on about how she had given the baby its first bath when it was alive, greatly upsetting the parents. She seemed animated after babies died on several occasions. You could say "oh well we all react differently to death" but actually we mostly don't, and her behaviour was very unusual for a neonatal nurse, and the police always consider bizarre reactions to death when they are investigating murder cases - it's one of the best indicators that someone should be looked into.
"nobodys directly called her annoying, but the subtext of the description of her behaviours (being overly emotional, relying on colleagues for a lot of emotional support, just generally being 'extra' with colleagues and patients) makes me think she'd come across that way. the fact that these behaviours are noted during the trial mean they caught ppl's attention"
Where did you get the impression Letby was annoying to work with? I’ll admit I’m not as knowledgeable on the subject as many but I did read The New Yorker article mentioned in the episode.
nobodys directly called her annoying, but the subtext of the description of her behaviours (being overly emotional, relying on colleagues for a lot of emotional support, just generally being 'extra' with colleagues and patients) makes me think she'd come across that way. the fact that these behaviours are noted during the trial mean they caught ppl's attention
Please don't rely on your own impressions. Letby was extremely well-liked by her colleagues, both doctors and nurses. It's driving me crazy to see people here draw conclusions based on gut feelings. I know the case, I listened to the podcast that reported on every minute of trial proceedings. Read my comment upthread if you want to understand more, I replied to a user called Kezziah, I have included a lot of the evidence against her, though there's many more that I left out because so much evidence against her exists.
Having covered court cases for years here in the UK, it’s wild that you guys think being able to prejudice a jury is the preferable option. Anyway, just for future reference Simon and Sacha Baron Cohen aren't brothers, they’re cousins.
Little explanation on why we have reporting restrictions ‘contempt of
Court’
Hint: to help avoid juries being influenced by gossip/rumour etc so that the defendant has a trial that’s as fair as possible.
If later on, a defendant’s lawyers can show irregularities with that trial or produce new evidence then they argue in court (not Reddit) that it’s an unsafe conviction.
It’s called the Rule of Law. Used to be quite popular
Considering tabloids were running articles demonizing her as soon as she was arrested, and UKians were accessing foreign reporting throughout the trial, doesn’t seem like it works too well.
Once someone is charged, the reporting restrictions come into play.
That gives a fair amount of time for tabloid comment & reporting to die down before the trial starts.
Of course, it’s not perfect: but the aim is to produce as fair a trial as is possible and to keep juries’ minds focused on the evidence they hear in court.
To remind them to base their verdicts on that, rather than on what Jill0783 says on Reddit
The idea that only stories *during* the trial can influence a jury seems profoundly naive, and destined to do what we see here - mostly protect the prosecution from criticism of their evidence until the trial is over and it’s not “news” anymore.
Besides, the NY piece was about the trial that had already concluded, and was only suppressed because of another *upcoming* trial for one of the attempted murder charges that the prosecution was allowed to split off and retry. Seems pretty biased toward the prosecutor.
Hey I got my comment read by Jesse!
Unfortunately I think he and Katie might be missing the point of my and Snags’ comments that they read.
Because the emails they shared don’t really contradict our comments, even though J+K present them as if they do. My objection wasn’t that workers in classified environments should be expected to never discuss or post *anything* off topic, that would clearly be unreasonable for humans shut in a closed area. Certainly I’ve had more than a few non-work talks with my work buddies behind a secure facility door. That’s fine!
Rather, my objection is to the notion that discussions about sexual penetration, butthole zapping, and tucking your dick to pee would be considered appropriate for work by any reasonable employee. Jesse can claim it isn’t “explicit”, but that requires a weird definition of “explicit”!
One of the emails talks about some previous attempts to crack down on extraneous discussion. Again, J+K seem to interpret this as a sign that the transition talk is being unfairly singled out. I think it means the opposite - if the higher ups were going after even tame off topic posting, how could they reasonably conclude that much more clearly “not safe for work” content would be tolerated?
This is “laughably obvious example in a sexual harassment training” level stuff here people.
Yeah, pretty disappointed to know Katie went in and downvoted my comment! As a Katie fan-girl, I guess I'll just go jump out a window now.
I think Katie was joking about downvoting your comment, but she definitely didn’t understand it.
There is, in fact, no downvote option in Substack.
Oh yeah, duh! She got me again.
Drunk posting on substack is dangerous
But did Katie know/remember that when she made the comment?
Good question. It’s exactly the kind of thing Katie is constitutionally incapable of understanding.
Yeah, if any guy started talking about his penis in work slack, there’s a very good chance he’d get reported, and would either be penalized in some way or outright fired. You can get reported for saying just about anything in the office, including the private sector. Half of the workplace stories on this podcast have been more tame than what was going on here.
Yeah they totally missed the boat on that whole discussion.
Wait! Aren’t we encouraged to bring “our whole selves” to work?
But not your hole selves.
Having listened to episode 250 just before listening to this one, I don't think they misunderstood what you said, but I respectfully suggest that you might be misunderstanding the crux of their concern, at least in part. The problem that K+J are highlighting has more to do with the curious importance assigned** to these conversations by Rufo, not by the government. Moreover, this is about *how* these conversations have been singled out and to what end.
Based on Katie's description of Rufo's reporting (and Jesse's dramatic readings), his goal here seems to have been the hyper-sexualization of the content of these conversations. Yeah, it's all super gross and inappropriate, no doubt, but it's not sexual in a prurient way, and it certainly isn't geared toward seeking out sexual acts, either at work or elsewhere. Nevertheless, that is the picture that Rufo wanted to paint, while the prejudicial pink-slipping of the perforated-pelvic-mounded perps on these scandalous grounds was the outcome he sought.
This is borderline sexual harassment training fodder at best. Not all references to procedures being done to naughty parts are themselves naughty. My sense is that what is bothering you and others here is the TRANS-sexual content of these conversation. Hey, it bothers me too. Can't help it! I grew up on "Dude Looks Like a Lady" and "The Crying Game"; like Popeye, I y'am what I y'am. But that doesn't mean my visceral reactions are correct. In fact, I know they're not. I wouldn't be as bothered if I overheard a coupla gals going on about how these new lululemon seams are over-accentuating their camel toe or how the solar-powered Evie pumps feel a bit "too good" sometimes.
But whether it's the unsung conveniences of vaginoplasty, randy breast pumps, or vasectomy commiseration, it all needs to be treated equally. And that goes both ways**; the government can't turn a blind eye to conversations about sex-change procedures while sidelining discussions about penis pump penny stocks or the trials and tribulations of the poofy-pudded yoga pants contingent.
(**) Pun not entirely unintended.
I agree that Rufo is the crux of their concern, but that’s part of what is bothering me and part of why I believe they are over-reading the emails as a refutation of my comment. The issue is that they actually haven’t established that these conversations had “curious importance assigned”, nor have they established that these conversations were “singled out” (well, they were singled out in the sense that they were individually highlighted. Whether they were “singled out” in the sense of being subjected to unfair treatment has not been established).
But J+K very much want it to be true that these conversations were unfairly handled, because it fits their prior that Rufo is a bad actor. So they are letting confirmation bias affect how they read evidence that provides an “out” for the trans talk (maybe lots of inappropriate conversations were going on! Yeah here’s a guy that says unspecified off topic conversations were a problem all the time, that must mean everyone was talking about their dicks!). While applying a much higher level of scrutiny to the Rufo-friendly version of events. (Ooooh his source claimed they said “gangbangs” but didn’t provide a screenshot! What absurd hearsay that no real journalist would *ever* publish (lol)).
Honestly this seems similar to the recent episode with Maurer, where they thought they had a perfect means to mock Musk, but everyone instead was like “wait they groomed and raped how many girls now?!”. This time they thought they had a great reason to rag on Rufo, but the reaction was “wait the spooks were talking about what on work chat?!”. The common thread is, in a rush to go after a favorite lolcow, they badly misjudged how glibly they could get away with covering an underlying issue they know little about, and are now doing a bit of damage control.
Your comment also reflects another problem, the insistence on downplaying the chats with euphemism rather than engaging with the actual language. Even if some references to “procedures” on “naughty parts” might be allowed to slide (and I still believe you are overestimating the degree to which they would be) we are talking about: discussing sexual pleasure from penetration, “butthole zapping”, and a feeling of “euphoria” from no longer having to tuck their dick while peeing. You can’t just justify any conversation by claiming it’s downstream of a medical procedure, therefore fair game.
I would be shocked at a work sanctioned group chat with any intimate discussion of any individual’s medical procedures, because it’s an HR nightmare - they have legal obligations regarding personal information and are on a hair trigger for anything that might threaten that.
I would appreciate if you not project on me your assumptions about my attitude re: trans people. I have no particular feelings about them working at NSA, I’m only bothered in this case by the specific individuals involved seeming to have a serious lack of appropriate boundaries regarding safe-for-work conversations. No, I would not be okay with cis-Alice posting about how great her last piss felt now that she finally got that UTI handled, nor would I be okay with straight-Bob saying that he enjoys getting pegged by his wife again now that his doc zapped the inflamed hemorrhoids off his butt hole.
IF we can establish that similarly work inappropriate conversations were allowed unchecked so long as they weren’t by trans employees, THEN we can rag on Rufo for his inconsistency. Until then all we can say is, yes these were inappropriate, yes Rufo possibly overstate what the quotes meant, and we can argue about whether firing was overkill or not I guess.
You're doubling down in your pursuit of a different debate. This IS about Rufo and it IS NOT about how the government handled these chats. They were very clear that both they and Rufo lacked the awareness necessary to comment on how this was handled _broadly_ or how these conversations stacked up to other conversations had by non-trans employees in the same or similar spaces. This was about how Rufo's manipulation of the content of these conversations was used as a basis for firing these people. That's it.
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But J+K very much want it to be true that these conversations were unfairly handled, because it fits their prior that Rufo is a bad actor.
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Katie admits to that though, so.... this isn't a revelation. And she got push back on it from Jesse, some of which *I* thought was initially unreasonable (was it? maybe a little, but not as much as I initially thought). This was a very nuanced discussion and it did not attempt to obscure Katie's underlying basis. Indeed, she went pretty deep into the origin of her bias in the lead up to her thesis.
The case that Katie very effectively makes is that Rufo's report fits his stated goal -- STATED... dude copped to this a while back -- of altering the narrative on what he regards as progressive cultural excess, be it DEI or trans ideology, neither of which is something that I champion and certainly not something that K+J support.
Again and again, this seems to coming down to is what *you* want to be true. Or maybe a fairer way to say that is that you want to presume a different set of claims against which you can more effectively deploy your preferred arguments.
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This time they thought they had a great reason to rag on Rufo, but the reaction was “wait the spooks were talking about what on work chat?!”.
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No, that was *your* reaction. Is is not THE reaction any more than mine is.
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Your comment also reflects another problem, the insistence on downplaying the chats with euphemism rather than engaging with the actual language. [...] we are talking about: discussing sexual pleasure from penetration, “butthole zapping”, and a feeling of “euphoria” from no longer having to tuck their dick while peeing. You can’t just justify any conversation by claiming it’s downstream of a medical procedure, therefore fair game.
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The euphemism at work here is not "naughty parts", it's "actual language". You are proving Katie's point be repeatedly returning to this angle which is not a complaint about the broad inappropriateness of hyper-personal medical issues -- which includes sexual function, it. just. does. -- but rather a specific objection to one particular class of inappropriate medical issues. NOBODY here is arguing that these conversations were appropriate or that NSA leadership wasn't correct to cite these conversations as abuse of government property (they seemed a bit hesitant, in fact). So what other distinction is there to make? This is Rufo's game and you seem willing and ready to play it.
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I would appreciate if you not project on me your assumptions about my attitude re: trans people
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I'm sure Katie feels the same way. And yet here we are.
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No, I would not be okay with cis-Alice posting about how great her last piss felt now that she finally got that UTI handled, nor would I be okay with straight-Bob saying that he enjoys getting pegged by his wife again now that his doc zapped the inflamed hemorrhoids off his butt hole.
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Based on how you have explained yourself up to this point, I don't think you be okay with either. But I also don't think you'd be as worked up about it. Your willingness to revise and expand the most vulgar, groomer-adjacent language found in those chats proves the point *again* that Rufo's report, as read by Jesse, purposefully missates the nature of these discussions in such a way as to skew the discussion into the specific direction of icky trans sex stuff. You don't seem capable of seeing the difference, so this likely is falling on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, more people have lost their jobs and we're basing our understanding of why this is happening on an unverifiable stream of information from DOGE itself and Enquirer-level sensationalism masquerading as brave reporting.
We have a disagreement about what “the real story” is here. J+K thinks “Rufo is a bad guy” is the real story, I (and others) think it’s “NSA spooks were using government group chats to talk about their genital surgeries in graphic detail”. It’s fine to assign a different level of importance to these things, that doesn’t mean either weighting is objectively wrong. My objection is a concern that J+K are suffering from confirmation bias because of their history with Rufo.
“Actual language” is not euphemism. It’s in the screenshots. If there is any evidence that the screenshots are not genuine, I’ve not seen it and I’ve frankly not even seen any serious discussion that doesn’t presume they are genuine. It’s as “verified” as anything in this whole discussion.
“Revise and expand” “Groomer adjacent” language? I’m just going off the screenshotted quotes, with at most a bit of artistic license in a lame attempt at humor. But butthole zapping is in the quotes! Sexual pleasure from penetration is in the quotes! Euphoric peeing after surgery is in the quotes! I’m not misstating the nature of the quotes (even if Rufo is) because I don’t need to - they are prima facie extremely inappropriate.
Your interpretation requires giving these quotes an additional level of charity and presumption of innocence because they are downstream of gender affirming surgery and therefore, in your opinion, must include sexual discussion. You seem to be asserting any graphic talk about sexual function becomes mere discussion of “personal medical issues” as long as a medical treatment was involved. You’re also baking in a presumption that other hyper-personal medical talk was allowed, without evidence.
You say that “NOBODY here is arguing that these conversations are appropriate”. Well, you certainly seem to be making an effort to minimize their inappropriateness, continually downplaying them as simple clinical discussion. “But what other distinction is there to make?” There is no distinction required, because we have no evidence that any other inappropriate medical talk existed. I am perfectly comfortable saying that anyone else using a government group chat to discuss the details of surgery or medical treatment to their sex organs should be disciplined. Or really any “hyper-personal” medical discussion, but sexual medical discussion is a special case regardless of gender identify or sexual orientation and you can’t pretend it isn’t.
The trans medical discussions are being “singled out” because they are the only similarly inappropriate conversations we know about! The only conversations of any kind we have literal screenshots of. It’s *possible* that other inappropriate talk existed, and it’s *possible* that non-trans persons similarly discussing their genitals would not be similarly disciplined, but that is pure speculation.
As is your presumption of how I’d react to such speculative scenarios, so please stop insisting you know my feelings better than I do.
There’s a world of difference between benign off-topic small talk and graphic discussions about your nether regions.
I don’t have an issue with people commenting on the weather, recommending local pizza places, celebrating the results of a sports game, asking what’s going on with the construction across the street. Normal, inoffensive small talk.
I don’t want to think about anyone’s bodily functions at my job. If your discussions of bodily functions go beyond “I’m heading to the bathroom, could someone monitor this inbox until I get back?” and you’re not in a profession where there are actual work-related reasons to discuss bodily functions, it seems pretty straight-forwardly inappropriate.
The way I think of it is: If Lucy Letby isn’t a uniquely evil angel of death, then the British public need to confront the horrible fact that the NHS is no longer fit for purpose. That is too much for many to take. Rachel Aviv’s article was stunning. There was raw sewage backing up onto the floor of the hospital neonatal unit, for God’s sake.
Absolutely. And some units are so much worse than others - in our local NHS trust of 2 hospitals, one of them is in special measures because of excess mortality in the maternity unit, but the other hospital unit has been held together by scaffolding for years because the victorian architecture is literally crumbling. With family & friends working in the NHS, its all too common to hear stories of severe bullying among staff, scapegoating, and poor patient care. They blame the government for staff morale being low, but its also because the NHS is a monopoly employer that just moves problem staff from one location to another, and the GMC & NMC literally take years to investigate cases of malpractice. My friend has been stalked and harassed by a nurse, as a patient, to the point they couldn't leave the house - the nurse was found guilty by the police & has a criminal record for doing it, but the NMC still hasn't struck them off after over a year because they're still investigating their own "evidence".
the thing is that unfortunately babies die on neonatal units all the time - these babies are really very sick.
But Because random does not mean uniform, it sometimes happens in a way that appears “too clustered” to our dumb ape brains. But in fact that’s just how randomness works. Flip a coin enough times and Sometimes you really do get heads 10 times in a row.
You’ll get runs of 10 heads in a row. Get 100 heads in a row, and it’s much, much more likely that you’ve got a biased coin (it’s literally a one in a nonillion chance, that’s 1 with 30 zeros after it).
Whether 7 dead babies on your watch but no one else’s is “10 heads” or “100 heads” is the question.
Again. across all the hospitals everywhere across a reasonable stretch of time it virtually is guaranteed to happen to some poor nurse. This time it was Letby.
All I’m saying is you’ve got to do the math. “It’s bound to happen sometimes” may or may not be a reasonable defense.
That’s my point. They did do the math, and the people who did the math showed it was like a 1/20 chance this could happen by chance. Which is pretty dang likely. Unfortunately the jury was not shown the correct stats, but cherry picked ones only.
I recommend reading the New Yorker article if you haven’t. It really is very good.
Plus the note saying I’m evil.
I don't know what more people need - she literally wrote "i killed them on purpose" for god's sake
In the context of her therapist telling her to write down the worst darkest thoughts she’d ever had and simultaneously also writing “I didn’t kill them” etc.
Some people feel guilty even when they're innocent. And people make false confessions for all sorts of reasons.
The degree to which you find the note definitive kind of calls into question your utter certainty about the case from listening to a podcast, IMO.
The thing actually is, that at the Countess babies didn't die all the time usually, and that's why people there got concerned when they started to drop like flies.
They did though. An average of 2 is still going to yield 6 sometimes. Especially because you have to consider that at SOME HOSPITAL SOMEWHERE (with similar death rates) that’s going to happen.
Again. It’s our dumb ape brains at fault here. Coincidences literally do happen; at predictable intervals.
I salute you. People generally can’t even handle discussions of overlapping distributions. This is a subset of that, where you’re basically saying “the tails exist.”
There are also going to be some neonatal units that see zero deaths, and absent any supporting evidence we can’t attribute that to a miracle working nurse that was attending to every surviving baby.
You said "babies die all the time" on these wards. But you are wrong, they don't, that's the point. Our ape brains may be dumb sometimes but if something is unusual it's worth checking out, and when it was checked out here they discovered a mountain of evidence against Letby. Listen to the podcast with all the evidence from the trial if you want to actually understand the case and not just have an opinion because you read one or two shallow, sensationalist articles.
Yeah there are sometimes weird patterns in randomness.
But if we’re flipping a coin and it’s pretty much 50/50 and then I pull out a coin and get 10 heads in a row and then we go back to the old coin and it’s back to 50/50… it’s certainly possible it’s a coincidence but the better inference is that there’s something weird with my coin.
Here the increase in deaths started when she qualified to work with infants and stopped once she was removed. Again, this isn’t open and shut proof (maybe she was really bad at her job. Maybe the extra attention fixed the problem - and they also did change the age of babies they’d take etc.) but this certainly isn’t a case where the pattern means nothing.
It is. If you have a million hospitals each with 100 nurses all acting identically over 20 years, ONE of them is all but guaranteed to get a streak this bad.
So, I did some math to get a sense of the numbers we’d be talking about here.
Let’s assume that Letby had a 1/5 chance of being on shift at any particular time (that’s about right if she worked 3 12 hour shifts a week plus some allowance for vacation, sick days, and other duties). And let’s for the moment grant the prosecution version of the case: there were exactly 24 adverse events.
The probability of Letby being on shift for all 24 events is 1/5^24, or one in 600 quadrillion. That isn’t a needle in a haystack, that is “a single cancer cell among the normal cells of 20,000 humans”. If that’s the “right” probability - she’s guilty as hell.
BUT the New Yorker article notes the “Texas sharpshooter” fallacy - it looks like the prosecution may have excluded some number of other events without a good reason for doing so, some of which Letby was not present for.
The article didn’t give an exact number, but let’s say there were 50 events total and Letby was on shift for at least 24. In that case we need to calculate a cumulative binomial probability, which you can do with a calculator like this one: https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial
We input 0.2 (1/5) for the probability of success, 50 for the number of trials, and 24 for the number of successes, and the calculator gives us a cumulative probability of X >= 24 of 0.00001, or 1 in 100,000. Still very unlikely, but across large populations, 1 in 100,000 events happen all the time. Not guilty.
Where it really gets tricky is that we can’t just simplify the whole problem that way, because we have the confluence of at least 2 or 3 improbable events. First, that Letby was on shift for an unusually high number of events. Second, her hospital had an abnormally high number of deaths that year. They averaged 2 or 3 but had 8 - we’d need more data to determine how unlikely that was, and stats with small numbers are always dangerous, but naively that seems like a “high sigma”, i.e. very rare, event. Third, the deaths went back down after she left. No idea how to calculate that probability but we have an alternative explanation anyway - the unit was downgraded from level 2 to level 1 so it saw fewer challenging cases. Maybe we should ignore that.
Anyway let’s say 8 deaths is a 4 sigma high event - that would mean it happens 0.003% of the time. Multiply that by the 0.00001 binomial above and we get 1 in 30 billion and oh shit she’s guilty again.
But all of this is EXTREMELY sensitive to your assumptions and how you state the problem, so ultimately I don’t think the probabilities are all that definitive here, on their own.
The British public already knows the NHS is in shambles and dangerously broken down, because we live here and it’s our health system, and there have been plenty of high profile patient safety scandals. It’s one of the biggest political issues in the country. Your perspective is completely distorted because your knowledge of the subject comes exclusively from a single American reporter talking about a single sensational case.
What's irritating is that it's proffered as if one or the other, it's not. Both can be true at the same time. In reading the court trancripts there were untold (and some told) red flags, many whistleblowers who were ignored for years. CEO Tony Chambers stalling police and investigations, then walking scot-free of all culpability is striking enough. Also missing here is any real delve into Letby's psychological makeup; yes she looked 'normal' in her posted pics, but her stoic behaviour in court other than physically leaving her chair and desolving into (the only) emotional display of hysterical tears when the doctor she was potentially having an affair with spoke, has some bearing - this was not a stable individual.
Oh, I rolled my eyes when Katie went on about how ‘normal’ Letby seemed as though it mattered, and I have little interest in how ‘weird’ she might have seemed in court. People are terrible at ‘reading’ someone’s interior mental state from stuff like that; you might as well read her horoscope.
It's worth mentioning that Letby wasn't actually that normal - she was considered "cold" by her assessor when she was completing nursing training, and seemed to lack the ability to pick up on non-verbal signals of anxiety/distress from parents, suggesting a lack of empathy.
Agreed Her parent's actions, too, both before and after the trial are telling. My irritation with the conspiracists is not about strong feelings one way or the other regarding Letby. What inflames me are two things; the dissemination of facts and evidence. I've been listening to Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator), and her most vehement warning are the dangers of fracturing a shared reality. If there are no 'facts', it creates a vaccum for anything at all, and it's never good. I also detest bullies. That these poor broken people are being harassed and having to relive their worst moments is appalling. I recall the same with Nicola Bulley (if you're in the UK, you'll remember it). She fell into a river during a morning riverside walk and drowned. It was clear that that was what happened, yet all these conspiracists came out of their basements saying everything from that it was a police cover-up to her 'husband did it'. I'm surprised they didn't blame the family dog. They harassed him into hiding, this grief-stricken man. Disgusting.
Cards on the table, I think the Letby conviction is probably is unsafe and won’t hold up. That said, I can’t stand the online peanut gallery either, of people with no accountability or skin in the game making themselves the protagonists on the story on online fora. The establishment fucks up all the time but compared to these self-important idiots it’s a paragon of competence. If you let them try the job themselves they’d create a dumpster fire within ten minutes, which come to think of it is the exact situation currently enveloping the US government.
Exactly .
The sewage issue is a red herring - children collapsing didn't even match up to the times the plumber was called to deal with problems in the hospital. This is detailed in this post https://www.reddit.com/r/lucyletby/comments/164jc43/plumbing_on_the_ward_the_plumbers_evidence_and/. Listen to the Trial of Lucy Letby podcast from start to finish, with an open mind - the case is very complex and there is an awful lot of evidence that Letby did it.
I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship between the sewage and the deaths - rather, it’s indicative of how troubled and decrepit some of these hospitals are.
Either the old plumbing was a factor in the case or it wasn't. The Countess had its structural and managerial issues but the reason people started to get worried about babies dying there was because it was very unusual for them to die at such a high rate there. As one of the consultants said - the babies they had there were born, cared for, got well and went home. Deaths were rare and tragic. So many babies dying in such a short time was really, really unlikely, and things like plumbing didn't explain it. What did explain it was the nurse who was witnessed standing over a baby bleeding from its mouth, doing nothing, or another time over another baby who was rapidly desaturating, again doing nothing, a nurse who falsified notes, who seemed animated after babies died, who took home the confidential medical papers of dead children (a huge no-no), who made bereaved parents uncomfortable with inappropriate comments, who never seemed to be affected by the deaths the way her colleagues were, and who wrote "I am evil I did this" and "I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough" in private notes at home.
Listen to all the evidence. She did it. So did Adnan Syed and so did the guy from making a murderer, if you actually look at all the evidence and not just the stuff cherry picked to make a sensationalised headline grabber. I'm tired of journalists challenging convictions because it makes a good story, there are families here who lost beloved children. It's not a game.
SO many things were left out from this podcast, which deserved a far deeper and more honest dive - including the laughable comment by Jesse that he 'thanks god' he's not in the UK given the current shitshow the US has become. They left so very much out; how Letby stalked the parents of the babies she murdered (in the court transcripts) on facebook; how she took home (confidential) records of the vitals - bloodwork, oxygen levels, etc, of some of the babies she murdered and stored them in a pretty little flowered tote bag under her bed. How babies were found with breathing tubes dislodged that they, as preemies, could never have removed themsevles, insulin levels high enough to kill with Lucy being the only attendant. How she 'checked' on babies at night that had been removed, with good reason, from her care. This is the worst reporting I've seen either of them do, sorry guys, I generally love your work, but it is. Btw, I live in the UK, Rachel's article was NOT blocked, we could read it easily - there was a whole reddit thread disecting it. They did try to block it, not against fReE sPeEch, but to avoid prejudicing a jury - at a trial that lasted 10 months!!
Lastly, sneering at that there is 'empathy' for the musically named Lucy Letby because of her looks shows even more ignorance; of COURSE it's because she's young, pretty and blonde - the majority of those who defended her were single 'protective' middle-aged men. Same ones had zero sympathy though, for Shemima Begum. Pretty little blonde Lucy could 'never' harm a flea, right? Jesse might want to (or not) know there's a whole SPEED DATING club dedicated to 'Lucy Letby is Innocent' believers, that's how nuts these people are. I could go on and on. We studied it, hundreds of students, for an ethics and behavioural science class and let me tell you, they left no stone unturned. I feel bad for the parents of these poor babies, their lives are changed forever and this conspiratorial bullshit keeps cropping up, they get phone calls, chased in cars, all for the love of a pretty little blonde thing who yes, was convicted for 7, but harmed, that we know of, dozens, and is still under investigation for two more.
Yes, rules about what the press cannot report and what cannot be said online are there to preserve the chance for a fair trial, because journalists are not legal professionals and don't have the right to influence the jury. The rules aren't dumb, and when I look at what an insane circus high profile American trials become I can't believe anyone would think that that is a better or fairer system.
100%.
Indeed, look at the OJ and Depp v Heard trials, utterly crazy level of undue influence pushed because of the publicity.
The Amber Heard trial immediately sprang to my mind too
The New Yorker article casts some serious doubt on the insulin theory, in my opinion (there were babies with high insulin that Letby was not present for, and these were ignored by the prosecution. The test that “proved” it had to be artificial insulin was explicitly not capable of testing for that, and this sample was never retested. Also, I think only one of the high insulin babies actually died?).
The prosecution never seemed had a clear and consistent theory of how exactly she was killing these babies. They’d pivot from theory to theory, method to method, even changing their theories after one was proven wrong (e.g. the test that *proved* Letby injured the kid, that turned out to be taken before she was on shift). No answer for clear alternative explanations - e.g. gas in a scan could easily be postmortem, the first baby that was probably injured by a tube inserted too far by a junior doctor, etc. Just a lot of “well she *could* have done this, and the baby died, so clearly that’s what happened”.
The “stalking” seems to have amounted to Letby searching their public Facebook profiles, among thousands of other Facebook searches she did.
I’ll grant the taking records home is weird, although by that point she seems to have been pretty messed up mentally from the string of deaths, whether she did it or not. Not sure why her choice of folder makes a damn bit of difference.
Anyway there’s way too much out there and I don’t intend to make myself a scholar on this case to the degree necessary to be “sure”, I just want folks to know this comment is substantially underselling the potential issues with the prosecution’s case. There are reasons other than “Letby is white” that UK public opinion swung toward her lately.
Also, sequester your damn juries, don’t threaten foreign journalists with arrest. Especially when your press was allowed to run damaging articles about Letby as soon as she was arrested anyway, prejudicing the potential jury pool from the get go. You saw the article anyway, so it’s clearly not even effective. You’re censoring the free press for no reason. Jesse is right to thank god that he lives in a country where the government doesn’t threaten, harass, and arrest him for doing his job (too bad about Bluesky though).
So tiresome when people speculate, as you've just shown here brilliantly; this is exactly why armchair 'sleths' should be banned from strongly-held opinions - it muddies both fact and evidence. Point in case; they're not 'my damned juries', I'm not British. And of course American exceptionalism rears it's ugly head, as ever - you literally have a 'president' threatening to arrest protesters, violating their first amendment rights. So what, everyone else's govt threats are pearl-clutching but your own? America has become the butt-joke of the planet alienating allies and cosying up to dictators, sit down with this shit, seriously. So which is it, either Britain has censorship in free press or they're allowed to run 'damaging articles'. If you'd actually been in the UK, you'd see they clearly print whatever the hell they want, much to the population's detriment as we saw with false claims about Brexit, you literally have no clue.
As you say, our President is violating our free speech laws. He's been complaining about these laws since before he first ran for office. He personally opposes both the spirit and letter of our first constitutional amendment.
I think you could fairly accuse an American of hypocrisy if they criticize other country's attitudes towards speech while supporting what Trump is up to (JD Vance being the poster child), but I doubt you'll find many of those people in this Substack.
THANKYOU! I found Jesse's comments, including 'what a dumb country' - which didn't seem to be a joke - actually pretty insulting. Yep, America's free speech laws are admirable and hard won. But do J and K really think that the UK restricts trial reporting because we're stupid drones who enjoy being under the thumb of big government? It may not suit their worldview, but there are what we consider good reasons to do it.
And do they really believe that UK judges and juries are idiots? This was a TEN month trial (plus the many inquiries/reports etc into Letby) during which every little detail was discussed. And, despite that, the decision might have been wrong! People may have lied or been mistaken! Letby might be innocent! But for J and K to have such a facile understanding of the trial (to assume it came down to mere statistics) suggests a very poor opinion of UK law in general. And that makes me sad.
His comments about the UK were so obviously jokes. He actually had a lot of great one-liners in this episode, like “That’s infanticide—the *worst*”
Giving Jesse the benefit of the doubt, it was probably a joke! But it didn't sound that way at all.
I mean, they have a president threatening judges, journalists and pretty much everyone else with imprisonment - someone deliberately fostering hate and fear. He's threatened to arrest and/or deport students exercising their codified rights to free speech - literally what the first amendment is all about - and (gasp) 'prohibits' them wearing masks. But yeah, every other country is the problem. What you wrote is exactly why I was incensed, 'facile' is the perfect word. Don't worry about opinions about the UK, it's not everyones, and I suspect a lot of Americans are defensive of late given the current insanity, they're going through their own growing pains being universally reviled. But yes, it makes me sad too.
Yeah there's absolutely nothing the armchair experts have posted that wasn't available to the jury, they saw all the evidence (she was defended by a KC, not some low rent solicitor) and were convinced of her guilt. Disappointing episode tbh
wow
Just like the UK court system was wrong not to be more skeptical of the importance placed on the statistical analysis of the prosecution's experts, the UK public would be wise to not overreact in another direction by declaring the NHS unfit across the board and ripe for a good DOGE'ing down.
Personal connection to this episode: my 72-year-old mum has been on the “Lucy Letby is innocent” train for years now and got permanently banned from r/LucyLetby for questioning the verdict after getting into several arguments with Gulley (FyrestarOmega). My mum rules, obviously.
"... Because the intelligence community is uniquely positioned to keep the president in check"
Ding ding ding, that email came from one of the #resist types that probably posted in those chat rooms, and is now out of a job.
The intelligence community, in fact, has no role in keeping any branch of the government in check. It is very specifically not included in the "Executive, judicial, legislative" system of checks and balances.
How would the Intel community, who are explicitly not decision-makers for the most part, limit any power of the government? If your answer is " Leaking to the media/congress", then you have to admit that there is no role for Intel to keep anyone in check aside from interference.
If you think it's fine for the Intel community to leak information for " the greater good", then you also believe it was fine when the FBI came out before the 2016 election to announce they were investigating Hilary, and I doubt most people now arguing in favor of the Intel community leaking liked that very much.
And as for the political leanings of the people who work in those communities, they are absolutely to the left of most people. The Intel community has been explicitly trying to recruit them for the past 10 years, but especially the last four. No one remembers the CIA's "I am a cisgender millennial with generalized anxiety disorder" recruitment ad?
It sounds silly, but when Katie and Jesse quoted this person saying “folks,” I thought: this guy’s a Dem. It just seems like a word only left-leaning people use, unless they are a southern character in a cheesy movie.
I wanted to post this as well. The IC are the opposites of a check on the executive, they are agents of the executive, with a duty to carry out the executive’s will. If they don’t like what the executive is doing, they can resign, or just passively do a bad job and hopefully be fired.
The executive isn’t a check on itself, the other two co-equal branches check it, and they all check one another.
Yeah that was a dead giveaway! Dead giveway...
Actually, former military guys are extremely common in the furry community, for the same reason that former military guys are very common in MtF communities. 1) It's a career path that attracts shape-rotator types, the kind of geeks who get super into online fandom and 2) the military is a draw for men who are looking to "prove" their masculinity, i.e., gay men and future MtFs; these types of men are basically the backbone of the furry community. It's not at all a coincidence that most of the guys from the Tranch were furries and former military.
I'd be willing to bet, dollars to donuts, that the incidence of veterans is higher among furries than among the general population.
So it’s like the Beatles growing beards to make up for all the floral blouses or whatever
This is going into my list of most favorite barpod comments ever.
❤️
I get your point regarding most of the Tranch, but imagining Kev in particular in the military is *high-larious.*
As an aside here, recruiters seem to make a hobby of trying to pull people in as they're heading towards the offices of recruiters from other branches (where I was in Utah, they were all in a single strip mall), and when I was headed to talk with the Air Force recruiter, a Marine recruiter stepped in an gave a very masculinity-focused advertisement (be tough, get all the girls, etc).
I didn't think of myself as gay back then, but somehow that didn't particularly land for me. I joined so I could learn Chinese in a stable position that would give me time to get my feet under me and figure out what I was actually doing with my life. I imagine "proving" masculinity does hit harder for some people, but at least when it comes to Air Force intel, it's mostly just a bunch of geeks and nerds whose plan A paths fell through somewhere, with all the hobbies you'd expect from that crowd.
Interesting insight. Thanks, Trace. I have a geeky family member (he's into Star Trek, comic books, etc.) who joined the Air Force in the 80s because he was interested in engineering, but couldn't afford to go to college. He definitely falls into the former "shape rotator" category of veteran. I wouldn't say his plan A path fell through, so much as it was never presented as an option to him.
I also went to college with a gay veteran who told me he enlisted because he wanted to get away from the small town he grew up in, and like my family member, he couldn't afford college. He was very normie and conventionally masculine, though.
Obviously I wouldn't want to intrude on American "freedoms", but as a Canadian listener whose country seems to be in the bullseye of a new wave of American imperialism, I'm getting really sick of listening to this podcast deriding the political systems and laws of foreign nations that are far more stable and functional than America is proving itself to be.
J+K can say whatever they like, but I can't be the only one finding it off-putting in the current political climate.
Deriding laws that criminalize speech is always the correct thing to do. The United States is better than any other country on the planet on this issue. Our legal system is superior to one that jails people for being mean or for reporting on current events. The UK, Canada, et al. should continue to be ridiculed as long as they continue to enforce these indefensible authoritarian policies.
(To forestall any whataboutism: Go ahead and bash any US policy or action that violates people’s freedoms. God knows they exist. But the above is no less true.)
No country in the world, America included, has fully free speech, as that would allow threats and intimidation, etc. There is always a balance to be had. What annoys me are pompous Americans showing up to a different country, not understanding the history, cultural context, etc. and making sweeping pronouncements that they have the balance right and that if only you poor, ignorant fools would be more like us, how much better off you would be!
JD Vance can keep his asinine opinions to himself when speaking to world leaders, particularly when his motive for doing so is to intimidate other countries into changing their regulations to suit the business interests of Silicon Valley oligarchs like Zuck and Musk.
America has the fewest exceptions, which is why it’s the best country on this issue.
As for “not understanding the history,” perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the idea of free speech as we understand it was created by English and Scottish people, who I imagine would be horrified by the illiberal clowns trampling all over everything they believed in.
No “cultural context” justifies imposing a Stasi-esque regime of speech laws. This isn’t about Americans paternalistically telling others what’s good for them, it’s a simple matter of right and wrong. Freedom is right. Repression is wrong.
When you defend the unjust laws that make you less free than your American counterparts, you sound like an Afghan girl talking about how actually it’s a good thing that she’s not allowed to go to school. (You need to understand the cultural context!) It’s bizarre. If you want to hit back at chauvinistic Americans, “actually I like my lack of freedom” is a really weird way of doing it.
I'm not here to defend every instance of infringement on free speech mentioned on this show - in fact many of them are beyond the pale for my preferences. However, I can see perfectly legitimate reasons why Germany would outlaw Nazi imagery, and perfectly legitimate reasons why courts may suppress the publication of details of current trials (e.g. name of the assailant if that reveals the name of the victim, especially if the victim is a minor), etc. All of these are restrictions on free speech that I'm personally fine with. But I'm not arrogant enough to think that my personal approach is the objectively correct one.
By and large I prefer the Australian system to the American one for many reasons - but a proper constitutional protection of free speech is one thing I think we need desperately. Unfortunately there’s no appetite for it because there haven’t been any outrageous cases to provoke it, and most Australians assume we have more robust protections than we do (because there is a reasonably strong norm of free speech).
I find it quite refreshing when they cover stories from here in the UK - I like hearing how other countries and cultures perceive events here. We can't allow the world to revolve around trump for 4 years, or we're just giving him the excess attention he craves.
I’d love to hear about literally anything besides Trump, even more diaper or pedo stories.
ABDL furry shit may be all that stands between us and complete despair.
ADBL and furry stuff makes me despair more than Trump.
So true
As a Brit, I couldn't agree more with our good hosts: UK laws around speech and journalistic freedom are terrible and oppressive. Americans, be happy that posting a youtube video of your dog doing a nazi salute won't result in a criminal conviction, and that anonymous complaints about offensive twitter posts won't lead to the police knocking at the door.
If Jesse were British, he'd probably be doing as much hard time as Letby based on his twitter malfeasance alone.
I only managed to read the New Yorker article after scouring the internet for crude phone pics of the magazine pages, like someone back in the Soviet days getting a hold of crumpled handwritten copies of Western literature.
Tangential question: I read UK football news, and whenever there's a case of someone doing or saying something offensive (e.g. racial epithets from the crowd, nationalist epithets from one player to another, rando on Twitter publicly attacking a player), I cannot find any press outlet reporting what the offensive thing actually was. And I do understand why, for reasons of discretion, some of the major papers would choose to leave this out. But it seems like no one reports it, not even half-censored versions. Is this a strongly adhered to journalistic convention, or would the papers be putting themselves in legal jeopardy for publishing the offensive thing?
As a Toronto-based Liverpool fan, I read such stories too and am confused. They never report what was said. And why do you never see such stories about North American sports. Are Canadian and American fans so much better behaved that they never attack players online? I see such stories from the UK and file them under, "That Would Never Happen Here."
The reporting restrictions around this case were ridiculous. Not to mention the lack of legal recourse Letby currently has. If it takes Americans pointing that out, so be it, they’re allowed to point out the glaring flaws in the UK’s legal system despite their own country’s problems! (I am half British and not American, and I was disappointed and annoyed by the defensiveness with which many British commentators reacted to the New Yorker story.)
The reporting restrictions were only the normal reporting restrictions cases face in the uk. The babies identities were protected and opinion pieces can’t be written while the case or appeals were ongoing. There were daily blogs factually presenting every piece of evidence. I followed them really closely and tbh I’m a bit disappointed with how the evidence is presented here because there’s so much more.
I know they were the normal restrictions, that’s how British people were defending it: “oh but you Americans don’t understand, these are just the rules here!” as if the fact that the rules are bad makes it better? No, it makes it worse! My problem with the restrictions has nothing to do with the babies’ identities being known, that has no bearing on whether she’s guilty, it was the fact that until the retrial was over journalists weren’t even allowed to question whether the initial verdict was based on sound evidence.
I’ve also read and listened to a lot more about the case than was talked about in the show and I think it was a fair summary, but then I also am pretty convinced Letby is innocent.
Do you understand contempt of court laws? They’re actually in place for a really excellent reason- to make sure people get a fair trial. You know how in the US where people are tried and convicted in the court of public opinion before they even see inside a courtroom? Yeah we don’t do that here. So while a case or appeal is going on, journalists can only report facts, they can’t give opinions
I understand the rule, and I lived in the UK for 10 years as an adult. I can actually know about it and just disagree with you. In this case “the rules” meant tabloids could write 1000 articles about how she’s a monster and Private Eye could write 0 articles about how maybe the evidence that any of the babies were murdered at all was quite weak and I think that’s bad! In the US the former would still have happened but the latter would have been able to happen sooner, plus she would have far more rights to appeal than she does in the UK. A lot of things are fucked up in the US (and again, I am not American, don’t live there, and don’t particularly care about defending their legal system) but I don’t believe the UK’s legal system is objectively better than America’s.
But if you think Lucy Letby actually got a fair (re)trial as a result of the contempt of court laws, I don’t think there’s any point discussing this because we’re not going to agree on anything.
This looks to me like nationalistic defensiveness in the face of legitimate criticism and humour.
The internet is awash with Canadians who think they are the main characters in the story of America's crumbling into a political and economic hellscape.
Or perhaps Canadians are the main characters in their own story of a foreign leader who is threatening to annex them.
“Cet animal est très méchant, Quand on l'attaque il se défend.”
The world is awash with exceptionalistic, ignorant and arrogant Americans who think they can bully other nations while their bloviated idiotic man-child president cosies up to murderous dictators. Other countries, including Canada, standing up for themselves isn't the damned problem when they're literally under threat by that same political and economic hellscape that wants to economically damage it. What other fucking response to it could there possibly be?
As an American, I hope to hell the Canadians get to be the main characters, if it means they end up humiliating Donald Trump in his stupid crusade to start trade wars with everyone.
We definitely have a lot of problems right now, but one problem we have fortunately less of than the U.K. for sure does is judges telling reporters they can't talk about something. This episode has a great compare/contrast on that issue. The entire news industry in England was forbidden from reporting on a case of immense public interest, and an almost certainly innocent woman was given a whole life sentence to the applause of the public until the ban on reporting was lifted. Meanwhile across the pond, an internet spat wound up with a judge banning one (admittedly obsessive) person from making comments on the internet about another person (who on this subject is definitely a public figure), and a massive apparatus of speech protection jumped in to rectify that. Donald Trump is a sonofabitch, but that is true along with the fact that we've just got way better speech laws here than in the U.K.
I agree with most of what you wrote here, but just to clarify, the news industry in England were allowed to report on the case during trial, so long as they didn't report information that was excluded from the trial. Still too restrictive for my taste, but it wasn't a complete news blackout. You're absolutely right though that a lot of pro-Letby information was censored during trial on the grounds that it wasn't part of the official record.
Please no one ever bully Jesse out of his top of the episode stories, they are always so good. Same with Katie!!
The skiing story has me nearly in tears. Oh, Jesse.
So, just because I randomly heard Katie discussing that trace wasn’t your typical military guy.
Mormons are on the whole a very patriotic group. It doesn’t strike me as odd at all that trace would be in the military.
Also, there's a massive amount of Mormons and ex Mormons in Intel because they're one of the few demographics where the kind of young men who would be interested in that work have no history with the devil's lettuce.
I would imagine that some have a leg up with languages after their missionary work.
The odds of a normal looking white dude that randomly speaks a language fluently that originates halfway across the planet being Mormon, or at least formerly Mormon, are hilariously high.
They generally, don’t drink, do drugs or any other risk taking activities that law enforcement and intelligence services screen out for.
Exactly! That's why there's so many of them in 3 letter agencies. This is not a criticism - they're just, in general, much less vulnerable to the usual kinds of blackmail.
Unless it’s about soaking
Very true.
Especially since he was in the Air Force. It’s the hardest to get into for a reason, most of the nerdy guys (said with love) end up there.
Air Force ROTC was huge with engineering students at my college. Definitely an overlapping demographic with furries/MTF
The Adams v Gulley shitfight was absolutely classic BaRpod stuff, and I’m not at *all* shocked that it turned out Adams was insane, paranoid and violent. The thing about the pro- and anti-Letby fandoms is that they’re both composed of the same kind of mentally unwell true crime obsessives.
There was a tragic and complicated incident in my area some years ago, involving an unusually eccentric family. Someone(s) in the family were running several Facebook profiles posting prolifically, accusing various entities of culpability (note: bad idea, don't do this.) A news article mentioned the intense interest this was generating in a true crime forum, and being slightly acquainted with some of the principal characters I thought I'd check it out, and HOLY CANNOLI, the discourse was so unhinged, I could not nope out fast enough.
I'm a true crime podcasts listener, though mostly interested in cons and fraud, not violent crimes. Maybe that was why this seemed so off to me, it was mostly speculating on motive, based on...not much evidence. You don't get that with fraud, the intent is a given.
Yes, fraud is my favorite kind of true crime! Not only is it usually not violent, but parsing the manipulative strategies of the fraudster is fascinating. I also like to pretend I'm not susceptible--but we all are !
Yes, same here. Not really interested in sadists or serial killers. Any recommendations? I am enjoying Queen of the Con at the moment. Crimetown may be one of my top five of all time, along with The Dream (MLMs). I also like The Opportunist, and Criminal with Phoebe Judge. And all the Theranos, NXVIM..
I'll check out Queen of the Con and the Opportunist. Gosh--there's Bad Blood, Chameleon, Conspirituality, A Little Bit Culty (lots of MLMs), Exit Scam, The Grift, The Lazarus Heist, The Missing Cryptoqueen, Oh No Ross and Carrie, Persona: The French Deception, Ponzi Supernova, A Very British Cult--not all of these are great so YMMV!
Trust Me is my go-to for cults, I'll check out some of the others. I loved Exit Scam. I listened to much of Oh No but along with Behind the Bastards and Sawbones, I think I drifted away when it was apparent they could poke holes in the logic of everything but The One Thing. I also like Scam Goddess, occasionally. Crypto Island and WeCrashed were good.
We are certainly seeing both types of obsessives in this thread.
I'm in the UK, I've just finished listening to this, and one of the most horrifying parts of this case for me was the sentencing - a whole life order without parole, for a case based on circumstantial evidence. These "victims" were already incredibly unstable, unwell babies with a tiny chance of survival. Compare this to Axel Rudakubana, who stabbed 3 little girls to death at a dance class and critically injured many more, and had ricin in his home - he's on a long sentence but not a life order because he was 17, not 18+. On both cases, the online discussion has deliberately been targeted and stifled by the British state, blaming "prejudicial" reporting, even though some aspects brought out in online discussion forums have been proven to be true. And in both cases, it is the British state defending massive mistakes and underfunding in state organisations - the National Health Service, and counter-terrorism police & MI5.
Nadine, listen to the Trial of Lucy Letby podcast with every piece of evidence against her. You will understand why the whole life order was imposed. There are miscarriages of justice in the British legal system - this is not one of them.
That's your opinion. I'd rather listen to the opinions of the panel of experts in their field who have said this could be an unsafe conviction. A whole life order is completely unnecessary - I could understand not being allowed to practice medicine again due to a breakdown in trust, if the conviction is overturned, but the whole life order has been misused, she's not an imminent danger to the wider public.
There were many experts called in the trial itself - neonatologists, haematologists, paediatric endocrinologists, forensic pathologists. Most of Lee's explanations for the deaths were already discussed in court and ruled out as implausible. The only single piece of new evidence he offered was his own insistence that skin discoloration is not seen in venous air embolisms - but he left out an example that should have been in his review, from a study by Prof Johan Smith, an expert in the field, who described exactly that in a case of venous embolism.
Even if I agreed with you over the verdict, I still think the Whole Life Order is cruel and unnecessary punishment. There are rapists and paedophiles who have been given suspended sentences with no jail time, and really violent homicides including those linked to organised crime that still didn't get a WLO. Its inconsistent and based on public outcry rather than justice being served.
Agree, sentencing often seems senseless in the UK. I think the remedy is to properly issue murderers, rapists and paedophiles with long custodial sentences though, not to let a baby killer off with a lenient sentence. But we can agree to disagree and I appreciate your good faith response :)
You too! :-)
I was excoriated here for musing on the purely circumstantial conviction of Alex Murdaugh, to the point where I was pedantically explained-to what circumstantial evidence is. Yeah I know what it is, it’s just remarkable, ok? Rant over; good points.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have much patience for Americans and free speech defenders (which I would generally count myself as) condemning our court reporting rules. Everyone kind of seems to know that sensationalist trial-by-tabloid is a bad thing, so forcing the media to report responsibly in ways that won’t prejudice the jury (and lead to high profile trials collapsing) is completely reasonable. It’s also a fundamentally self-limiting restriction: the trial *will* end, at which point everyone can say what they like. Enough of the dudgeon when some American publication horns in on a British case and tries to tell everyone what the jury should be finding while the trial’s ongoing.
Nonsense, and in this particular case, utterly ridiculous. The British press has spent years publishing articles on the Letby case, all of them freely available to the British public, right now, a google search away. Of course, it's mostly articles painting Letby as a villain, offering information much of which we now know to be misleading or illegitimate. It's funny how a ban only came for an article that posed a serious challenge to prosecutor's case against her.
No, the appeal trial completed and the restrictions lifted, because they only apply during a trial. That’s an essential part of how they work; how do you not understand that?
Edit: just remembered, it wasn’t an appeal trial, it was a separate trial for one of the murder charges that had been broken out from the main set for some reason.
As I say above, reporting during the trial is a public benefit (I'd go as far as to say a right), of dubious net cost to the proceedings (the intent is to protect the jury from prejudice, I would say they simply freeze in time any existing prejudice), and a fiction to enforce in any case.
It was retried because the jurors couldn't come to agreement in the first trial. There were several counts where they didn't agree, but the prosecution decided to retry only one of them.
Also, actually think this through, would you, assuming everything you say is true. All those articles biased against Letby in the press weren’t biased because of court reporting restrictions, but because the press saw it as good business to demonise her. Removing the reporting restrictions removes them for everyone: you don’t just get Rachel Aviv riding in on a white horse to silence everyone with the truth, you get every single tabloid free to rake up all the muck they can find with their own ‘independent investigation’ and then spray it across the headlines. Is this making the problem you identify better, or worse?
To be fair, the idea of reporting restrictions seems reasonable. I would argue that they aren't as beneficial as they seem and for that reason shouldn't weigh against the public good of press freedom and access to information. In this specific case, the media has already painted an unremittingly damning image of Letby. Any jury has already been prejudiced, realistically the only effect of new reporting could be to make it less negative (that turned out to be true). One could think of the opposite scenario, but that just argues that the net cost or benefit of retrictions are zero. Not worth the cost to the public right to information. There will be shady tabloids, there will also be investigative journalism that can do nothing but aid the course of justice.
And in an age of nearly unlimited access to information anywhere in the world, the idea of blocking all information is a fiction. I'd rather have all of the press reporting, not just a selection of foreign sources. Let the crown sequester the jury if they think it's so important rather than try to quarantine the rest of the world.
But it’s not really “quarantine” of information, reporting of active trials still occurs, it’s that the reporting has to be limited to what’s being discussed in court in front of the jury. There’s sometimes additional reporting restrictions enforced during cases - for example if a defendant is to stand trial again for a different crime. And the press is entitled to appeal against reporting restrictions during a court case.
I’m a former newspaper reporter - to get a journalism qualification in the UK you need to know the law around court reporting - and how to appeal against it. In the main I support our contempt of court laws, generally the public’s desire for tittle tattle doesn’t override the need for a fair justice system.
Are you calling the New Yorker piece "tittle tattle"? That's my point, it's not just tabloids, it's also important journalism, and the timely communication of information often matters. The contribution to society of press freedom isn't just titillation.
It’s rather hard to draft reporting restrictions that only apply to ‘tittle tattle’ and not good, responsible journalism, and all the benefits of press freedom can be enjoyed in full once the trial is over: the only demand of the reporting restrictions is that while the case is being decided in court, the press stick to reporting the case put before the jury, rather than effectively trying to decide the case themselves in the public media. It’s not a particularly onerous requirement, it certainly hasn’t suppressed scrutiny of the Letby case, and again I think if the rules were laxer the results would be *far* worse for Letby than the current system.
But that’s exactly my issue, the tabloid muckraking was all allowed prior to the trial, and it was mostly more good-faith stuff that actually got squashed by the reporting restrictions.
Show me an example of the tabloid muck-raking you mean, then, because they’re strictly bound by the same rules as Rachel Aviv. Which is why they sensationalise the case as has been put before the jury, whereas Aviv effectively constructed her own epic case for the defence outside of court procedure and rules. The tabloids are certainly not allowed to consult medical experts to provide interpretations of evidence the way Aviv did.
The New Yorker article mentions that multiple outlets published reporting on the case right after she was arrested and again after she was released on bail. These included quotes from e.g. other patients from Countess. Perhaps it was wrong of me to call these muckraking, but it’s unclear to me why these *wouldn’t* be prejudicial to a possible jury pool while Aviv’s article *was*.
Fortunately we have a body of law clearly setting out what you can and can’t report about in an ongoing trial, and if the New Yorker had cared about following it it could have done everything the tabloids are allowed to. Instead it chose to ignore British law and publish material which would be considered prejudicial while the trial was ongoing, and so was banned in Britain, only for the duration of the trial. Even as a pretty strident free speech defender I think this is reasonable.
Wouldn't it make much more sense to sequester the jury rather than restrict speech/press for an entire country?
Sequester a jury for ten months? Then if a tiny bit of information gets to them during the sequester period, the whole trial is put at risk?
As others have pointed out, reporting restrictions are temporary, from charge to sentencing/acquittal. There could be a case for changing these if the British press could behave themselves- but it’s notoriously bad for printing whatever the fuck it likes before charges are brought (there was a famous case a few years ago where a young woman was murdered and the press went all out on her “weirdo” landlord, accusing him of her murder and destroying him publicly. Then it turned out she was murdered by her neighbor.)
Sequestering a jury for 10 months is unreasonable, but restricting the press for the same 10 months is fine?
Yes? You’re talking about putting twelve random members of the public in confinement for ten months, unable to go home and see their families. Or what do you think ‘sequestering’ means? Of *course* that’s far more disruptive than restricting (not banning!) how the press reports the story.
That's fine to have that opinion, but then don't complain when your country's commitment to free press is criticized.
Imprisoning members of the public at random for months on end: the superior, freedom, respecting choice.
If Aviv had new information or evidence, she should have submitted it to Letby's defence counsel. Journalists are not legal professionals and the rules are there to ensure a fair trial by preventing jurors from being prejudiced.
Maybe not have trials last 10 months?
Not always possible, which baby murdered (or attempted) out of the 17 should not have been thoroughly investigated?
No because you can have media coverage before a case goes to trial.
It's so quintessentially British to be all atwitter when Americans comment on British news while themselves enjoying the British pastime of obsessively following and critiquing American news. You people are exhausting.
The backstory from Trace’s source makes the intelligence chat pervs even less sympathetic… fuck these entitled bastards.
You have a point.
Lucy Letby is what you get when you take a toxic workforce culture (that particular hospital) and infuse it with life or death stakes and the prestige of physicians. If the statistical argument doesn’t hold water (and apparently it doesn’t), all you’re left with evidence-wise is “Letby was sometimes annoying to work with due to being a bit extra, and this annoyed one doctor so much that he felt comfortable accusing her of murder”.
Having listened to basically every bit of court evidence that was given, this is absolutely not what happened. Letby was well-liked by her colleagues in general. There is a lot of evidence against her, and if you listen to the full podcast about the trial you will get a much clearer picture of what actually happened.
I haven’t listened to the podcast, while the trial was going on I couldn’t really face engaging with it, but I’m a Private Eye subscriber and Phil Hammond is increasingly convinced this is a unsafe conviction at best and a gross miscarriage of justice at worst. Why do you think he, and what appears to be a growing number of neonatologists, are disregarding the evidence that she did it? What they’ve been saying is shocking if true, yet I don’t actually know what the evidence is that she did anything? It can’t just be the spreadsheet of deaths and the scribbled “confession”?
Firstly, I would encourage you to listen to the podcast about the trial if you want to actually understand the case properly. But what do I think about recent developments? Well, first of all I think that Dr Lee is an opportunist who has seen a chance to promote his own image using a famous case - on this podcast we hear about grifters who behave like this all the time, many of whom are high profile, many of whom are doctors (paediatric gender medicine anyone?) it shouldn't surprise us that there might be a doctor who would do this. There are multiple holes in his argument - there are in fact cases of injected air embolisms causing skin mottling, one of which from a south african case he (deliberately?) left out of his clinical review and one that happened to one of Beverly Allitt's victims, a nurse who also killed by injecting air. He also gave dubious alternative explanations for the deaths - he attributed one death to an undetected bacterial infection, but such infections get progressively worse - the baby in question waa transferred to a different hospital for a few days where it improved, then on being returned to the Countess immediately collapsed again and died when Letby came on shift. The liver injury in one of the babies that he attributed to a doctor inserting a cannula was stated by a forensic expert to have been caused by physical abuse, the liver was ruptured to the extent that it could not have been accidental. The police investigation, unlike Lee, consulted not just neonatal specialists, but endocrinologists, haematologists, forensic experts etc. Dr Lee just convinced a handful of his acquaintances about the air embolism evidence, and he does of course sound convincing in his press conference, which I've listened to, so I can imagine why. Plus everyone loves a good story about a miscarriage of justice and nobody wants to believe that a nurse is a baby killer. But he has not just left out important clinical evidence, he has also ignored the mountain of circumstantial evidence against Letby. She falsified notes to make it look like someone else was on duty when a baby collapsed. She took home and stored confidential clinical notes about babies she killed (which is illegal). She seemed to know a baby she had just been with was pale and looked unwell although the colleague she was with said the room was too dark to see if that were the case. She was found standing over a baby bleeding from its mouth by the mother, doing nothing to help, she sent the mother away. She was found by a doctor standing over a rapidly desaturating baby again doing absolutely nothing, until he asked her what was happening. She behaved inappropriately around bereaved parents, she was chatty and animated after babies died, she stalked the parents of dead babies on facebook, she was never affected by the deaths like her colleagues were and refused to take time off like they did when babies died. The police were so anxious not to draw false conclusions that they had separate teams investigate every collapse and death without communicating at all until they were all finished with their investigations - when they finally all met up, the similarities in each case were astounding. Babies didn't just die, they had shocking, unexplainable collapses right after she started shift. The babies had never-before-seen symptoms like the bright pink skin mottling (if not caused by air embolisms, then what was causing these?) or screaming in the most horrendous way in the case of one baby, a sound that "should not have come out of a baby", or bleeding mouths. Letby went on holiday for a week - no deaths. She came back and the deaths began again immediately. Dr Lee has so little respect for the British judicial system that he thought just because the skin mottling was in question Letby should immediately leave jail. He's an arrogant crank, I don't put any stock at all in what he has to say.
It irritates me profoundly to see such a meticulously built case ignored in favour of sensationalism and what is essentially, just another good story. It's not a good story for the families of these babies, it is their lives. If people are going to report on this they should do their due diligence and understand the case. It's just basic respect for the families and for due process.
It’s really discouraging that all of this was left out of this episode.
It is, because K & J have just taken Aviv's article at face value, although it left out gigantic parts of the prosecution's case, and not bothered to understand the case in its entirety at all. Their angle is supposed to be cleaning up internet bullshit and not adding to it. I guess the main angle of the story is about the internet feud between two obsessive, troubled women, neither of whom are reliable voices, but the case the police brought was full of reliable evidence and it was made to sound in this episode as though there was basically none.
Probably why I was angry with it, because it's not usually a 'skim' thing with either. I know Jesse didn't investigate himself, but I've defended both of them (to the point of being on some sort of list on Bluesky - which is hilarious) enough that it's disheartening to have half-truths put out. There's enough of that going around.
A lot of this is just another way of framing what actually has been said. She “didn’t take time off” is actually one of the arguments Aviv puts forth for why Letby was accused: she was a new young career-oriented nurse in a taxed environment who worked any and every shift available to her. Also “she wasn’t affected” could be countered by the fact that she “stalked” the parents on FB and brought home records: she was arguably obsessed and upset that kids died on her watch.
Aviv's article is full of the sort of speculation a journalist might make who has no knowledge of how medical professionals conduct themselves, and who is looking to put a new spin on old evidence in order to raise her own profile. Letby was offered paid leave to recover from deaths; she didn't take it, though her colleagues did. She also found caring for less sick babies she was assigned "boring". You can read plenty about her glib and callous behaviour here, and the excited, gossipy way she discussed babies' deaths https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/15/lucy-letby-discussed-babies-deaths-in-excited-way-inquiry-told. It was simply not normal for medical professionals to be unaffected by deaths - for context, my father was a GP and a stoical man; when a baby under his care died, he lay in bed crying for 3 days. The last thing he wanted was to ever be reminded of the deaths of children in his care, it would have made his job impossible. Letby on one occasion stayed in the room where recently bereaved parents were bathing their dead child - she prattled on about how she had given the baby its first bath when it was alive, greatly upsetting the parents. She seemed animated after babies died on several occasions. You could say "oh well we all react differently to death" but actually we mostly don't, and her behaviour was very unusual for a neonatal nurse, and the police always consider bizarre reactions to death when they are investigating murder cases - it's one of the best indicators that someone should be looked into.
my other comment:
"nobodys directly called her annoying, but the subtext of the description of her behaviours (being overly emotional, relying on colleagues for a lot of emotional support, just generally being 'extra' with colleagues and patients) makes me think she'd come across that way. the fact that these behaviours are noted during the trial mean they caught ppl's attention"
Where did you get the impression Letby was annoying to work with? I’ll admit I’m not as knowledgeable on the subject as many but I did read The New Yorker article mentioned in the episode.
nobodys directly called her annoying, but the subtext of the description of her behaviours (being overly emotional, relying on colleagues for a lot of emotional support, just generally being 'extra' with colleagues and patients) makes me think she'd come across that way. the fact that these behaviours are noted during the trial mean they caught ppl's attention
Please don't rely on your own impressions. Letby was extremely well-liked by her colleagues, both doctors and nurses. It's driving me crazy to see people here draw conclusions based on gut feelings. I know the case, I listened to the podcast that reported on every minute of trial proceedings. Read my comment upthread if you want to understand more, I replied to a user called Kezziah, I have included a lot of the evidence against her, though there's many more that I left out because so much evidence against her exists.
Having covered court cases for years here in the UK, it’s wild that you guys think being able to prejudice a jury is the preferable option. Anyway, just for future reference Simon and Sacha Baron Cohen aren't brothers, they’re cousins.
Little explanation on why we have reporting restrictions ‘contempt of
Court’
Hint: to help avoid juries being influenced by gossip/rumour etc so that the defendant has a trial that’s as fair as possible.
If later on, a defendant’s lawyers can show irregularities with that trial or produce new evidence then they argue in court (not Reddit) that it’s an unsafe conviction.
It’s called the Rule of Law. Used to be quite popular
Considering tabloids were running articles demonizing her as soon as she was arrested, and UKians were accessing foreign reporting throughout the trial, doesn’t seem like it works too well.
Once someone is charged, the reporting restrictions come into play.
That gives a fair amount of time for tabloid comment & reporting to die down before the trial starts.
Of course, it’s not perfect: but the aim is to produce as fair a trial as is possible and to keep juries’ minds focused on the evidence they hear in court.
To remind them to base their verdicts on that, rather than on what Jill0783 says on Reddit
The idea that only stories *during* the trial can influence a jury seems profoundly naive, and destined to do what we see here - mostly protect the prosecution from criticism of their evidence until the trial is over and it’s not “news” anymore.
Besides, the NY piece was about the trial that had already concluded, and was only suppressed because of another *upcoming* trial for one of the attempted murder charges that the prosecution was allowed to split off and retry. Seems pretty biased toward the prosecutor.
FACT CHECK: Jesus is older than Chester's founding.
Better known to us Rome-thinkers as Deva Victrix.
Colonizer!
I wondered about that ha
That sounded off.
It’s not terribly far off, but it’s still off if you’re counting the stones the Romans left behind.