For all that people in Ireland have complaints about the criminal justice system, there is one thing about it that we should never lose: By and large, when the state accuses you of a crime, it will also go to every possible length to let you prove your innocence.
It is to the collective credit of politicians, voters, and our ancestors that this principle is maintained. If the state accuses you of murder, then in most circumstances it will not send you to prison without being willing to fund, if necessary, your own defence. The Government will pay legal aid to get you a solicitor, and the fees for conducting your defence will be generally covered in such circumstances – unless you are absolutely filthy rich.
Further, the state sets a high standard before taking away your liberty. Your guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. That is to say, it is not enough for a jury of your peers to decide you probably did it (as they did with Conor McGregor in a civil case, where his freedom was not at risk). They have to decide that you did it beyond any reasonable doubt.
It is worth noting, unpopular though it may be, that this criminal justice system – which gives a defendant so many rights – is something we inherited lock, stock, and barrel from the United Kingdom when that country acceded to our independence. The same criminal standards that apply here, apply there. Which is why, I think, there is now no possible way to stand over the criminal conviction for serial child murder of former neonatal nurse Lucy Letby.
Yesterday, in London, an expert panel of 14 leading doctors, who examined the deaths which Letby is in prison for bringing about, concluded that it was highly unlikely that she murdered any of the children, and that their deaths were vastly more likely to have been the result of old-fashioned medical negligence on behalf of the hospital.
We live in a world in which to many people, this intervention will not matter. The Letby case is one of those cases that polarise opinion to a ridiculous extent, with whole internet communities springing up to defend her innocence or condemn her guilt. Emotions collide and are conflated with evidence, and it’s the kind of story ripe for the kind of people who like to become obsessive one way or the other.
I’ll confess my own opinion: I still think, for whatever it is worth, that she probably did do it. There were, on my reading of the evidence, simply too many strange things that she did and said for those things to be innocently explained away while set against the death of all those children, on her care, when she was the only common denominator. The coincidences, I thought and still sort of think, are just too great.
But that’s not the point: The point is that after an intervention like yesterday’s, there simply cannot be any objective certainty about her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In our legal system, thinking that somebody is probably guilty is not enough.
As things stand, Ms Letby, a 35 year old woman, is in prison serving 15 life sentences without the possibility of release. She is slated to die in prison, at the very end of her natural life. That means probably at least another half century.
The experts casting doubt on the safety of her conviction are not just any old doctors, either. The panel was chaired by a Dr. Shoo Lee, an expert on air embolisms so respected that his 1989 paper on the subject was actually used by the prosecution in the Letby case to point to her guilt. Imagine you are on a jury and you are presented with that: A paper from a leading expert suggesting that Letby is guilty.
Now, imagine that the jury had heard from the expert himself, telling them that his 1989 paper is one thing, but Letby’s case simply doesn’t fit with it, and he believes her innocent. That’s the kind of new evidence that might well have swung a trial.
The whole point of a jury – the reason we have juries – is that they are supposed to be the interpreters of the word “reasonable” in reasonable doubt. The idea is, essentially, that the juror represents the common man. The bloke on the street. The person who reads the news and forms their own views and tries to approach matters fairly.
How could any such person – hearing 14 of the world’s leading experts in the relevant field saying that Lucy Letby is innocent – possibly still be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that she is guilty? Would you bet your house on that, if you had to?
This conviction, therefore, is no longer safe. Even if you believe that Ms Letby probably did it, our own standard of criminal justice on these islands demands that her conviction be quashed, and that she should be released. It is, after all, better that a guilty person should go free, than that an innocent person should spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime she did not commit.