Amanda KnoxThe trial of #LucyLetby for the murders and attempted murders of infants in the neonatal ward of the Countess of Chester Hospital was one of the longest murder trials in British history. It's worth asking why.
/thread
Part of the answer is the sheer number of charges. Another part is that the prosecution relied on expert witnesses interpreting complicated medical & statistical evidence, & had to spend months constructing an inferential chain, link by link, because there was no smoking gun.
I know something about that kind of trial. My own wrongful conviction was also built on circumstantial and inferential evidence, with no direct evidence tying me to the crime. I'm not saying Letby's case is the same as mine; I'm saying I recognize the architecture.
In both cases, the prosecution avoided motive almost entirely. Letby was simply "evil." When I was wrongly convicted, the judge said my motive was "Evil for evil's sake." When the evidence doesn't support a coherent motive, that "evil" tends to become the answer.
And in the absence of a smoking gun, or even a recurring modus operandi (the prosecution presented half a dozen different supposed methods of murder), the story has to do the work that evidence can't.
The prosecution constructed a character narrative about who Lucy was to make the inferential chain feel inevitable to the jury. That takes months to build in a courtroom.
In my own trial, my lawyers always argued that 0+0+0 = 0. But the story woven by the prosecution over 11 months was powerful. By contrast, Meredith Kercher's actual killer, Rudy Guede, had a fast-track trial, far shorter than mine.
With his DNA all over the crime scene, and an obvious motive, no circumstantial, inferential or character arguments were necessary to determine his guilt.
So here's the questions I keep coming back to: would the Letby trial have been one of the longest murder trials in British history if the evidence against her had been stronger? And does the length itself tell us something about what the prosecution was, and wasn't, working with?
This is not an argument that the prosecution's theory is wrong, or that Letby is innocent. But it is important context for understanding how this case was built and why it unfolded the way it did.
If you want to hear more about the prosecution's case, and how her trial began, listen to episode 4 of Doubt: The Case of Lucy Letby, out now.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
The Prosecution
The Prosecution
