The past does not want to be changed, as Stephen King says in his clever novel, 11/22/63, about a man given the opportunity to go back in time and prevent the murder of President Kennedy.
Though armed with total, detailed foreknowledge of the crime, his hero, Jake Epping, struggles to make his way to Dealey Plaza in Dallas on the morning of the assassination. Even the traffic seems to be working against him.
Much the same is true of criminal convictions. However dubious they are, however feeble the evidence and however powerful the case for a second look, those who doubt them must push a great heavy stone up a steep slope, while those who defend them have a far easier task.
Since I very reluctantly took up the case of Lucy Letby on September 24, 2023, I have assumed there was a good chance that I would be dead before the case was resolved. Occasionally I have had unwise flashes of optimism but have swiftly suppressed them. ‘This will take at least ten years,’ I tell my allies in the cause.
The events of the past few days have hardened my heart even more.
A nameless prison officer popped up to say that Ms Letby was not upset enough when she was first confined in jail.
This, it seems, was evidence she was guilty. Someone else, also nameless, emerged to complain that perhaps she has access to too many Snickers bars in Bronzefield prison.
This is thanks to an ‘enhanced status’, which must be a major compensation, mustn’t it, for the fact that she has to stay there till she dies, and that if she were in the normal prison population she would be violently assaulted.
Since I very reluctantly took up the case of Lucy Letby on September 24, 2023, I have assumed there was a good chance that I would be dead before the case was resolved, writes Peter Hitchens
On Tuesday three unnamed NHS bureaucrats, working at the Countess of Chester Hospital, were arrested – but not charged, says Hitchens
Then some rubbish emerged from the Health Ministry, spun to suggest that Artificial Intelligence could in future be used to catch serial killers ‘like Lucy Letby’. No person was actually quoted as having made this pretty silly claim but the suggestion somehow appeared in three national newspapers on the same morning.
If you ever wonder what it is that spin doctors do, this might give you some idea. It is worth noting that in the past the ambitious Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has been quite scathing about those who have cast doubt on the Letby verdict. This isn’t really his business as a serving minister.
There’s a vague idea that the executive branch of government should keep its nose out of court proceedings, which I learned somewhere, long ago, in a Britain wholly unlike the one I live in now. I doubt whether Artificial Intelligence could have stopped him behaving like this, but maybe the ordinary sort should have done. Please note that it is me, under my own name, saying these things. It is not some unnamed source or anonymous prison officer or the Bronzefield ‘insider’ who is so het up about Ms Letby’s Snickers rations.
Anyway, all this stuff was just a softening-up barrage for what may or may not be the main event. This was Tuesday’s arrest – but not charging – of three unnamed NHS bureaucrats, working at the hospital where Ms Letby’s crimes are supposed to have taken place. They were arrested on suspicion of ‘gross negligence manslaughter’.
The police force involved in this well-timed spectacular was our old friend, the shy and retiring Cheshire Constabulary. And gosh, the force is shy and retiring if the questioning is in any way inconvenient to it.
I am now on quite intimate terms with it, as we correspond by email a lot. But in most cases (I am being kind here) they don’t answer my questions. I have yet to be invited to one of the secret Press conferences they like to give to those media who they regard as sympathetic to their investigation of Ms Letby.
Recently, they actually made a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to themselves on my behalf, having quickly concluded that they were not going to answer my question.
Normally, I make these FoI requests myself after their Press office has declined to answer them. On this occasion, they just cut out the middleman.
Once I had got over the shock, I decided to treat this as an enhanced service, of sorts.
Currently, I am looking forward to them refusing to answer what is in effect their own request. Will they then refer the matter to the Information Commissioner for me, the usual next step? Or must I still do this myself?
For sure, they know my email address. But I can find nothing from them in my inbox about the Tuesday arrests, nor have they discussed with me, on or off the record, or at a secret Press conference, any plans to arrest Ms Letby for yet more alleged crimes – though they keep suggesting that they are poised to do this.
I do wonder about what the point of such an action would be. I can think of one very good reason not to bother. The babies she may now be alleged to have harmed have parents. Will it not distress them gravely to be told that their children may have been murdered or deliberately injured? How will this be justified?
Those who seek to reopen the case are constantly told by the anti-retrial lobby that they are wicked to distress the parents of Ms Letby’s supposed victims by seeking to re-hear the case.
So for what high purpose would such new accusations be pursued? Ms Letby cannot be jailed for any longer as it is. She has been condemned to what is, in effect, a slow-motion death penalty by which, lacking the courage to execute her, the state kills her inch by inch and minute by minute over perhaps 40 years, while pretending to be humane.
Will some censorious judge next sentence her to have her corpse confined in the prison grounds after death?
Well, I think I know the reason for all these arrests without charges and anonymous jailhouse scuttlebutt, gibberish about Artificial Intelligence and plans for a third Letby trial.
I think the Cheshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service and the Appeal Court judges who outrageously refused her permission to appeal against her ferocious doom, dare not admit to themselves that they might be wrong.
Those involved, having seen the very strong case for her defence, which some of the world’s most distinguished statisticians and doctors have made, might sometimes wake with a start wondering what they have done.
But the English criminal justice system – as all involved in it know – is a vast, crumbling, granite fortress, rapidly decaying into a great mass of delay, error and injustice.
Like the police, who have suffered a parallel decline, it still just retains the undeserved public trust built up in better times.
It dares not admit error, especially at this high level, lest the whole thing falls into deserved disrepute and collapses.
So when a former Health Secretary and highly regarded former Cabinet Minister, Jeremy Hunt, said recently that there were ‘serious and credible questions about the evidence presented in court, the robustness of expert testimony and the interpretation of statistical data’, they were deeply worried.
If thoughts like this began to get the upper hand in the establishment itself, they are in grave danger. So they resist.
Listen to Peter Hitchens and Sarah Vine debate the biggest talking points of the week on Alas Vine & Hitchens. Available wherever you get your podcasts now.
