I haven't watched the press conference, but it looks like it has just finished and those interested can watch it here...
I just listened to the entire thing. It's now well past my bedtime.
I enjoyed it, which sounds ghoulish, but it was stimulating to hear people talk my language after I've been retired for six years and not professionally active. I'm a vet, not a human doctor, and I know little about neonatology, but I do understand what was being said, in the technical sense. I am a biochemist, and trained alonside human-type clinical biochemists. The external scrutineer for my PhD thesis was a consultant clinical biochemist at a London teaching hospital.
These experts were talking complete sense. In fact they articulated what was a half-formed suspicion in my mind that the entire thing had its basis in a failing hospital with multiple areas of incompetency, and that circumstances acted together to result in one person being elected scapegoat. Unconsciously, doctors coalesced round the premise that this particular nurse was murdering babies, rather than face the fact that their own lack of experience and competence was leading to a very high death rate.
What always puzzled me a bit was the variety of murder methods supposedly employed by Letby. Obviously it's not impossible, but Shipman is more typical of this type of crime, with a set
modus operandi repeated again and again. Shipman didn't just like killing old ladies (in particular), he liked injecting them with heroin. It seemed to me that the prosecution were reaching to try to shoehorn in some sort of murder method around the circumstances of each of the deaths, a sort of God of the gaps if you see what I mean. Insulin infusions, misplaced feeding tubes, air injection, whatever they could allege plausibly that fitted in with the pathology, without any clear evidence that had actually happened. "That's just supposition", or conjecture, or whatever Prof Lee said on a number of occasions. Quite.
I didn't come to the thread to say any of that because it was all just the impression I was picking up. I hadn't made a detailed study of the case, and didn't intend to devote the time necessary to be able to debate it in detail. I'm glad I didn't bother, because it's all been done by people eminently more qualified and expert than I am. I am convinced, with and by these experts. These are not people riding a hobby-horse, they are people looking objectively at the facts in the interests of justice.
The later parts of the conference were the interesting part, to me. What can be done, in the light of the manifest intransigence of the CCRC and the appeal court to admitting arguments that could have been made at the original trial? As was said near the end, as the law stands, the procedure is simply to say, the defence were free to call these experts at the trial. They didn't. All the primary evidence this group had in front of them was available at the time of the trial. There is no new evidence and this sort of do-over is not allowed.
This has been a problem for numerous cases before this. It was a problem with my re-analysis of the Lockerbie suitcase evidence, and I probably should go off to that thread to discuss the issue in that context. The CCRC (and the SCCRC) see it as their duty to prevent cases going to the appeal court whenever possible. It can lead, and has led in the past, to people remaining in prison despite apparently conclusive evidence of innocence being uncovered. (I have read of cases where, although the evidence wasn't actually found until after the trial, the CCRC said, but it
could have been found before the trial, so no dice.) I wonder if this will be the case that finally prompts some soul-searching on that one. Following on from the Malkinson debacle, it bloody well should.
ETA: There was also a comment about the prosecution expert having rushed immediately to the police station when called in and decided it was definitely murder before he'd finished his coffee, or something like that. I recognise that approach, and it is no basis for making any decisions in a case of this complexity. One problem is that the police tend to call in the experts who've got them the result they wanted last time, not the experts who tend to say, well, I don't think you have a case here. If I remember rightly in the case of Siôn Jenkins several experts expressed the opinion that the traces of blood on Siôn's jacket didn't prove that Billie-Jo had been alive when he was holding her, but they kept asking until they found a less-well-qualified doctor who would say what they wanted to hear.) This gung-ho view-halloo attitude should cause the cops to run a mile, but of course it doesn't.