The Lucy Letby Inquiry and expressing concern about trial verdicts

Lady Justice Thirlwall's inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester while Lucy Letby was employed there opened today. 

Letby is a former neonatal nurse who has been sentenced to 15 whole-life terms after she was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others. There has since been widespread concern about the safety of these convictions.

I was taken aback by Lady Thirlwall's remarks on this concern, as quoted by the Guardian:

"So far as I’m aware it has come entirely from people who were not at the trial. Parts of the evidence have been selected and criticised as has the conduct of the defence at trial, about which those defence lawyers can say nothing.

"All of this noise has caused additional enormous stress for the parents who have suffered far too much."

Setting the condition that you must have been at the trial before you can express concern at a verdict would have disbarred the campaigners against the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four.

Expressing concern at a verdict seems bound to involve criticising some of the evidence presented but not all of it, and dismissing such concerns as "noise" is surely too dismissive. We lay people are allowed to have opinions about the British legal system that go beyond mute admiration of the state of perfection to which it has been brought.

If you want to know more about what the Thirlwall Inquiry will and won't be looking at, I recommend the video by Alan Robertshaw above.

And, while I'm not suggesting anything here about the verdicts on Lucy Letby, I can also recommend the book Three False Convictions, Many Lessons: The Psychopathology of Unjust Prosecutions by David C. Anderson and Nigel P. Scott, which I've just written a short review of for Liberator.