New Yorker magazine alert thread

i get a 404 error on the article. But just read it on the wayback machine. fucking hell.

Archive ph should have it

i do not think the answer is to give the deranged uk press freer reign though

otm forever

I read it through my local library via Libby app.

Shocking case, defence were negligible in not challenging more robustly the statistics used to convict her.

it's just completely baffling how her defence had an expert witness lined up who was aware of a lot of the issues with the prosecution's case and planning to challenge them, but didn't actually call him to testify? that's a level of negligence/incompetence that's very hard to understand

also just having letby testify seems like an obviously poor choice that i struggle to understand

Weird that this NY-er article is blocked but a BBC documentary and a Daily Mail podcast on the case are apparently fine?

yes, that is strange…I wonder why that could be…

lol

Need to find a way to read this later. I can't believe it's blocked. Wtf.

https://archive.ph/TgC1X

the adversarial judicial system was a mistake

just read that, wouldn’t have without it being posted here. seems completely insane that she was convicted.

Weird that this NY-er article is blocked but a BBC documentary and a Daily Mail podcast on the case are apparently fine?

the documentary was released the day of her conviction, which wasn't an issue as the retrial hadn't been announced yet, and the podcast was documenting the trial as it happens, as they're allowed to report on the case as it happens as long as they do so neutrally which usually means just directly quoting the transcript but the uk press of course does not usually do this in a way i'd consider responsible. it is a bit of a hole that the documentary is still accessible given the upcoming trial though, it's all a mess

I’m truly trying to understand your perspective here. what do you think the purpose of a free press is beyond court stenography? I really don’t mean to be rude

i think ufo is just trying to describe how media outlets in the UK are trying to comply with a contempt of court law, which was mentioned in the article: https://www.gov.uk/contempt-of-court

i wouldn't read into it more than that

more than one poster itt has essentially defended the practice as a net good, so that’s what I’m trying to understand

and we seem to have found ourselves in a situation where documentaries produced by the local police and broadcast by the BBC are freely available, along with a comically credulous body of reporting by other british press outlets, with the british public seemingly devouring this as they do royal gossip, while actual indenpendent reporting is blocked — and instead of shrugging our shoulders I’m wondering if that might be examined a little bit

yeah, agreed

U.S. freedom of the press is not perfect, but it is in some basic respects more free than even in many other democratic countries.

(speaking only in terms of constitutional protections — on other fronts, like ownership pressures and working conditions, it's not a great place to be a reporter)

The First Amendment, it turns out, is pretty great after SCOTUS started expanding it 100 years ago -- before contracting it.

It's quite amazing reading this piece having previously only read stuff about the case in the British press, including a long, detailed article in The Guardian that didn't express a scintilla of doubt about Letby's guilt. I'm astonished that the key expert witness was a retired paediatrician who had randomly read an article about the case in the press and then decided to volunteer his services... you'd think there would be some due process about identifying the right person to review the evidence!

the author wrote a very sensitive book about mental illness a couple of years back. recommended.

i think ufo is just trying to describe how media outlets in the UK are trying to comply with a contempt of court law, which was mentioned in the article: https://www.gov.uk/contempt-of-court

i think the basic principle that the media should avoid prejudicing a prominent criminal trial is worthwhile (similar laws apply in australia where i am but i can't think of any case that's been as messy as this one) but there's absolutely some inconsistency in how that seems to play out in practice, and the situation with the reporting restrictions around this case (that being that a retrial on one charge was announced a few months after the trial, which reintroduces the reporting restrictions just a few months after the verdict for the other charges was announced and the press had free rein with it for a bit) are quite unusual and i can't think of a similar situation here (though i can think of one where a prominent verdict was suppressed due to the defendant facing similar charges at another upcoming trial, and a lot of outlets were fined for breaching the order). at the very least the reporting restrictions for the retrial really should include the previously published material like the bbc documentary etc. being temporarily removed, or it would be reasonable to just give up on the idea in this case given how widely publicised the other verdicts were. the retrial being announced a few months later seems to be a weird edge case for the reporting restriction laws that produces particularly bad & messy results

re messy Australian cases might include rapey Bruce and his multiple other rapes being kept quiet

that was a somewhat different reporting restriction (it was about protecting the identity and reputation of the defendant in a sexual assault case before they were committed to stand trial) and was unambiguously bad and that particular law has since been repealed

Do people really think, even from a distance to the UK, that if contempt of court didn't exist, the UK papers would have managed to create a case against the prosecution of someone accused of murdering infants? Or that this would be a net good thing?

Even under the current law, the opposite is true. Many people accused of a serious crime are treated as guilty in the media. Given the numerous times an innocent person has been treated as guilty after being arrested, it seems the law could go further.

I'm no expert but the complication here seems to be that someone already had a trial at which they were found guilty and now another separate one is upcoming. So it seems the entire law sort of breaks in that system, as usually all the reporting happens freely once a trial is over.

One thing I will say is that a long time ago I worked in local news reporting for BBC News Online, and there was a murder trial. And after a verdict is handed down in the UK, every paper or website will write a sort of broader story of what happened, with the freedom allowed by the fact the trial is over. Especially if the person is found guilty. I had to write one of these after weeks of strictly assuming innocence until proven guilty, and reporting accordingly. In the particular case, there was no real doubt about the guilt of the person involved. But I still found it weird how we as a news organisation automatically switched our brains to 'here is the exact truth and detail of what happened, since it has now been proven by a court'. Like obv as an Irish person in the UK I find that weird. I remember talking about it here.

I still can see why it exists though, because the press would dig up everything and anything against innocent people otherwise.

In this case, I think if you read a wide range of sources about the trial, the New Yorker article omits almost any evidence that might make you think Letby could be guilty. For example the doctor who compares the trauma suffered by one of the victims to a road traffic accident. I'm not keen to dredge through all the evidence but you can find if you so wish.

I do think it seems a pretty weak case against her but I don't know what to believe about what actually happened.

yeah I broadly agree with that and after reading up a bit more, there did seem to be some cherry picking in terms of which evidence was cited in the story.

but I think it's besides the point whether she did it or not - what the story highlights is that there were serious issues with the methodology and evidence used to determine her guilt, as well as the surrounding circumstances of the unit, which were largely ignored and suggests an unsafe conviction.

The only witnesses Myers called were the hospital’s plumber, who spoke about unsanitary conditions, and Letby, who testified for fourteen days.

This seems insane.

Agree, Roz.

I had vaguely heard of the Letby case before reading this article, but yeah it raises a whole lot of questions. Unless she's excluding really damning testimony, it just doesn't sound like there was any evidence other than her presence. In a lot of the cases it sounds like other people were there so it's a little hard to see how she would have just slipped in, inserted an air embolism or insulin without anyone noticing anything strange at all. And also the way they added the insulin charges in, mostly on the basis of some scattered results that they only started looking for once they already decided something suspicious was going on.

I've spent a lot of time in neonatal ICUs. Both of my sons were born prematurely, one of them at 27 weeks and spent 3 months in the NICU before coming home. Of course, my experience was in the U.S. at a seemingly well-funded hospital, but even there I saw how hectic things could be in the unit when there were multiple high-needs babies all at once. Also, babies died there regularly, there were at least three in the three months we were there every day. And we did experience some arguable negligence too, with a gram negative bacterial outbreak that made several babies sick and was almost certainly spread by nurses taking insufficient care. BUT — the work they were doing was extremely difficult, and premature infants are just about the most vulnerable and fragile class of patients you can imagine.

I don't know, it all just feels so circumstantial and "statistical" (except probably not really very statistical) to be trying to charge somebody in such a complex environment. One thing I thought was, who's going to want to work in a NICU after all this?

Do people really think, even from a distance to the UK, that if contempt of court didn't exist, the UK papers would have managed to create a case against the prosecution of someone accused of murdering infants? Or that this would be a net good thing?

what’s the explanation for why an american magazine was able to craft such a case then? skill issue? something about the american temperament?

it’s literally unpublishable in the uk

i though that’s what “if contempt of court didn’t exist” was conditioning out

But most readers in Britain trying to read it online have been met with an error message: “Oops. Our apologies. This is, almost certainly, not the page you were looking for.”

The New Yorker said it had “geo-blocked” the article for audiences in Britain to avoid clashing with a court order restricting media coverage of the case.

The court order stems from Britain’s 1981 contempt-of-court law, which bans the publication of any reporting and commentary that could prejudice legal proceedings.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/05/16/lucy-letby-new-yorker-story-blocked/

i interpreted LG as saying even if Britain didn’t have contempt of court, they wouldn’t have written a case against the prosecution like the nyer piece. so i’m wondering what other factors beyond legal restrictions would stop them from writing such a piece

what’s the explanation for why an american magazine was able to craft such a case then? skill issue? something about the american temperament?

― flopson, Thursday, May 16, 2024 2:02 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

there is not a good one IMO. the UK doesn't do long form investigate printed journalism like the New Yorker, but it does do 60 minutes style TV investigations. there's no good reason an American writer (who is not an investigative journalist and usually writes features/essays about psychiatry!) could pull this off, but panorama couldn't, other than the law.

(and a culture that is unusually viscous and red misty about certain kinds of criminal acts, even at the "high" end)

(who is not an investigative journalist and usually writes features/essays about psychiatry!)

don't mean to imply this is not aviv's "beat" and/or she his not a good writer. it is/she is. more that there are literal teams of investigative journalists much more familiar with this case in the UK would could just as easily have written a similar story if it weren't for the law.

I think it's plausible to say that getting rid of the UK's contempt of court restrictions on the media would be a net negative for people accused (possibly wrongly) accused of emotive crimes, even if in this particular case it might have drawn more/earlier attention to weaknesses in the prosecution case?

i think the contempt of court law is a bit of a red herring - as soon as the trial is over, the law doesn't apply anymore, right? presumably if somebody in the UK press was interested in poking holes they could have published a piece as soon as the first trial was over - which is when the BBC documentary was published.

But I still found it weird how we as a news organisation automatically switched our brains to 'here is the exact truth and detail of what happened, since it has now been proven by a court'.

i made the mistake of wandering over to the subreddit on this case and apparently a bunch of posts by americans are getting deleted because "Verdicts in Lucy Letby's trial are fact and are law unless and until an appeal is granted. r/lucyletby respects the work of the jury and accepts their conclusions. We do not permit re-litigating of the verdicts rendered by the jury."

idk how common this attitude is in the UK? if it is widespread that definitely seems weird and bad to me. courts are very much flawed institutions as are the trials they oversee.

LG made the point upthread but yeah having seen this piece (and perhaps like many just kinda 'shutting down' on this story so early at the time) I got whiplash back on the Guardian with their 'she murdered babies, jury said so' attitude in their most recent coverage.

(and a culture that is unusually viscous and red misty about certain kinds of criminal acts, even at the "high" end)

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, May 16, 2024 6:32 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is fundamental I think - like you can run investigative 'Letby - a miscarriage of justice?' pieces/tv stuff properly 10-15 years down the line but blood frenzy for child killers is constitutive of the UK public sphere - the mutual public-press red mist is worse than you'd imagine if you don't see it day to day. Combination of laziness, groupthink and fear mean that even the ahem 'fiercely independent' voices (you, guardian) fall in line.

To be the person writing a UK article saying 'Looks more like a statistical anomaly than a baby killer', that would need courage.

Yeah courts are flawed institutions ofc but the reporting restrictions exist so people aren’t, supposedly, swayed by media opinions and are instead deciding based on what’s presented in court. If you need a modern day example of why that might matter to the outcome of a case, you can Google “why does Amber Heard live in Spain now”.

Contempt of court also has the effect of preventing this kind of bullshit, which can lead to mistrials.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48869040.amp

Contempt of court laws exist to ensure people get fair trials. The idea is that juries must not be influenced by anything but the evidence they hear in court.

If someone interferes with a trial, the defendants can walk free and a new trial might have to be held.

This is fundamental I think - like you can run investigative 'Letby - a miscarriage of justice?' pieces/tv stuff properly 10-15 years down the line but blood frenzy for child killers is constitutive of the UK public sphere - the mutual public-press red mist is worse than you'd imagine if you don't see it day to day.

Exactly - I reckon you could _still_ say something like 'I feel sorry for Louise Woodward' in the wrong place and get lamped.

tbc I'm nowhere on guilt/innocence of Letby, but after the NYer piece it looks like a dodgy trial.

If there are problems with this case it definitely seems to me to be mostly a matter of bad or lazy behavior by investigators, prosecutors and defense counsel — not because of the press restrictions. It's just that those press restrictions look weird to people used to seeing American trial coverage.

On the question of whether media coverage can influence juries, obviously it can, and U.S. courts take precautions about that that rely to significant degree on an honor system — jurors refraining from reading/watching the coverage or talking about the case. There are potential problems with that, but that's just one of the trade-offs for having strong constitutional press protections. (On paper, at least.) And as far as problems with the American media go, the potential of its coverage to prejudice juries is pretty far down the list, it does a lot worse things than that.

I honestly think I’d kill myself if I was on trial and the press had the right to film it but there you go. Cultural differences.

tbh, the idea that juries are boy scouts and refrain from considering any information about a case other than what's presented in court is one of the biggest legal fictions there is in today's world where everybody has in their pocket a tiny computer connected to the internet at lightning speeds at all times.

i definitely understand what the UK's contempt of court law is trying to accomplish, but for TMZ-type stories like this it's a lost cause. it probably worked better 50 years ago.