New Yorker magazine alert thread

(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.

Like most things, the laws are always behind technology.

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.

fwiw the rules on actually filming are variable and mostly up to the judges and courts. The Supreme Court doesn't allow any filming, and state and local courts often leave it up to judicial discretion. Where I live, the media have to apply ahead of time to bring cameras into a courtroom, and the assorted parties are allowed to object. But there's generally no restriction on what from inside the courtroom can be reported outside of it.

But for sure, there are plenty of defendants who would prefer less coverage.

I was a witness in a trial recently and was being asked questions by two different people, one of whom was the judge, it’s an intimidating atmosphere even in low profile cases like that one was, and that was just being a witness.

filming in US courtrooms is pretty rare

it's why we have such delightful courtroom sketch artists

Federal courts don't even let you bring in cell phones. My least favorite courts to cover.

Rules vary. I had a witness in federal court in LA who thought she had turned her cell phone off when the judge admonished everyone to silence their phones. Her phone rang anyway and the judge sanctioned her $100 from the bench in the middle of the hearing, on the record.

Courts are generally open to the public by default. However, a person can apply for a protective order to seal the courtroom. The burden for convincing a judge that the courtroom should be sealed is extremely high because of the presumption of accessibility under the First Amendment. But court proceedings or portions of them can be sealed for extraordinary reasons, including preventing undue prejudice or embarrassment to a person or disclosure of state secrets or proprietary information.

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.

i've seen this attitude a lot on twitter, even from lefty brits who i would have expected to be better than that. just expressing scepticism about the case was considered by many to be unthinkable, disgusting, etc. which was very strange

I wonder if that has anything to do with the embargo on serious investigative journalism of the case!! I’m literally pounding my head on my desk over here lol. different strokes etc

"there is not a good one IMO. the UK doesn't do long form investigate printed journalism like the New Yorker"

Think its an American genre. The Sunday Times and several other broadsheets used to have investigative desks but idk what the state of those is, these days...and those things don't have literary pretensions.

The only thing comparable in recent times was the LRB digging into Grenfell, which turned out to be a disaster.

some of this was not long after the verdict (when there weren't any reporting restrictions) and was just in response to some people on twitter raising red flags they noticed in the reported details of the case, some of it has been now in response to the new yorker article which they had read

my general impression of the uk press is that i don't think there's anywhere that would be running such a piece anytime soon, even if they were allowed?

the press has to stay broken to cover for the broken justice system to cover for the broken NHS neonatal ward

we do all this stuff here in the US, just not necessarily in this particular way

Right I know these people got blitzed by UK lawyers but I promised oomf a thread, so I’ll give a thread on Lucy Letby & why American lawyers need to actually either (1) stay in their lane or (2) actually do some research on the English criminal law system before commenting. 🧵 https://t.co/oU5Yp5Q4zP pic.twitter.com/nf2TNvRMMg

— Renée Nova 🌌 (@slagmaxxing) May 17, 2024

incredible thread lmao

look we don’t really do defendant rights here stop steamrolling us

fwiw I welcome British or any other nationality reporters to write long articles about American miscarriages of justice, we have plenty to go around.

"they've seen more facts and evidence"

yeah the articles mentioned how the presented evidence had statistics that showed a correlation that didn't mention how often deaths occurred on other shifts and whether it was an outlier. it's not about guilt per se, it's about the fact there was little contradictory evidence introduced, partially due to the rules and procedures

both the UK and the US do institutional culpability incredibly poorly. some countries, supervisors would be in a lot of trouble now

I don't know English or American trial law well enough to feel I really have a handle on all of this, but it's been strange watching left-liberal UK twitter people who spend most of their time posting about how Britain is the worst country on earth suddenly turn into Bob Hoskins ranting about yanks at the end of The Long Good Friday over this story

yeah sorry it really does seem like a bunch of unhinged people telling us their system is perfect when this poor woman is clearly innocent

I don't think she's clearly innocent. I think what the New Yorker article shows is the evidence wasn't strong enough to convict. That's not quite the same thing. The article itself has some inconsistencies. On the one hand, it implies the cluster of deaths could be attributed to the fact that the unit was severely under resourced and chaotically run. But then it also implies that the cluster might not need any causal explanation, it might be truly random. Those two ideas aren't necessarily compatible.

That thread is so hilarious. It’s like if non-Americans were saying “Wtf, in America you might execute someone even if there’s evidence of innocence that was beer presented to a jury” and Americans were like “Stay in your lane! These are THE RULES.”

xp

They could certainly be compatible if the stresses of understaffing and resources made conditions that could produce such a cluster of deaths more likely. i.e., the cluster almost certainly wasn't actually random, but that doesn't necessarily mean one person was going around doing murder.

max says the contempt of court laws are good actually https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-point-of-ai-is-to-talk-to-a-cool

i've seen this attitude a lot on twitter, even from lefty brits who i would have expected to be better than that. just expressing scepticism about the case was considered by many to be unthinkable, disgusting, etc. which was very strange

I wonder if that has anything to do with the embargo on serious investigative journalism of the case!! I’m literally pounding my head on my desk over here lol. different strokes etc

And again, having spent way more time than I wanted to in a NICU, I just can't overemphasize how vulnerable and fragile they are, especially the smallest/youngest ones who it sounds like made up most of the deaths in this case. Our son was born at 27 weeks and 2.25 pounds — 1 kg — and he was one of larger babies on his unit. And even for him, we'd just be sitting there watching him and suddenly his oxygen would just start plummeting and the machine would start a terrifying beeping and the nurses would hustle over to adjust his breathing tube or oxygen flow. It's a real scientific marvel that so many super-preemies do survive now, but many of them still don't. Just seems like an odd thing to try to build a murder case around. BUT WHO KNOWS. Maybe she did it. It just doesn't sound like there's much evidence.

I don't think she's clearly innocent. I think what the New Yorker article shows is the evidence wasn't strong enough to convict. That's not quite the same thing. The article itself has some inconsistencies. On the one hand, it implies the cluster of deaths could be attributed to the fact that the unit was severely under resourced and chaotically run. But then it also implies that the cluster might not need any causal explanation, it might be truly random. Those two ideas aren't necessarily compatible.

arguing the merits of the case is whatever, it’s just funny that the knee-jerk british reaction on ilx was “it’s actually good that we made scrutiny of our judicial system illegal”

i am curious what the statistical argument was (if it went beyond the “diagram with an x next to the names” described in the article). the judicial system is pretty infamously bad at interpreting any argument relying on probability theory, but there are perfectly standard methods that quantify questions like: what’s the false discovery rate (how often would this criteria cause us to fire a perfectly normal NICU nurse out of bad luck)? similar methods (“value added models”) are used to identify outstanding and underperforming teachers using data on repeated observations of grades that take into account student composition and idiosyncratic luck

arguing the merits of the case is whatever, it’s just funny that the knee-jerk british reaction on ilx was “it’s actually good that we made scrutiny of our judicial system illegal”

― flopson, Sunday, 19 May 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Please, lol. That's just not what was posted.

my most charitable interpretation of the pro british status quo side is something like this

i. in theory, more scrutiny of the judicial system, all else constant, would be good

ii. giving the additional freedom to the media would enable them to provide that kind of scrutiny. c.f. this post by caek:

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 [contempt of court] law

iii. however, it's not worth it to give the press this additional freedom, because it would also enable them to write awful things about defendants, and on net that would overweigh the good

my problem with this is that the british media seem to write plenty of awful things about defendants under the current system. also seems like there is somewhat selective blocking of media related to the case, where the investigative reporting (aviv's piece) is getting blocked but not the "red misty" anti-defendant witch hunt (the bbc doc)

there's also the possibility that it has the causality reversed, and having fewer legal restrictions on investigative journalism written about course cases would reduce the amount of anti-defendant sentiment

a useful counter-argument, which some posts have sort of intimated at itt, would be that there is something fundamental to the temperament of british journalists that makes them incapable of having sympathy for defendants or suspicion of weak arguments by prosecution; they are blood thirsty by nature, and the legal institutions can't affect that, so the best thing to do is shut them up as long as possible. in max read's post (linked by dan) he says the problem is that british don't have longform literary journals like the new yorker. this seems not quite right to me; it's not that the new yorker is literary that matters, but just that it occasionally does investigative journalism

also seems like there is somewhat selective blocking of media related to the case, where the investigative reporting (aviv's piece) is getting blocked but not the "red misty" anti-defendant witch hunt (the bbc doc)

I may well have understood, but I thought what happened is that there was a (brief?) window between the end of the trial and the announcement of the retrial, during which reporting was fine (which is when e.g. the bbc doc happened), but right now neither the new yorker article nor the bbc doc would be allowed? and presumably after the next trial there will no longer be restrictions in place (again)?

That sounds right to me. And there has been plenty of scrutiny of past convictions in the British legal system, with many wrongful verdicts overturned.

just a coincidence then i guess

lol

Just read that thing from max:

"Because everything online manifests itself through national-chauvinist lenses, there’s been a fair amount of defensiveness over the verdict and media coverage of the trial on the part of Britons online, who have an understandable distaste for Americans on social media doing drive-by assessments of the fairness and sanity of U.K. criminal procedure or speech law. The r/LucyLetby subreddit seemed threatened to split along trans-Atlantic lines; on Twitter, Americans were often accused of having “true crime brain.”"

That's a case of too much online, to me. I wouldn't take the US vs UK shitposting each other as indicative of anything about this case.

On twitter quite a few people in the UK have posted long threads doubting the verdict of this case as soon as it arrived (that's how I got to know a bit more about it at the time). I wouldn't be at all surprised if Aviv picked up on one of those threads from a random and started to use it as basis to build her story on it (I've yet to read the piece).

actually i think posting on social media is also in violation of contempt of court

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60d4a59dd3bf7f7c3716c60d/Contempt_of_court_-_fact_sheet.pdf

Contempt of court refers to behaviour that undermines or prejudices court proceedings and interferes with the administration of justice, or creates a real risk of that happening. The same rules apply to members of the public as they do to journalists, especially when posting on social media.

Think before you post – could your message stop someone having their day in court?

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty – juries must decide on the basis of evidence, not your posts.

We all have a right to talk about what we see, hear, and read in the news – but make sure you know how to stay on the right side of the law.

Your post could mean a trial is delayed or stopped because a fair trial isn’t possible–don’t get in the way of justice being done.

Contempt of court can be punished by a fine or up to two years in prison.

hopefully anonymous posts on a plain-text message board are ok though

I'll be allowed one post a day under the King's pleasure.

flag post (to police)

brits understand that for every negative post about their dear courts, the king gains an extra cancer cell