chapter three
CHAPTER THREE. “JUNK SCIENCE” IN THE LUCY LETBY CASE.
Lucy Letby was convicted on fake statistics, fake psychology, and junk forensic science.
The fact is that “forensic science” is far more “iffy” than most people realise. In support of this statement, I will now provide some quotes from the book Junk Science and The American Justice System, by M. Chris Fabricant (an Innocence Project lawyer), published by Akashic Books, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-63614-135-0.
Reviews of this book say – “an amazing book” – “groundbreaking” – “expertly delves” – “few people are more qualified” – “well researched” – “brilliant” – “absolutely superb” – “compelling” – “powerful” – “fascinating”.
Now here are some quotes from the book:-
Page 26:- “Nearly half of all wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence involve the misuse of forensic sciences. - - - - The list of discredited forensic techniques is considerable.” (My highlighting.)
Page 68:- “Charlatans of many stripes establish societies, attend national conventions, set up certification boards, and otherwise go through the motions of serious science.” (My highlighting.)
Page 70:- “Many established forensic techniques - - - - - Opinions derived from these methods are subjective - - - - - rather than objective science.” (My highlighting.)
Page 98:- “DNA exonerations - - - proved that many of the most trusted forms of evidence had misled jurors into convicting the innocent - - - - - Convictions relying on forensic science were shown to rest on junk science.” (My highlighting.)
Page 103:- “The whizbang technology was very impressive to juries, but it was essentially meaningless.” (My highlighting.)
Page 109:- (Regarding microscopic hair comparison) - “Experts from the world’s most prestigious crime lab were wrong more than ten percent of the time, yet routinely testified to zero error rates.” – and page 210:- “Hair microscopy had already played a part in at least seventy known wrongful convictions.” – and page 212:- “DNA evidence - - - revealed that one of the hairs identified as human was dog hair.” – and page 216:- “proved that all hair evidence is fundamentally unreliable.” – and page 217:- “Hair comparison was routinely used - - - - Tens of thousands of convictions had been tainted.” (My highlighting.)
Page 120:- “The use of centuries-old dogma passing as scientific evidence - - - - ”
Pages 141 to 142:- “They (ie:- some US prosecutors) adopted the win-at-any-cost culture.” (My highlighting.)
Page 149:- “The ability of all pattern-matching techniques - - - matching stuff at a crime scene to stuff from a suspect – had been grossly exaggerated for a generation.” (My highlighting.)
Page 152:- “DNA evidence had been used to free 227 innocent men and women in two decades.”
Page 204:- “West, a junk scientist, was nevertheless a highly credentialed expert - - who practised in a firmly established field of forensic science. - - - The jury would never believe that a technique so - - - widely accepted could be hocus-pocus stuff.”
Page 214:- “According to a DOJ investigation, the expert (forensic) testimony at Boyle’s trial was - - - - “misleading”, “overstated”, and “without scientific basis””. - - - - “the “prosecutor deemed the lab analysis - - - material to the defendant’s conviction.”” (Boyle was executed before this DOJ investigation!) (My highlighting.)
Page 215:- (Regarding comparative bullet lead analysis) “The NAS published a report debunking the science - - - The FBI - - - - continued using the technique.”
Here is a quote from the book The Guardians, by John Grisham, published by Hodder, 2020, pages 69 to 70:-
“In the 1980s and 1990s, expert testimony proliferated in the criminal courts - - - - thousands of criminal defendants were convicted and put away by SHAKY THEORIES about blood stains, blood spatter, arson, bite marks, fabrics, glass breakage, scalp and pubic hair, boot prints, ballistics, and even fingerprints - - - - - always implicating the defendant. And ALWAYS FOR A NICE FEE. Then DNA testing arrived - - - - - - it brought a fresh and devastating scrutiny to THE JUNK SCIENCE - - - - In at least half of the DNA exonerations of innocent men and women, BAD FORENSICS have been the cornerstone of the prosecution’s evidence. (My capitals.)
Here is a quote from the magazine Crime Monthly, Issue 7, October 2019, pages 48 to 49, Article:- Hair Under The Microscope.
“In 1994 Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, a supervisor at The FBA crime lab, reported worries to his superiors about lab practices, including “ALTERATION OF REPORTS, ALTERATION OF EVIDENCE, AND FOLKS TESTIFYING OUTSIDE THEIR AREA OF EXPERTISE IN COURTS OF LAW” - - - - - - In 2015, the bureau formally admitted that NEARLY EVERY EXAMINER IN THE FORENSIC LAB HAD GIVEN FLAWED TESTIMONY. “Of 28 examiners with The FBI - - - - 26 OVERSTATED FORENSIC MATCHES in ways that favoured prosecutors in more than 95 per cent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.” (My capitals.)
I could provide a huge number of similar quotes from various sources. The bottom line is that forensic science is, in many cases, decidedly “iffy”, and can easily be used by unscrupulous “win-at-any-cost” prosecutors to bamboozle the jury. I believe that this is exactly what happened in the Lucy Letby case. Absolutely outrageous junk science, supplied by supposed “experts”, was put forward as objective fact, and helped to secure the conviction of a completely innocent person.
Let’s now look at the supposed prosecution “experts” and the extremely “iffy” “scientific” forensic evidence that they put forward.
The sources for most of the following statements can be seen in Chapter 9 (The Chief Prosecution Witness, Doctor Dewi Evans.)
The main prosecution “expert” was Doctor Dewi Evans, a retired paediatrician. (He wrote that one of the infant deaths was either due to a noxious substance, or to air embolism. This is not a scientific medical diagnosis. This is simply “hedging your bets”. Either the symptoms showed a noxious substance, or they didn’t. Either the symptoms showed air embolism, or they didn’t. Apparently “noxious substances” were ruled out (by toxicological analysis presumably). Doctor Evans then insisted that the cause of death must therefore be air embolism. This was based on rashes that some of the babies had. (These rashes could have been the result of a viral infection spreading through the hospital, to which some highly vulnerable premature babies would be susceptible, but to which adults would be immune.) Doctor Evans had never seen a case of air embolism. His diagnosis relied on a paper he had read by Doctor Shoo Lee. The defence consulted Doctor Shoo Lee, who stated as follows:- “None of the babies in the trial should have been diagnosed with air embolism.” A paper in Archives of Disease in Childhood concerning Air Embolism stated that there were 53 cases of air embolism world-wide, and that in only FIVE cases did the skin become discoloured, or show a rash.
In my opinion, Doctor Dewi Evans is a practitioner of “junk science”. I am not the only person who thinks this. An Appeal Court judge in a previous case had described a report by Doctor Dewi Evans as “worthless - - - - expressions of opinion that are outside Doctor Evans’ professional competence - - - - - - breach of proper medical conduct.” (My highlighting.) On the basis of this previous ruling, Lucy Letby’s defence team petitioned the court to have Doctor Evans’ testimony struck out. This request was (absolutely astoundingly!!!!) refused by the court!
What it boils down to is that Doctor Dewi Evans is a “chancer”. However, he did show some intellectual honesty and integrity in one instance. For one of the babies, Doctor Evans wrote that he could not “exclude the role of infection”.
Doctor Evans then suggested that air might have been injected into the infants’ “naso-gastric tube”. He admitted that there are no published papers detailing this procedure. Several doctors disagreed that this would even be possible. Once again Doctor Evans was just “whistling in the wind”.
It was also suggested that insulin was injected into the infant (directly or indirectly). However, a specialist in “paediatric hypoglycaemia” disputed this suggestion. In fact, another baby actually DID (supposedly) have a high insulin level in the blood, but this was 10 hours after Lucy Letby had left the hospital. If she had somehow administered the insulin, the insulin level would have gone down after ten hours
Let’s look more closely at the notion that Lucy Letby might have administered insulin to the babies:-
(1). There is absolutely no direct evidence that Lucy Letby administered insulin – none whatsoever.
(2). QUESTION:- If the babies had a high level of insulin in their blood, how could this be demonstrated?
ANSWER:- By tests known as “immunoassays”. The problem here is that immunoassays are “not reliable enough to be used in court” – according to multiple experts. One expert, Doctor Adel Ismail stated that “immunoassay has a high error rate.”
A similar case to the Lucy Letby case involved Lucia de Berk, a Dutch licensed pediatric nurse who was wrongfully convicted of murder. In 2003, Lucia de Berk was sentenced to life imprisonment, for four murders and three attempted murders of patients under her care. The case was reopened by the Dutch Supreme Court, as new facts had been uncovered that undermined the previous verdicts. De Berk was freed, and her case retried; she was exonerated in April 2010.
The prosecuting evidence claimed high digoxin levels in some of the patients’ blood – indicating poison. However, subsequent analysis showed a level of digoxin in the patients’ blood was “at a level below the threshold that would indicate poisoning”. Also various other medical evidence contradicted the notion that the patients were poisoned. She had been convicted on the basis of JUNK SCIENCE! (and flawed statistics!).
We will come back again to Lucia de Berk’s case when we look at the statistical fallacies involved in her case, which are very similar to those in the Lucy Letby case.
As far as the forensic evidence in the Lucy Letby case goes, it was specious, junk science, represented as objective fact, by a cynical, “win-at-all-costs” prosecution, intent on bamboozling the jury, overseen by an antediluvian judiciary, and with an already previously discredited “expert” witness who was willing to “chance their arm” in order to obtain fees, and to feel a sense of self-importance. It is an outrageous and disgraceful episode, which makes The UK look like a third world country, or like what Donald Trump has called “a s(expletive deleted) – hole country”. Lucy Letby should be released immediately, and generously financially compensated for the trauma she has been subjected to.
As a post script to this chapter, let’s look in more detail at the junk science that convicted Lucia de Berk. I am now quoting from the Wikipedia article.
The very high digoxin levels in autopsy blood from one child were key to the argument. Digoxin had previously been administered to the child, but the treatment had been discontinued some time before and doctors argued there should be none remaining.
In addition to the statistical arguments, at the third appeal hearing doubt was cast on the evidence about high digoxin levels in one child's blood, which had played a major role in de Berk's second conviction and life sentence for murder at the 2004 appeal hearings. Digoxin levels in autopsy blood should be expected to be much higher than those in a living patient. Living heart cells extract digoxin from the blood and concentrate it, but heart cells die within minutes after death and so digoxin can then diffuse into the blood in the heart and in the surrounding large blood vessels, the sites from which blood is extracted by pathologists for blood chemistry analysis. Additionally, the blood taken from the child for analysis did not originate from a proper sample but was squeezed out of a piece of gauze left inside the body after two autopsies had disturbed all of the organs. Digoxin levels increase with the evaporation of liquid. The measurement of digoxin was also complicated by the presence of digoxin-like immunoreactive substances (DLIS), which occur naturally particularly in infants. The tests used to determine the presence of digoxin were not able to distinguish between digoxin and DLIS. A laboratory in Strasbourg, with the facility to distinguish between digoxin and DLIS, analysed the samples and found 7 milligrams of digoxin per litre, a level below the threshold that would indicate poisoning. Other medical findings also failed to show any evidence of poisoning, such as the non-contraction of the heart.
In December 2009, with new statistical analysis and medical evidence having been presented, the court accepted that the deaths had all been entirely natural.
The Lucy Letby case and The Lucia de Berk case are both case studies in the misuse of “junk science” to support wrongful convictions.