The Principle of Suspicion

Suspicion : 

Um, and uh just apply this 

to The Lucy Letby case. 

Um so The Principle of Suspicion is animated 

by an internal kind of personal conviction 

uh that Your Suspicion is correct 

and because it's correct you can 

proceed and act on that basis. 

Now when People with Power 

hold to This Principle then 

becoming A Suspect is enough 

for you to then be punished. 

Uh once you've been identified,
essentially, Your Fate is sealed. 

Now that principle, 

The Principle of Suspicion, 

it's it's irrational with respect 

to basing actions on evidence, 

but it is an effective way of 

Projecting Domineering Power. 

And so it strikes fear or even terror into people. 

And that's useful for getting compliance. 

And the principle of suspicion can also 

make for very persuasive sophistry 

because it it appeals to very 

common ways of thinking. 

You know, we all tend to think that 

our suspicions are correct and so on. 

So there's there's an appeal 

behind this principle as well. 

Um and so I take the principle of suspicion from Hegel. Um and Hegel identifies three eras when the principle of suspicion is is the kind of the defining principle of of the era. Um so he talks about the the period of Rome under the emperors. Uh he talks about the witch hunt mania in the 16th and 17th century. And and he has a brief period as well. the period of a terror uh in the French Revolution. Now reading Hegel, Hegel seems to be optimistic and thinks well we've kind of gone beyond uh operating on this principle now. But unfortunately of course the principle of suspicion uh is not is not a thing of the past. It's something that uh we still have to engage with. And so let's see how the principle of suspicion operates in practice. Um so we there's two ways it operates. You either go straight from suspicion to punishment or you have suspicion and then trial and punishment. So suspicion punishment is very simple. Uh go back to the Roman emperors. You know if the Ptorian guard are out to get you, they get you. Essentially there there's no intermediate stage. Um if you're a boat in the Gulf of Mexico and the American government are out to get you, they get you. You know, again, it's just suspicion straight to punishment. Um so so then there's the there's the three-step process has the the intermediate trial. And if you say, you know, you say a trial, well that that then you might seem that isn't a principle of suspicion because of course in a in a trial these suspicions are tested and and and that of course is correct. So in in a rational trial uh suspicions are indeed tested against the evidence. However, there are also irrational trials in which suspicions are simply fitted to the evidence. I then think that there are there are what we can call hybrid trials where there is an element of rationality in the trial and rationality and the principle of suspicion are in conflict. So as in many other witch hunt trials uh Miss Leeppley's trials I think were hybrid ones where the prosecution uh was based on the principle of suspicion and the defense was based uh on rationality. Let me then move on to Lucy Let's case. Um so the foundation of the case against Lucy Leby I think was one of pure suspicion and the form it took was one of turning an unknown into a kind of a known inner certainty. So it started out if you think about the doctors they think we do not know why the babies collapsed or died. We only know why they didn't. And therefore we do know we know that Lucy Leby did it. And I think that was the essential way in which which they fought. I think that encapsulates it reasonably well. And to justify um the the transition then from not knowing how these babies died or to knowing the persecutors of misle created so-called evidence to fit the suspicion and then refused or only pretended to test the evidence that they'd concocted. This was the evidence then that got Miss Leby convicted and she then went to the court of appeal with her plea to be appeal to to to try and be able to appeal. So let's move on then to the court of appeal uh and look at what the the judges did. So the court of appeal judgment rejecting this plea to be allowed to appeal was was thoroughly irrational I think. Um, and we can ask in penning this judgment, were Dane Victoria Sharp and Lord Justice Horoid and Mrs. Justice Lambert DBE, were they animated by the principle of suspicion? Um, I'm not sure. The idea that these judges might have been so biased is is is, you know, is is a terrible prospect. Uh but the principle of suspicion at least involves an element of sincerity um and alternative explanations of the conduct of these judges such as sort of treating the case as some kind of game or something like that. I think alternative explanations are perhaps even worse. Anyway, whatever the state of their inner consciousness of these judges, uh the court of appeal not only endorsed the irrational arguments of the prosecution, but they added more irrational arguments of their own. Um so so to show this I'm going to critically examine how the judges responded to the defense submission that with respect to intravenous uh injection of air to cause air embolism there was no case to answer that's one of the things the defense said when they wanted said you know we wanted to appeal and that submission of course was correct um this business about introvenous injection of air was founded entirely on suspicion there wasn't ever any evidence but the judges said No, there was there was a strong prosecution case uh for introvenous air injection and they argued this by fitting the expert evidence of both professor Owen Arthur and Dr. Daryry Evans to the suspicions against Miss Leby and also manipulating the evidence that the defense have put forward with defense the evidence of Professor Shulie to make this evidence appear to be quote irrelevant. I'll turn to Dr. Evans is first and and look at what the court of appeals said. So the court of appeal presented what they said was a a hypothetical account of expert witnesses reasoning that Miss Leby made introvenous air injections uh based only on suspicion and you can see it there on the the right hand side of the screen. So the court of appeal said if you know if any witness had given evidence to the effect that he or she could must identify any other possible cause of the baby's collapse and therefore assumed on that basis alone that the baby's collapse must have been due to an embolis that evidence might well be criticized as mere conjecture and that isn't in fact a hypothetical uh account. It's exactly how the expert witnesses reasoned and we can compare it with Dr. Evans when he was interviewed by Dr. Raj Prasad on intravenous air injection shortly after the trial and Dr. Evans identifies as you can see cases where your diagnosis is made by ruling out other factors and you end up with the diagnosis where this is the only explanation. You've ruled everything out. What's left is the diagnosis. However, we should add that Dr. Evans said that sometimes you had what he called a full house a full house of evidence of air embolism and that included evidence of coming from the x-rays and it included evidence with regard to skin discoration and the court of appeal made a similar claim and by dropping Dr. Revans's observation that you only sometimes have a full house, it justified its description of mere conjecture as being merely hypothetical. So according to the court of appeal, the suspicion that Miss Leby made introvenous injections are always supported by a full house of evidence. although their preferred metaphor was a constellation a constellation of factors which was kind of the suggestion that there were kind of countless pieces of evidence there. So we want to then look at how this mere conjecture that the port using portfield's term then was turned into a constellation of factors and two of the ways in which this is done uh was by having the images of gas observed in X-rays of some of the babies being said to form a basis for a diagnosis of their embulus. Again that's a direct quote from the court of appeal. And second, their argument that the skin discoloration uh seen on the babies was said to be consistent with their embolism. So I'll turn first to the x-rays. Uh and uh this is where the the court of appeals supported a pseudo test that was conducted by professor arth. So, Professor Arers, uh, a consultant radiologist at Great Orman Street Hospital and a witness for the prosecution, uh, conducted research in preparation for Mr. Leby's trial and his findings supported the defense. Uh, but he twisted them to support the prosecution. Uh, and instead of criticizing this twisting of the evidence, uh, the court of appeal reinforced it. Um, let me go on to Professor Arthur's what I call professor Arthur's real test. So, so, so Professor Arthur did a I think you know actually a very helpful and genuine test. He he he looked at the pertinent x-rays of at least seven of the babies where Lucille was alleged to have attacked them by means of intravenous injection of air. If he looked at the least seven of these babies or the X-ray images of at least seven of these babies and in imaging of three of the babies he could see gas in the great vessels meaning the blood vessels around the heart. Um what professor aras then did is he reviewed the x-rays of 500 babies who had died at great Orman Street Hospital and where there was no suspicion of intravenous air injection. Uh and he did this as the court of appeal judges put it to to satisfy himself that seeing gas was unusual as as it would be for example if uh imagine if he he'd looked at the 500 cases and he'd only seen in one or two occasions that there was uh uh there was imaging of gas in the great vessels you know only one or two times out of 500 then certainly that would be unusual but in fact professor Al's assumption was refuted because far from being unusual he saw gas in the great vessels in about a quarter of the cases in about 125 cases out of 500. So he saw it about a quarter of a time. So if gas can be seen in the great vessels about a quarter of a time about 125 times out of 500 when intravenous injection is not suspected then is seeing gas three times out of seven is that unusual? Is that suspicious? Obviously the answer is no. It isn't. Um, so as I say with with this review of 500 babies, I think professor Arthus had conducted a real test uh and one that one that showed the jurers who perhaps you know contrary to their intuition um that that seeing gas in the great vessels uh is common place and it wasn't a suspicious society at all. And what what do the judges say about this? They say nothing. um be completely silent on the implications of this finding and then they undertake what philosophers of science call a degenerative problems shift and we try again with 38 of the youngest babies and find that eight of them show gas um is that significantly different from 125 out of 500 or indeed three out of seven no it's not at this point um professor rather and the court of appeal judges run a pseudo test. There's a kind of a roof slate. They take these eight of the youngest babies uh where gas has been found and they don't ask is this unusual? We know that it's not. They ask instead is it unusual for these eight cases to have been unexplained? And and then Arthur says, well, all of these cases at Great Orman Street, we explained all of them. We exp, you know, we we knew why these babies had died. Um so it was indeed unusual for them to be unexplained and and and it was that unusualness that was then used uh by the prosecution to say well what's going on in these three cases where where Lucy Letby was said to be involved. Now there is some inconvenient facts in a sense you know who Arer has done when he's gone down to this test of eight babies. And the first thing which which I find strange is that on the face of things at least even amongst these eight babies at Great Orman Street at least one of these deaths and perhaps several of them um was unexplained because it was classified as sudden unexpected death in infancy. So that's that's a classification of death for sure but it's not an explanation is it? Um and so it's a bit odd to say that none of these eight cases were unexplained. Uh but but still that's that's just what that's what we said. Um and then another inconvenient fact is that and we've already heard about the postmortm reports. And so two of the these uh counters of Chester babies, they had postmortem reports that identified the cause of death as being result of natural causes. And again, that's ignored and they just say, "Well, it's all unexplained. It's unusual. It's suspicious." It is a basis of diagnosis of embolism, but it's not a rational basis, is it? Um so we've got these problems. We've got the fact that there is a sudden unexpected death in industry. Uh we've got a difficulty in that it is not comparing like with like. So if the doctors at the counters of Chester hospital insist on saying they do not know how babies died and if they reject postmortem findings that say that babies die from natural causes um then of course the deaths by their account are going to be unexplained. 

You can't then draw a comparison 

with doctors at another hospital 

who do not hold this kind of suspicious attitude and have accepted postmortem explanations of deaths of eight babies. You just not comparing with you can't draw any kind of comparative conclusion from that. There's also no comparative data on the babies where gas is not observed. So that no figures at all are given for any of the other 492 babies in the original test. I mean we we just don't know uh about how many of their deaths were explained or unexplained. But however we can we can assume I think that unexplained deaths were also going to have been unusual amongst these babies including the approximately 375 babies who didn't have gas uh observed in the vessels around the hut. 

Um and if we assume that that they that they also had deaths that were by and large explained all that professor Arthur has shown is this firstly shown that baby deaths or collapses at countis of Chester hospital in cases where this leby stands accused are unexplained in the eyes of the doctors there and he's shown then second that it's unusual for baby deaths at great orman street hospital to be unexplained. pain. That's all he's show. That's it. Um, let's move on to skin discoloration and making Professor Lee's evidence um irrelevant. The defense had tried to introduce the evidence of Professor Lee who argued that the skin discolorations observed on the babies were not consistent with what was known of introvenous air embolism in the medical literature. And the judges said that Dr. Lee's evidence came too late. However, although they refused formally to consider the evidence, they preserved the appearance of fairness by uh seeming to test Dr. Lee's evidence anyway and finding it. I say we found it irrelevant. Um so the court of appeal um said that Dr. Lee had missed the point and he was insisting that only one specific form of skin discoloration is sufficient to diagnose air embolism. uh but they said you know the kind of the localized transient significant skin discolorations that were so often seen in these babies um that was consistent with their embolism that's what Dr. Lee had found in his own report uh they said and that was all that that mattered. Well, of course it was in fact the judges who had missed a point when Professor Lee reviewed the medical literature uh he found there are no reported cases of localized transient skin discoloration in cases where air has been in accidentally injected into the veins. The judges discussed Dr. Lee's so-called irrelevant elements over 24 paragraphs in their judgment. Uh but they didn't mention that finding. Um they weren't really testing uh Dr. Lee's evidence at all. They were fitting it to the prosecution case by selectively citing and emitting things to make it appear that Dr. Lee was arguing one thing when in fact he was arguing something quite different. Um the court of appeal had another argument against Dr. Liam. was that even if he did have a point, it was still irrelevant as the evidence as a whole showed that Miss Lebby killed or attacked babies in one way or another. And if the prosecution was wrong about intraggina's injection or anything else, this meant only that she killed or attacked the babies by some other method. 

So if we if we we remind ourselves about the original suspicion of the counters of Chester hospital doctors, it was 

"We do not know why the babies collapsed 

or died only why they didn't. 

Therefore, we do know 

Lucy Letby did it. 

Well, when they dismissed Dr. Lee's evidence, 

The Court of Appeal draws out, I think, 

what This Suspicion really means. 

The Suspicion really means 

Lucy Letby Did it and 

it doesn't matter how. 

Um that kind of approach, 

that suspicious approach 

is one that is unfalsifiable. 

Um The Argument that Miss Letby 

is Guilty because of the whole thing 

makes it impossible ever 

to acquit Miss Letby -- because 

any kind of supposed evidence 

could be fitted to A Suspicion. 

None of the evidence which 

has been made up to convict : 

None of it can withstand testing. 

It all comes down to cherrypicking or something along those lines. It's all meaningless. But for the very reason that it's meaningless, they can always come up with more. 

You know, it is literally infinite. 

The amount of evidence that the misle persecutors can bring to bear against her has no limit. 

And we've seen that again at the Fewell inquiry always about 40% of tubes dislodged and so on. So in in this way the the the the suspicion that has got Miss Leeppby imprisoned for life has become totally unassalable. Unless you can actually prove that it's impossible for Miss Ley to have carried out the attacks, it cannot be falsified. Whatever evidence is shown to be wrong, there is a ready answer. It doesn't matter she's guilty. It's the whole thing. Thank you. [Applause]