Speaker 1: So I'll walk you up and I'll show you the
Speaker 1: Actually it starts up in Lincoln's INNO. Okay, So this
Speaker 1: is Lincoln's In that we're about to enter. I think
Speaker 1: this is the oldest of all the evens, about six
Speaker 1: hundred years old.
Speaker 2: Lincoln's It almost everything I understand about a fair trial.
Speaker 2: I owe to a place like this, one of England's
Speaker 2: historic bar associations. This is nuts, guys, ok right. So
Speaker 2: this is a huge room, a huge banquet hall that
Speaker 2: has wood paneling with all of these like crests of
Speaker 2: some nightly kind. There's portraits of people from presumably very
Speaker 2: important people, and it looks like a cathedral. But I
Speaker 2: guess for food, the presumption of innocence, the right to
Speaker 2: be judged by a jury of your peers. England built
Speaker 2: all that, and then it handed the blueprint to the
Speaker 2: rest of us. And you have to belong to this. Yes,
Speaker 2: what does that mean?
Speaker 1: So you can become a member, okay? And you can
Speaker 1: only become a call to the bar. What you've eaten
Speaker 1: so many dinners.
Speaker 2: That's bizarre. So okay, So you take the test to
Speaker 2: become a barrister. But that's not enough. You have to
Speaker 2: eat food.
Speaker 1: I had to eat eighteen dinnies.
Speaker 2: Eighteen dinners. What is the point of that? Is that
Speaker 2: to say, like trade your bar.
Speaker 1: Was that you didn't actually take exams to become a barrister.
Speaker 1: You learn by dining and being with people.
Speaker 2: You learn by belonging. That's the part that stayed with me.
Speaker 2: A system this old doesn't just hand down its rules.
Speaker 2: It hands down its instincts, who belongs, who's reliable, whose
Speaker 2: sounds right? And six hundred years of that builds something
Speaker 2: beautiful and something very sure of itself.
Speaker 1: This here is a painting of all the great lawmakers
Speaker 1: throughout history. Up there is Alfred, King, Alfred and Plato
Speaker 1: and sort of all the great voices throughout history is
Speaker 1: all painted of that.
Speaker 2: Are there a wall of certainty looking down? And I
Speaker 2: kept thinking, a system this confident in its own history
Speaker 2: is a system that finds it very hard to say
Speaker 2: it got something wrong.
Speaker 1: I think the slightly unorthodox approach that I've taken to
Speaker 1: this case are playing the whole thing out in public. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's something that a few parts of the bar, some
Speaker 1: elements of the bar would probably raise our eyebrow out.
Speaker 2: That's why I'd come to London. Mark McDonald is Lucy
Speaker 2: let Be's barrister. He's doing something. His profession isn't built
Speaker 2: for making the argument out loud in public where everyone
Speaker 2: can see it. Because the quiet, traditional route, the one
Speaker 2: those portraits would prefer, is the one that's kept her
Speaker 2: where she is. This is doubt the case of Lucy
Speaker 2: let Be Bonus episode four, Shaking up the Establishment. Sitting
Speaker 2: down with Mark at his offices, we got straight into
Speaker 2: the important business of understanding what Lucy let Be's out
Speaker 2: to release might be. So you talk about her getting released, yes,
Speaker 2: can you explain to me how that could happen?
Speaker 1: So the CCRC refers the matter to the Court of Appeal.
Speaker 1: Before the Court of Appeal. We have some amazing judges
Speaker 1: in this country in the Court of Appeal. I'm not
Speaker 1: just saying that because I want them to agree with me,
Speaker 1: but we do. We do have some brilliant judges and
Speaker 1: they will put what I have put before the CRC
Speaker 1: under scrutiny, and they will test it, and if it's
Speaker 1: found wanting, they will reject it. The battle in this
Speaker 1: case is the Court of Appeal. Now the CCRC can
Speaker 1: refer the conviction to the Court of appeal on any
Speaker 1: of the reports that I've put before them, or all
Speaker 1: of the reports I put before them, But they can
Speaker 1: do on a discrete issue. And when I get to
Speaker 1: the Court of Appeal, I'm going to have to argue, well,
Speaker 1: the CCRC has said the failure to have a statistician
Speaker 1: is so important that the convictions are unsafe. But actually
Speaker 1: I want to bring in Shuley and the international experts,
Speaker 1: and I want to bring in this so I want
Speaker 1: to expand it. And it's up to the Court of
Speaker 1: Appeal to decide or not they agree with me or
Speaker 1: not if they want to hear all that evidence, or
Speaker 1: they could just say the whole and then all these experts.
Speaker 1: And if that's the case, then we could have a
Speaker 1: lengthy argument in the Court of Appeal that can go
Speaker 1: on for weeks, where they hear all this evidence and
Speaker 1: their decision, their only decision that they have to make.
Speaker 1: You board it all the way down is are these
Speaker 1: convictions safe? That's the test. If they say they're not safe,
Speaker 1: then they're crushed.
Speaker 2: And she's out.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: The prosecution can then apply for a retrial, the Court
Speaker 1: of Appeal can agree, or it's called who's Decisionless to
Speaker 1: whatever or not she has a retrial, but the prosecution
Speaker 1: can apply for a retrial and it is likely that
Speaker 1: if they do apply, they would agree to let them
Speaker 1: have a retrial in front of the jury. Now, who
Speaker 1: they're going to use as they're experts when it comes
Speaker 1: to a retrial, would be of interest, but that's their problem.
Speaker 2: Not so when does the lucy gets out part.
Speaker 1: If there's a retrial and it goes in front of
Speaker 1: a jewelry and she's found not guilty, she walks out
Speaker 1: of the Crown Court. If there's not a retrial, she
Speaker 1: walks out of the Court of Appeal.
Speaker 2: So the before even being retried, she got out. But
Speaker 2: also there are a lot of ifs. What happens if
Speaker 2: the CCRC doesn't recommend it, if they.
Speaker 1: Don't refer it to the Court of Appeal. I can
Speaker 1: challenge the CCRC by way of judicial in the High Court.
Speaker 1: I have to say that applications to review the CCRC
Speaker 1: don't often succeed. I've done it once in fact, and
Speaker 1: we've known that case. I succeeded in that I got
Speaker 1: leave to appeal, and then the CCRC took it back
Speaker 1: and said, yeah, we agree with the High Court where
Speaker 1: we look at this.
Speaker 2: So it's not a complete dead end if the CCRC
Speaker 2: doesn't refer it to appeal, but if the High Court,
Speaker 2: if you challenge that and you go to the High
Speaker 2: Court and they say too.
Speaker 1: Bad, that's it.
Speaker 2: That's it, nothing will nothing more.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I think, oh, shall I hold one of these
Speaker 1: reports back just in case? But they've got everything.
Speaker 2: And when Mark says they've got everything, he really means it.
Speaker 2: The amount of work that has gone into those reports
Speaker 2: has been immense. Clearly the role of the expert place
Speaker 2: an outsized rule, especially in this case. How important are
Speaker 2: the rules of the expert witnesses during her appeal, especially
Speaker 2: considering the fact that she had none during her actual
Speaker 2: first trial.
Speaker 1: The starting point with the whole of this trial is
Speaker 1: that it was based around a hypothesis, so no direct
Speaker 1: evidence Noah saw her do anything wrong. The hypothesis was
Speaker 1: given by the experts. Therefore, the quality of the experts
Speaker 1: and the evidence that they give is under a microscope.
Speaker 1: And so the experts that I have gone to and
Speaker 1: used foording to three categories, really the first is a
Speaker 1: greater expert by file than the ones that were used
Speaker 1: at trial by the prosecution Secondly, an identification by experts
Speaker 1: of evidence that was not put before the jury. The
Speaker 1: third is in relation to experts of a discipline, for
Speaker 1: example susssicians that were simply not used in the trial.
Speaker 1: So I have those experts. There is now evidence and
Speaker 1: I am relying upon that's put before the CCRC in
Speaker 1: relation to the police investigation. It is up to the
Speaker 1: CCRC to decide whether that is something that impacts upon
Speaker 1: the safety of the conviction. So that's what I'm putting it.
Speaker 1: The main prosecution expert witness has been saying quite a
Speaker 1: lot since the conviction and has given a number of
Speaker 1: podcasts and interviews, and in some of those interviews he's
Speaker 1: said things that are inconsistent with what was said before
Speaker 1: the jury. So that's gone in.
Speaker 2: How do you think they should conduct themselves?
Speaker 1: So an expert has a duty to the court. The
Speaker 1: overrides their duty to the person who instructs them to
Speaker 1: give the evidence. So their duty is to be the
Speaker 1: Criminal Cases Review Commission or the Court of Appeal is
Speaker 1: to assist the court. And if it's a we try
Speaker 1: the jewelry investor come to come to the conclusion and
Speaker 1: what their opinion is. The juries are directed that they've
Speaker 1: got an expert opinion. It's up to them whether or
Speaker 1: not they accept it or not. They could disregard it
Speaker 1: if they wanted to. And so they're there to be
Speaker 1: independent and not to come to a conclusion as to
Speaker 1: the guilt or innocence of the individual. That's not their job.
Speaker 1: Their job is to look at the statistics, look at
Speaker 1: what was said to the jewelry, and then say, I
Speaker 1: don't think that they were given accurate information and this
Speaker 1: is the reasons why, and not to go beyond that
Speaker 1: and to say and that means she's not guilty and
Speaker 1: she's innocent. That's not their job.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The important thing about all the experts or thirty odd
Speaker 1: experts is that not one of them has been paid,
Speaker 1: not one penny. Why because I got money?
Speaker 2: Well, should they be in an ideal situation?
Speaker 1: Yea work, you do a job, let's be paid. But
Speaker 1: aren't any money?
Speaker 2: So what kind of experts does Mark have working on
Speaker 2: his CCRC reports?
Speaker 1: Neil Layton is an incredibly experienced neoetologist, but he's also
Speaker 1: a man who's a detailed man who has spent hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of hours working away at the hospital. Notes
Speaker 1: in the hospital x rays and expert reports that found
Speaker 1: things that other people have not been able to find,
Speaker 1: not based upon Oh I've got a different opinion, But
Speaker 1: hold on you. You haven't included that lab result there.
Speaker 1: That's actually quite important. And here go through the whole
Speaker 1: of the transcripts and it was never mentioned for the jury.
Speaker 1: And he is, I think, has become very important to
Speaker 1: this appeal system. And the probably lighton also is that
Speaker 1: he's only anatologist and one of the things that the
Speaker 1: Court of Appeal don't like is just getting.
Speaker 2: Another expert, just any old expert.
Speaker 1: And so he's been great from the point of view
Speaker 1: that he's uncovered things, But the hierarchy of experts starts
Speaker 1: with Shuley and the international experts across the world. But
Speaker 1: what he's been very good at is uncovering a lot
Speaker 1: of wrongdoing, mistakes that happened before the trial and expose them.
Speaker 1: So his reports sometimes go up to eighteen ninety one
Speaker 1: hundred pages of detail.
Speaker 2: I was particularly interested in how the CCRC report would
Speaker 2: deal with the cases of supposed insulin poisoning.
Speaker 1: I've challenged every single element of the prosecution cases been
Speaker 1: put before the trial, every element be it the so
Speaker 1: called confession notes, be it the statistical evidence, be it
Speaker 1: the issues in relation to air embolism, be it the incident.
Speaker 1: I've focused on all of them. I've dismantled every single element.
Speaker 1: But here says the prosecution, this is the smoking gun,
Speaker 1: is the incident cases, because they've got these incident results.
Speaker 2: They put that question to Lucy on trial.
Speaker 1: In cross examination, and quite robust cross examination. She was
Speaker 1: as she conceded the issue in relation to the expert
Speaker 1: evidence that was put to her in questioning and said
Speaker 1: to her, and it's not criticism towards the prosecuting council.
Speaker 1: He did his job and he did it very well
Speaker 1: in the way that he cross examined her, But in
Speaker 1: essence said, Ler, do you accept that, if these experts
Speaker 1: are correct, that these babies are poisoned? Yes, so who
Speaker 1: poisoned them is the issue. I didn't poison them. So
Speaker 1: you can see the way that she was cross examined
Speaker 1: on this is but it was never the defense case
Speaker 1: that they accepted the results of this incident. The defense
Speaker 1: never accepted it was never their case. And now we've
Speaker 1: looked at them, you can see why. You know, the
Speaker 1: seven expert joy report that I put in last year
Speaker 1: in relation to expert completely exposes the whole issue in
Speaker 1: relation to hyperothemia and the essay testing and the reliability
Speaker 1: of the testing, and the report that I'm about to
Speaker 1: put in next week exposes the many issues in relation
Speaker 1: to insulin and the testimony on insulin that was given
Speaker 1: to the jury, the many mistakes that were made, because
Speaker 1: there were many.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think this is a prominent lot of
Speaker 2: wrongful convictions. Is if it's not the convicted person, if
Speaker 2: it's not Lucy, then what was it? What is the
Speaker 2: alternative explanation?
Speaker 1: I think this is what's unique about Lucy Letbe is
Speaker 1: because in most cases you find someone has been murdered,
Speaker 1: there's a gunshot wound or a stab wound, and it's
Speaker 1: who did it. Here, no crime has been committed, and
Speaker 1: when no crime is being committed, it's not who did
Speaker 1: it because there was no crime. But what there was
Speaker 1: was a systemic fading of a unit that was taking
Speaker 1: babies that were too sick for that unit and shouldn't
Speaker 1: have been on that unit, that was overwrapped, overstressed, under resourced,
Speaker 1: and issues in relation to medical care have been raised
Speaker 1: by the medical experts. Issues in relation to not having
Speaker 1: appropriate staff on the unit have been raised by the experts,
Speaker 1: and it's important to say that this actually mirrors over
Speaker 1: neonatal units in the country. It's not unique to the
Speaker 1: Countess of Chester. It's just that the Countess of Chester
Speaker 1: art pointing the finger at somebody. But people in the
Speaker 1: hospital said no, senior people, senior managers said no, there's
Speaker 1: no evidence that Lucy had done something.
Speaker 4: None.
Speaker 1: But then the police were contacted and an investigation started
Speaker 1: and a press release happened, And sitting at home treaking
Speaker 1: his coffee was a man called Dr Darry Evans, who
Speaker 1: then sent an email saying, this sounds like my type
Speaker 1: of case. Within weeks with meeting the police and as
Speaker 1: he would say, and as he said on the podcast,
Speaker 1: I knew within ten minutes that there had been intentional
Speaker 1: harm to a baby. There have been post mortem's, clinical
Speaker 1: reviews for months, if not years, and no one had
Speaker 1: identified anything. But within ten minutes over his coffee Darry
Speaker 1: Evans did.
Speaker 2: There are many who believe that Lucy Let is in
Speaker 2: prison because she was a whistleblower, someone who was bullied
Speaker 2: by senior staff challenged them at tribunal and was retaliated
Speaker 2: against to such an extent that she was accused of murder.
Speaker 2: I asked Mark about his thoughts on whistleblowers in the NHS.
Speaker 1: It's happening almost on a daily basis in our health service.
Speaker 1: There are doctors being sacked for speaking out. There are
Speaker 1: nurses being sacked for speaking out. We have a real
Speaker 1: problem and then not being protected. They're just not being
Speaker 1: protected by our system. Lucy let be epitomizers everything that's
Speaker 1: gone wrong, always going wrong in o for health service.
Speaker 1: Our health service has been broken for a long time
Speaker 1: and nobody would admit it. Our labor units are dangerous,
Speaker 1: neo natal units are dangerous. Of them but many of them,
Speaker 1: and people won't accept it. We put our health service
Speaker 1: upon a pedestal, but it's broken.
Speaker 2: How hopeful are you feeling.
Speaker 1: This conviction will be overturned? Do you think so, lucy Let,
Speaker 1: people will be free?
Speaker 2: What gives you that hope?
Speaker 1: Because I have never seen more expert, most national and
Speaker 1: international expert come forward and say what went on at
Speaker 1: that trial? It was so bad that this is a
Speaker 1: platant mischaracter justice. She's innocent.
Speaker 2: Mark mc donald believes Lucy let be is innocent, and
Speaker 2: though it is his job to argue that point, my
Speaker 2: sense is he'd be fighting this fight regardless. I wanted
Speaker 2: to hear from someone with no brief to argue, someone
Speaker 2: with nothing to gain. So we went to the Palace
Speaker 2: of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, to be exact, into
Speaker 2: the shadow of Big Ben, past armed police and through security,
Speaker 2: where an aid met us and led us up a
Speaker 2: narrow back staircase to a wood paneled office overflowing with books.
Speaker 2: Tea was poured. Big Ben chimed through a window looking
Speaker 2: down on the courtyard, and here, in the heart of
Speaker 2: the British establishment, sat one of the most persistent thorns
Speaker 2: in its side. Sir David Davis MP.
Speaker 4: So you want to talk about Lucy, let me.
Speaker 2: I would love to know what initially drew you to
Speaker 2: the case, because it's not, you know, politically opportune.
Speaker 3: I might think, yeah, my hate mails went up by
Speaker 3: the small amount of I imagine, I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 3: I asked mat, I never read it, Yeah, exactly. It
Speaker 3: is not my first radio. People tend to see me
Speaker 3: as sort of missed and miscarriage of justice or the obverse.
Speaker 4: One hopes the.
Speaker 3: Sort of classical pattern for a miscarriage is that the
Speaker 3: person who turns out to be the victim of the
Speaker 3: miscarriage is hated by everybody.
Speaker 4: And the first thing you must have come across this yourself.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you mean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, It's hated by everybody, and so everybody else
Speaker 3: is terrorized out of doing anything about it.
Speaker 4: So my role, in many.
Speaker 3: Ways is to be the icebreaker for that right.
Speaker 4: And you were seen with this that.
Speaker 3: Once I'd spoken in Parliament and so on, once I'd
Speaker 3: said publicly various things about it. There was a a
Speaker 3: cascade of witnesses, mostly experts, but not just experts, the
Speaker 3: nineteen nurses.
Speaker 2: And someone among the people reaching out to Davis was
Speaker 2: a friend in New York, the old science advisor of
Speaker 2: number ten Downing Street.
Speaker 3: It just read the article in the New York at
Speaker 3: the thirteen thousand worder. You know the what I mean,
Speaker 3: And he says, you know this is your territory, David,
Speaker 3: you we should have a.
Speaker 4: Look at this.
Speaker 3: It makes it look as though the case is very flawed.
Speaker 4: Didn't say wrong, we just said flawed.
Speaker 3: So I went online trunk get it and it was
Speaker 3: suppressed by a court order. Right, So I got it
Speaker 3: another way read it so hmm. Like everybody else, I'd
Speaker 3: sort of accepted the monster nurse headlines up til then
Speaker 3: I thought this looks worrisome.
Speaker 4: At that point, no more than that, it's just worrisome.
Speaker 2: He raises the question in parliament, why is it that
Speaker 2: we can't read about court cases in our own jurisdiction.
Speaker 2: He wasn't trying to get an answer, he was just
Speaker 2: trying to make a point we should be able to
Speaker 2: access this information. But very quickly people started to take
Speaker 2: notice of Davis's doubts of the let be convictions.
Speaker 3: And then in the next two weeks I had sixteen
Speaker 3: different people get in touch with me. Nobody was a
Speaker 3: conspiracy theorist for a start, and not that sort of territory.
Speaker 3: They varied from well, a whole range of expert people,
Speaker 3: the past president or All Statistical Society, the past president
Speaker 3: or All College of Pediatric and Child Healthcare, a Nobel
Speaker 3: Prize winner, a professor of legal statistics, a forensics professor,
Speaker 3: and so on, and all these people were saying the
Speaker 3: same thing. None of them was saying she's innocent.
Speaker 4: They were all saying.
Speaker 3: I can't speak for the rest of the trial. But
Speaker 3: the bit I know about is rubbish, right, So he
Speaker 3: had this trial resting on a dozen pillars of evidence
Speaker 3: of court, and each of those pillars being knocked down
Speaker 3: by the most authority person in the country on that subject.
Speaker 3: That was far more persuasive to me than if somebody
Speaker 3: write up seats she's innocent.
Speaker 2: In most of the interviews I've done into this case,
Speaker 2: I've asked the interviewee if they think Lucy let Be
Speaker 2: is guilty or innocent. But David Davis, he wastes no
Speaker 2: time in making his position clear.
Speaker 3: People often say to me, do you think she's innocent?
Speaker 3: And I say yes to that. Now, if all I
Speaker 3: had done is what I've just described, I would have
Speaker 3: said I don't know, but she's not being proven guilty.
Speaker 3: That would have been my normal response. But I do
Speaker 3: say yes, she's innocent. Now why do I say that?
Speaker 3: I say that because I think there's a demonstrable alternative cause,
Speaker 3: and the demonstrable alternative cause is a very very poor
Speaker 3: standard of care in this hospital.
Speaker 2: David Davis, mister miscarriage of justice, knows the process for
Speaker 2: these kinds of cases can be long.
Speaker 3: A typical miscarriage case for me, will swallow roughly ten
Speaker 3: years start to finish. Right, the Post Office cases took
Speaker 3: fifteen years. I was involved in that as well, not
Speaker 3: actually from the complete beginning, but nevertheless it took fifteen years.
Speaker 2: From the beginning, I didn't realize, Oh, well, you.
Speaker 3: See, my reputation is civil liberty's rule of law, limitation
Speaker 3: of the powers of the state, free speech. They've all
Speaker 3: become topical again. I am mister civil liberties in this place.
Speaker 3: That's how I'm seeing. So that also lends people to
Speaker 3: come to me when they think the States done something wrong,
Speaker 3: whether it's a legal miscarriage or an oppressive treatment of
Speaker 3: a whistleblower or whatever.
Speaker 4: I've company view.
Speaker 3: This is plainly a mistrial in the sense that a
Speaker 3: number of pieces of fundamental evidence were wrong and has
Speaker 3: such been presented wrongly.
Speaker 4: The jury had believed them when they were not true.
Speaker 3: But I didn't know whether she was guilty of any
Speaker 3: of them because my view, I mean, she was convicted
Speaker 3: or whatever it was fourteenth cases. My view was, if
Speaker 3: she's guilty of one of these cases, she's in the
Speaker 3: right place. And I was not going to invest ten
Speaker 3: years in proving a technical mistrial, right right, So we
Speaker 3: tried to get hold of the transcript.
Speaker 2: Getting hold of the court transcripts proved to be more
Speaker 2: difficult than expected, resulting in his office resorting to cross
Speaker 2: checking the BBC live feed of the court case with
Speaker 2: detailed local reporting.
Speaker 3: And I went through all those, right, and what I
Speaker 3: was looking for was a single slam dunk one proof
Speaker 3: of guilt. I went through and I didn't find one.
Speaker 3: Took three months. I didn't find one.
Speaker 2: Emotionally, what was that like for you? Were you almost
Speaker 2: hoping to find evidence of guilt?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: No, they're going to bear in mind my sort of
Speaker 3: psyche is I'm cold blooded, analytical, vicious. Okay, but you
Speaker 3: know that now. I tried to distance myself from the
Speaker 3: emotionality in these things. I've never been to see her,
Speaker 3: for example, And people say why not? And you look
Speaker 3: in the eye and see if you tell the truth.
Speaker 3: And my answer to that is I'm a professional, which
Speaker 3: is probably sixty percent psychopaths. You know, if you ask
Speaker 3: them something, they'll tell you about right, lie in a
Speaker 3: very perspuasive way. On the other hand, you're going to
Speaker 3: look at somebody's being broken by the system and they
Speaker 3: won't meet your gaze. And they be hesitant, and their
Speaker 3: memory will be and they may even half believe.
Speaker 4: Their own guilt.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, so I make it as dispassionate as I
Speaker 3: conceivably can.
Speaker 2: Having not found the slam dunk he was looking for,
Speaker 2: he came to a couple of conclusions.
Speaker 3: One, there's no evidence for any of the murders, or
Speaker 3: so called attemptive murders. There's no evidence that a murder occurred. Secondly,
Speaker 3: I came to the conclusion that if you had taken
Speaker 3: all fourteen fifteen cases and tried them into pendently, there
Speaker 3: wouldn't have been a single conviction, because this is built
Speaker 3: on accumulation, a cascade, a cascade which turns into a
Speaker 3: confirmatory bias. I don't know if you saw it, but
Speaker 3: I did a speech in the Chamber about two weeks
Speaker 3: ago which was deliberately focused on the prosecutorial process, the
Speaker 3: police and so on. I rather upset the head of
Speaker 3: Cheshire Police.
Speaker 2: I had seen the speech Sir David Davis in the
Speaker 2: House of Commons had alleged egregious failures in the police investigation.
Speaker 2: The fallout had made huge national headlines as the head
Speaker 2: of Cheshire Police retaliated against the MP's comments in a
Speaker 2: public statement. I'm wondering if you think that this case
Speaker 2: isn't just a personal tragedy but also a political one.
Speaker 2: Is this a political case?
Speaker 3: Well, let me change the question slightly. Okay, does it
Speaker 3: have policy implications?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 4: The answer is emphatic. Yes.
Speaker 2: As Sir David sees it. There are four areas of
Speaker 2: government policy which will be impacted based on this case.
Speaker 2: Some of them are already in place but have been ignored.
Speaker 2: Policy area one, the police.
Speaker 3: Police procedure is incredibly important. Prosecutorial procedure is incredibly important.
Speaker 3: We have rules today and they were in application at
Speaker 3: the beginning of the Letley case, but they were not
Speaker 3: quite so clearly stated. But we have rulesod We say
Speaker 3: if there are four suspected homicides or more, or if
Speaker 3: there is a health care involvement, it should go to
Speaker 3: a specialist unit in London, which is the counter Terrorism
Speaker 3: and Specialist Unit. So should be done from here, not
Speaker 3: from the Cheshire and Merseyside Crown Prosecution Service.
Speaker 4: Right. So they didn't do this.
Speaker 3: So that's the first thing, is the whole nexus of
Speaker 3: police and CPS obeying the rules, making sure the rules don't.
Speaker 2: Properly This would also include making sure that confirmation bias
Speaker 2: doesn't bleed into future investigations. Policy number two the handling
Speaker 2: of expert witnesses.
Speaker 3: A very famous retired judge here wrote to me and
Speaker 3: he said, in his experience, expert witnesses become advocates for
Speaker 3: which I ever side employs them, and as such they
Speaker 3: cease to be impartial experts. This is the Dowie Evans
Speaker 3: issue here and indeed the other experts here and Dowie
Speaker 3: Evans famous. He said, at one point I've only lost
Speaker 3: one out of thirty five cases.
Speaker 4: Experts.
Speaker 3: Don't we should winning or losing. In fact, that they
Speaker 3: start thinking about winning or losing, they should be disqualified
Speaker 3: from the case. There is a law Commission report will
Speaker 3: come out in twenty eleven which we did not adopt.
Speaker 3: It should be in law okay. First point number two.
Speaker 2: Policy number three appeal procedures.
Speaker 3: There is a couple of strong feelings about this one
Speaker 3: that the Appeal Court seemed to put the dignity of
Speaker 3: the law above the individual case, the individual miscarriage in
Speaker 3: the way back when in a very famous British judge
Speaker 3: called Lord Denning actually said it's better that we preserve
Speaker 3: the belief in the dignity of the law, and then
Speaker 3: we solve an individual miscarriage, which to me is anathema,
Speaker 3: but there's that feel about it.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: The new evidence guideline is there to prevent defense lawyers
Speaker 3: trying one set of evidence and when that strategy fails,
Speaker 3: come back to another one. But in a case is
Speaker 3: ten months long with fifteen babies, you know, with vast
Speaker 3: numbers of doctors and nurses, and god knows what else
Speaker 3: I can understand why it's there, but it's a problem,
Speaker 3: and it's one of the reasons the CCRC, which has
Speaker 3: to guess it's of second gaessism since few over So
Speaker 3: that's three.
Speaker 2: Policy number four the behavior of the National Health Service.
Speaker 3: The health service is incapable of healing itself when it
Speaker 3: goes off.
Speaker 4: The right off.
Speaker 3: Now, neonatal and maternal deaths is sufficient of a course
Speaker 3: of concern in the UK that we have a woman
Speaker 3: called Valerie Amos nominated by the government to go around
Speaker 3: and do a.
Speaker 4: Review of it.
Speaker 3: Right, she's been visiting various places with local scandal. One
Speaker 3: of the things she's already found she didn't be doing
Speaker 3: for six months, is that hospitals misclassified deaths in order
Speaker 3: to avoid embarrassment.
Speaker 4: Really yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: The baby dies maybe within thirty six hours after her birth,
Speaker 3: they will often misclassify that as a stillbirth. Stillbirth does
Speaker 3: not require an inquest. Really, but if they die in
Speaker 3: the hospital. So for example, baby born, let's say it
Speaker 3: got pseudomonas, could die after twenty four.
Speaker 2: Hours and they call it a stillburth.
Speaker 4: They called it stillbirth.
Speaker 3: No, and that's a recent scandal, right, So my concern
Speaker 3: is that our National Health Service behaves like big bureaucracies everywhere.
Speaker 3: They avoid blame. They may be will intentioned organizations, but
Speaker 3: they avoid blame.
Speaker 2: Sir David has thoughts on how this could be done.
Speaker 2: What if hospitals behave more like airlines after a crisis,
Speaker 2: identifying what went wrong, changing protocols and retraining accordingly, what
Speaker 2: if they change the culture to one that is less
Speaker 2: interested in scapegoating and blame into one that is focused
Speaker 2: on improvement.
Speaker 3: When a pilot makes a mistake, there's a no fault
Speaker 3: reporting procedure. Let's imagine I reach down and instead of
Speaker 3: putting the flaps down, I put the wheels down. Or
Speaker 3: instead of bringing the flaps up, I bring the wheels up.
Speaker 3: And whatever phase of flight and that causes a crash
Speaker 3: or causes a risk. I report that very simple happen.
Speaker 3: After that, they might change the training, They might change
Speaker 3: where the knobs stand. So for example, in an aircraft today,
Speaker 3: if you go to put the undercarriage up or down, there's.
Speaker 4: A wheel, so it's obvious what it is.
Speaker 3: If you put the flap up and down, it's a
Speaker 3: little thing shaped like a flap. So the risk of
Speaker 3: you know, even by feel and location, they or they
Speaker 3: don't put them next to each other typically, and so on.
Speaker 3: So there should be a system which picks out hospitals
Speaker 3: or even individual departments they have high death rates, and
Speaker 3: goes and unswervingly, unflinchingly analyzes why it is right. The
Speaker 3: doctor should not be fearing a manslaugh to charge. They
Speaker 3: should be looking to improve their performance. I'm a big
Speaker 3: believer in the hell, so I'm a working class board.
Speaker 3: My entire life has depended on it. It doesn't now
Speaker 3: because I can't afford to wait. I have to go
Speaker 3: and pay for myself to get fixed. But generally speaking,
Speaker 3: I'm a big believer in it. But it's got to
Speaker 3: be fixed.
Speaker 2: I wanted to know more about the perception of politics.
Speaker 2: In the lucyle Be case.
Speaker 3: Most MPs give a really wide steer around these things.
Speaker 3: This is dangerous territory. There's not much upside people. Once
Speaker 3: we win, which we will all beit take years, it
Speaker 3: might take years.
Speaker 4: Once we win, people will forget.
Speaker 3: I think will win this.
Speaker 4: I've got high confidence in winning.
Speaker 3: The issue is when she is a woman of childbearing age.
Speaker 4: We know from the infamous.
Speaker 3: Post it notes one of the things you said was
Speaker 3: I'll never get married, I'll never have children. So it
Speaker 3: matters to her and for me. The measure of success
Speaker 3: or failure on this is not winning. It's winning early
Speaker 3: enough for her to recover some of her life and
Speaker 3: forgive me of the slightly sexist comment.
Speaker 2: No, actually, i'm surprised that you thought of that, because
Speaker 2: the vast majority of people who work on wrongful conviction cases,
Speaker 2: even those who are dedicated like it doesn't occur to
Speaker 2: them that that's a special issue for women who.
Speaker 4: Are expect.
Speaker 3: One of the those things I wrote to Vera Beer about.
Speaker 2: That, that's Vera Baird, current interim chair of the CCRC.
Speaker 3: I thought, I don't want to answer, I just want
Speaker 3: you to take on board this woman's life is evaporating
Speaker 3: while your organization takes his time.
Speaker 4: So that's the test of success.
Speaker 2: In the next episode, I'll be heading north to Chester
Speaker 2: to find out more about whistleblowers in the NHS and
Speaker 2: at the Countess of Chester specifically because, as it turns out,
Speaker 2: Lucy Letbee hasn't been alone in raising the alarm about
Speaker 2: conditions at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
Speaker 1: Doubt.
Speaker 2: The Case of Lucy Letbe is brought to you by Vespucci,
Speaker 2: iHeart Podcasts and Knox Robinson Productions. I've been your host
Speaker 2: Amanda Knox. This episode was written by Isis Thompson. The
Speaker 2: producer was Isis Thompson. The assistant producer was Amy Gill.
Speaker 2: Senior producer is Natalia Rodriguez. The sound designer is Chandler Mays.
Speaker 2: The theme music was written by Tom Biddle, story editing
Speaker 2: by Natalia Rodriguez. Legal advice for the series was provided
Speaker 2: by Jack Browning. The producers at iHeart Podcasts are Chandler
Speaker 2: Mays and Katrina Norville. The executive producers were Joe Meek,
Speaker 2: Amanda Knox, Christopher Robinson, Daniel Turkin, and Johnny Galvin.