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The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment

The Jolly Contrarian

Crime, criminal justice, and our systems of compliance jollycontrarian.substack.com

true crime social sciences

All Episodes

30:04

Juries, proof and the appalling vista

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/10/11

Trigger warning: this newsletter assumes readers are of sufficient maturity to understand and not be wounded by cultural references to cocaine, Starsky & Hutch, and physical money made out of paper. Also: these events happened a long time ago. My recollection is imperfect, and I have definitely changed and embellished the narrative to make it a good story.Dirty banknotesShe don’t lieShe don’t lieShe don’t lieCocaine.J. J. Cale, CocaineThere is an urban myth that every bank note in circulation has

32:24

Lucy Letby: you had to be there

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/08/29

The investigation into the actions of Lucy Letby, the trial process and medical experts continues to face scrutiny and criticism, much of it ill-informed and based on a very partial knowledge of the facts and totality of evidence presented at court and at the Court of Appeal.This case has been rigorously and fairly tested through two juries and subsequently scrutinised by two sets of appeal court judges. Lucy Letby’s trial was one of the longest-running murder trials in British criminal history with

57:22

Waiver of privilege

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/07/28

This is a follow on piece from Lucy Letby: waiver of privilege? It is mainly about waiver in a criminal context. The rules around waiver are more developed in the civil cases, since waiving privilege there is not quite as catastrophic to life, liberty and freedom, so it does happen.A document or communication is “once privileged, always privileged”. The principle that a client should be free to consult his legal advisers without fear of his communications being revealed is a fundamental condition on

41:50

Lucy Letby — the judge’s direction

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/07/21

In his summing up, Mr Justice Goss instructed the jury that they did not need to be sure precisely how Ms. Letby murdered the infants, as long as they were sure she did:“If you are sure that someone on the unit was deliberately harming a baby or babies you do not have to be sure of the precise harmful act or acts; in some instances there may have been more than one. To find the defendant guilty, however, you must be sure that she deliberately did some harmful act to the baby the subject of the count

43:15

Lucy Letby: confirmation bias

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/07/09

Take the following hypothetical scene, which describes Lucy Letby’s experience at the Countess of Chester Hospital:Internal investigationA hospital experiences a cluster of deaths and collapses materially in excess of its usual rates for such events.Staff notice a particular nurse was present during an abnormal proportion of the collapses.Concerned at the possibility of foul play, hospital management investigates the collapses, focusing on those where the nurse was present. Those where she was

39:51

Lucy Letby and behavioural profiling

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/06/13

A leopard goes to the doctor.“Doc,” he says, “You gotta help me. Whenever I look at my wife, I see spots.”The doctor looks at him for a minute and says, “Well, what do you expect? You’re a leopard.”“I know that, Doc. But I’m married to a zebra.”Healthcare serial murder enquiries are unusual in that they generally start without specific evidence of wrongdoing as such. Suspicion generally arises from an unusually large cluster of unexpected deaths. From there, prosecutors work backwards towards a

29:45

Lucy Letby: The ludic fallacy

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/05/21

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents the “ludic fallacy”: the mistake of applying unvarnished theoretical probabilities to real-world scenarios.Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.Here is his example:You have a fair coin which, on the last 99 flips, had come up “heads”. Assuming it is a fair coin, what is the probability of it coming up “heads” on the 100th flip?Professor of statistics: Easy: 50%.Professional gambler: Come on, chump, it is 100%

29:49

Lucy Letby: how the charges were selected

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/05/09

Prelude: A daycare centre in New ZealandPeter Ellis was a childcare worker in Christchurch, New Zealand. A creative, flamboyant and somewhat uninhibited character, Ellis loved his job, put a lot of energy into programme planning, and would entertain children with elaborate puppet shows and somewhat provocative productions, sometimes to the point of being “risqué and outrageous”. Ellis had worked at the daycare centre for several years and was popular with children and parents alike.In 1991 a parent

27:07

Lucy Letby: strikingly similar?

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/05/05

Show me a man who believes in conspiracy theories and I’ll show you someone who has never organised a surprise party.—Lee Harvey Oswald.The constant presenceOrdinarily, when a defendant appears on 22 counts of things like murder, there is a wealth of compelling evidence: eyewitnesses, fingerprints, incriminating forensics and related corroborations that point not just to murder, but to the defendant, specifically, committing each one.Ms. Letby’s case seemed quite different. The evidence largely

29:18

Lucy Letby: the insulin smoking gun

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/04/06

The test results showing that insulin had been given to them was the only piece of concrete evidence of criminality throughout the whole of the prosecution’s case. It was the closest thing they had to a smoking gun and became the keystone for their case as a whole.Johnson’s argument ran that if the jury could agree that Letby had deliberately poisoned two babies, they could also reasonably conclude that she had harmed others using different methods, even if the evidence for those were less concrete

15:29

Lucy Letby: The Handover Notes

The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and Punishment ·

2025/04/04

“Lucy Letby Conspiracy Theorists are Wrong”, Liz Hull, Daily Mail, July 5, 2024.R v Letby, Court of Appeal Judgment, 2 July 2024.Rachel Aviv’s, New Yorker investigation of 13 May 2024.Lucy Letby: initials of babies noted in diary on dates of alleged attacks, court told, The Guardian, 17 April 2023. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subscribe

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