| We spoke to Rachel Aviv about her reporting on Lucy Letby, which draws from more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts, including police interviews and text messages, as well as leaked internal hospital records. When did you become interested in the story, and what alerted you to the fact that the legal and medical narrative of the case against Letby might be deeply flawed? About two years ago, I had considered writing about an Australian mother named Kathleen Folbigg, who, in 2003, was found guilty of smothering her four children. There hadn’t been any direct evidence that she had committed these crimes, but the prosecution had said that it was more likely that pigs would fly than that four babies in one family would die of natural causes. Folbigg was pardoned in 2023, after scientists discovered that the deaths could be explained by rare genetic mutations. The Australian Academy of Science called the case “Australia’s greatest miscarriage of justice.” The case made me interested in the kinds of assumptions we make about the nature of chance and the way those statistical intuitions play out in the criminal-justice system. I had been corresponding about the Folbigg case with Cleuci de Oliveira, an amazing researcher I work with, and she pointed me to the Letby story, and observed that the prosecution’s case seemed weak and driven by the same principle as in the Folbigg case: the belief that there had been too many deaths to have occurred by chance. At that point, the trial was in its sixth month. Given the fact that the prosecution’s evidence was circumstantial and that the scientific claims seemed very flimsy, I assumed that Letby would be acquitted and there wouldn’t really be a reason to write about her. I was shocked when the jury found her guilty. What was the most surprising thing you learned during your reporting? Did it affect how you approached other details in Letby’s case? On almost a sociological level, it was surprising to see how a tentative opinion, first voiced by a few doctors, kept gathering strength: the more that people signed on to the belief, the harder it was for others to resist the idea. Even some of Letby’s friends and colleagues, who had previously supported her, decided they must have been wrong about her all along and turned against her. Eventually, this belief became the national consensus, affirmed by the Prime Minister and other government leaders. And, yet, to believe that she was guilty required accepting a proposition that on its face was pretty outlandish: that a nurse who had been described as kind, caring, and dedicated—even the police acknowledged that they could not find anything about her that seemed inherently suspicious—decided to start killing babies with diverse, unprecedented methods in such a discrete and masterly way that no one saw her doing it. What about the British legal system specifically makes it difficult to report a story like this? In the U.K., contempt-of-court laws prevent any reporting that will prejudice court proceedings. (In the U.S., on the other hand, we have a First Amendment right to report on government proceedings, including criminal cases.) After the Letby verdicts in August, there was a brief window in which journalists could report on the case, but, in September, when the prosecution announced that they would retry Letby on one charge, there was another blackout, and reporting on the case was restricted again. And, yet, during the ten months of the trial and the five-year investigation leading up to it, there had been an enormous amount of articles published about each step of the case. With almost no exceptions, those articles presented Letby as the incarnation of evil. It came to feel to me that the reporting restrictions actually allowed the state’s narrative of the case to proliferate, at the expense of other perspectives. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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