Convict In Haste...

...retrial at leisure? 

Former Cabinet Minister David Davis is to spearhead a Commons campaign raising questions about the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby as growing numbers of experts express concerns about the case. The ex-Brexit Secretary plans to table a series of questions under Parliamentary privilege amid disquiet within the NHS and the legal profession about the case.

Mail columnists Peter Hitchens and Nadine Dorries have highlighted that Letby was convicted of the murders of seven newborns and the attempted murders of six other infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital, despite the fact that no one saw her kill, or attempt to kill, a baby and there is no forensic evidence to prove her guilt.

One of your other columnists disagrees, though (paywalled).   

Some members of the Royal Statistical Society have expressed concerns over the use of statistics to secure a conviction on the basis of probabilities. Its recommendations on using such data in the cases of medical serial killers were not followed here.

Recommendations are just that. They don't have to be followed. 

But why would the state and all its operatives conspire to convict a woman of such a heinous crime?

Mr Davis is understood to be concerned about the justice system's institutional reluctance to admit to its own failings, leading innocent people to languish in prison. He said: 'There is a mounting consensus among experts that Lucy Letby's guilt was not established beyond reasonable doubt. I will be using Parliamentary privilege to raise these arguments: we must exclude the possibility that she has effectively been scapegoated for the wider failings in the system.'

Ah! Some might call that 'motive' 

'At the very least, this appears to be a mistrial. But the justice system moves slowly when it comes to assessing its own failings, so if she is innocent it could be a decade before she is released. We must try to do much better than that.'

Regular readers will know I don't automatically disbelieve claims of miscarrtiage of justice - in fact there are at least two glaring examples where I believe the convictions to be unsafe. But I'm not convinced this is one to add.    

So, This Is A Step Too Far, Eh..?

School leaders have accused Labour of “window dressing” after Keir Starmer pledged to introduce...

...supervised toothbrushing for young children in England’s primary schools.

While the policy has long been supported by the dentistry profession as a way of curbing decay, headteachers said it was not appropriate for their staff to check whether pupils had cleaned their teeth.

It's not appropriate to check what parents are sending in for a packed lunch either, but that didn't stop them, did it?

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “We have serious reservations about how such a policy could even work. It is not the role of teachers to be making sure children brush their teeth each day.

“Schools already play a role in teaching children about the importance of looking after their teeth through the curriculum, but there has to be a limit in terms of what we can expect them to do.

“We should demand more than window dressing from all of our politicians.”

Oh, be quiet! You've already meddled in things that were the purview of parents, you can hardly claim it's not your role now... 

The British Dental Association, which represents the profession, said it was encouraged by Labour’s proposal, given ministerial inaction over introducing a similar scheme.

So, have the hapless Labour brains trust decided there's more votes to come from dentists than from  teachers? Because maybe they shouldn't have let Diane Abbott do the maths...