Originally published at: Nurse who murdered 7 babies to spend rest of life in jail | Boing Boing
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Jarndyce and Jarndyce would like a word.
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After a weekend of reading about this, it’s time for a change of pace.
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For a brief moment I was okay with the death penalty for this person
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That was a civil lawsuit, not a criminal trial.
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It being fictional is probably a bigger issue.
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The Lucy Letby case is literally front page news here in the UK, and it is a matter of national political significance. It could even lead to a change in the law, because Letby did not go to the sentencing hearing, and the Prime Minister has now said that the law may be changed to require attendance.
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To be clear, I don’t believe BB is the only place that does this. Awful stories drive engagement, I recognize that.
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I was trying to explain that this is not a “bad person did something bad” story and the news coverage is not driven solely by engagement. The fact that the hospital failed to stop a nurse killing babies is a political issue because it occurred within the public National Health Service. It raises issues related to the lack of staff and other systemic problems within the NHS.
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We may have to agree to disagree about that first point, as I don’t see any of those issues raised in BB’s story.
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To British people it is obvious that any kind of malpractice in the NHS is potentially politically significant, because the buck stops in Westminster and ultimately at the Prime Minister’s desk. The problem is that the political angle might well be missed by people outside the UK, including BoingBoing’s authors.
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Probably, meant the longest murder trial.
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Not least that 7 doctors complained about her, were forced to apologise for picking on/discriminating against her, the exec mgt ignored/pooh-poohed it/the Board were misled by exec mgt, and so on. It is not just about a lunatic/evil murderer of babies - this story is also about how she got away with it for so long when there were allegedly multiple opportunities to stop her earlier.
Personally, I do not find these factors (assuming them true) to be specifically representative of systemic NHS flaws as much as systemic public (and some ex-public) sector management incompetence and self-serving arse protection (cf The Post Office) but there is a big enough backstory at this particular hospital trust (and there are one or two others investigated recently whose exec mgt clearly acted to protect arses rather than patients) that a public enquiry is on the cards.
PS In none of the coverage over the past couple of years, have I seen any implication that staff shortages were a part proximate cause.
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sigh
Jarndyce and Jarndyce was a fictional (thank you @robertmckenna) civil (thank you @Tsu_Dho_Nimh) case that was a key plot point in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
It has nothing to do with this real, criminal, murder case, other than taking place in Britain and lasting a very long time.
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… which would be an example of “reveling in punishment for its own sake” 
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Well, you brought it up, in the first place! 
(Yes, I knew both those things, and obviously it has nothing to do with this real, criminal murder case. ‘Murder trial’ being the key missing words from the phrase ‘longest … in English history’. Was that reply intended for me?)
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The most revealing comment from the hospital management I have read - one that explains why they didn’t act on the physician’s suspicions - was that they were concerned for how the hospital’s reputation might be damaged. The optics of having the unit with crime scene tape on it.
Way back when I was an active lab tech, most infant and pediatric deaths were investigated. Who was on duty (in case their training needed refreshing), all the meds given, all the lab reports … by staff from outside the unit. Because if we screwed up, we did NOT want it to happen again.
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They really do seem to be focusing on one of the least important parts of this.
Like there were dozens of bigger issues here: how the management chose to misinterpret the external review; how a visit from her father made them fear a civil suit and caused them to tell the doctors to apologise to her; a rift in the professions (doctor whistleblowers said that they were given the impression that they were seen doctors bullying a nurse and management came from the nursing side of the discipline); not leaping at a police investigation which has a more compelling effect on testimony and is better the earlier it happens.
It’s funny that we have seemed to focus on the length of the trial - which is objectively a good thing as more details were aired under oath for forensic examination - or what the sentencing looks like, which is less important than the sentencing, the verdict, the trial and evidence, the failures that led to this going on, or the murder, attempted murder, and maiming of many babies.
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Which I doubt would have even happened. The police would not have been looking for physical evidence at the crime scene which had most likely been sanitised many times since the incidents. They would have done what the medical review had done: looked at rosters and interviewed people, possibly footage and they would also have asked different, more probing, questions.
So it seems to me they allowed more children to be murdered because of watching CSI rather than doing the obvious right thing.
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