In 2023, British nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven babies at the hospital where she worked and attempting to kill seven more. Unsurprisingly, such a heinous charge made her the monstrous feature of the tabloids, TV documentaries, and endless online debates. How could someone do such awful things?
Well, there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that she didn’t; that the babies weren’t murdered in the first place, rather that their tragic deaths were down to a failing maternity unit.
Unpacking the whole horrible story on Doubt: The Case of Lucy Letby is Amanda Knox, a woman who knows a little something about being vilified in the media for crimes she didn’t commit. Using her first-hand knowledge of such opprobrium, Knox covers all that was missed in the trial and the tabloid coverage, building a convincing argument that claims the fifteen life sentences Letby is currently serving might just constitute the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.
Having Knox host a show about an potentially innocent woman being convicted for murder is a canny way of separating this podcast from the ocean of existing documentaries about Letby. It’s also an effective way of underlining the fallibility of any legal system, whether in the UK or worldwide. Even if she’d made no reference at all to her own case, Knox’s narration adds important weight here.
Unfortunately, she makes many references. In the first episode, barely three minutes goes past without Knox reminding us that she knows what it’s like to be a regular person wrongly accused of an atrocity. Her perspective is rare and valuable; after all, there are few people who have achieved such an extreme level of unearned global notoriety. Still, that this podcast is officially titled “Amanda Knox Hosts DOUBT: The Case of Lucy Letby” underlines how there wasn’t exactly a risk of audiences not getting the connection.
Besides Knox’s constant self-injection being a little irritating, the more damaging aspect of Knox’s involvement is what we are meant to infer from it: Knox was innocent, so Letby must be too.
But the two cases are apples and oranges. Their differences are so obvious, it almost doesn’t need to be said. Even if you think Letby is innocent, or are at least deeply troubled by the way her situation has played out in the media, such a gargantuan leap of logic risks delegitimizing the plenitude of more valid points here regarding the flaws in Letby’s prosecution.
Nevertheless, while sometimes clumsily presented, the facts of Letby’s case presented here are illuminating. No one ever saw Letby harming a baby. The biggest piece of “evidence” weighing against her is that she was present at the deaths of all seven infants. But Letby was one of the most senior nurses, often called in for emergencies, and was also seeking extra shifts because she was saving up for an apartment. The prosecution made a huge deal of notes found in her home scribbled with thoughts that looked like a confession (“I am evil, I did this”), but they were written on the advice of a counsellor, who was seeing her for the immense toll of working amidst such loss and feeling blamed for it. Fourteen experts were called for the prosecution. None were called for the defence.
Doubt is a fitting name for a podcast interrogating grand institutions operating with flimsy evidence and dubious processes.
Speaking of institutions: as a Brit writing about an American making a show about a British case, the way Knox discusses the National Health Service consistently rankles. She talks as if it’s a golden deity we all worship and won’t hear a word against. It isn’t. For British people, the NHS is cognitive dissonance writ large. It is an amazing, invaluable thing that keeps us alive without bankrupting us for the mere sin of inhabiting a mortal body. It is also a maddening, terrifyingly underfunded, overstretched system, which people frequently and understandably complain about. Both things are true, and that Knox doesn’t grasp the nuance does have a detrimental effect on the segments where she discusses how the public perception of the NHS factored into the trial and its coverage.
Ultimately, institutions are run by human beings, and thus are fallible. That we are so vulnerable to those failures is terrifying. And if there’s even a small chance that Letby will be in jail her whole life for tragedies that were not her fault, but the fault of an institution, that’s enough to justify the existence of even a deeply flawed podcast like Doubt.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.