Letby and Sandusky: Two Monsters or Two Martyrs of the Media Age?

This is the first of a three-part series.

By John Atwell Moody

Part I

Twisted “Confessions” Link Sandusky and Letby Miscarriages of Justice

It is instructive to notice similarities between two ongoing miscarriages of justice. In both cases, the prosecution had issued press releases about crimes which had never occurred at all. In both cases there is a supposed confession.

We all remember Jerry Sandusky on ESPN.

Most likely he would have been speaking straight into the blackberry phone which his lawyer Joe Amendola was using in 2011.

Darth-Vader-like Sandusky huffed and puffed into the microphone and spoke with a distorted voice, but what he said was unmistakable, “sexually attracted to young boys? …kshk …sexually attracted? …gasp…I enjoy young people …kshk…I love to be around them….huff, puff…”

But no, he said, after a pause, which the world took as evasion, “I am not sexually attracted to young boys.”

Less familiar to those outside Britain is the case of Lucy Letby, a nurse who was arrested in 2018 after an investigation at the hospital where she worked.

In her house were post-it notes of insane-like scrawlings with the word ‘hate’ in capital letters circled in black marker. Understanding that she’s killed babies because she doesn’t care about them, police exhumed her garden; nothing was found. Letby was released on bail and later re-arrested.

In both cases, just from the original confession and using a clear mind, it is possible to get a sense of what is going wrong.

Sandusky had dedicated years of his life setting up the Second Mile charity, which had helped thousands of underprivileged and sick kids. He was physically there for them, too, spending time with them. And he adopted some, and fostered many more.

Yet on TV he was asked, in Bob Costas’ booming voice, “Are you sexually attracted to young boys.”

To understand what Sandusky said next, imagine a cat lady, who had dedicated her life to rescuing cats, whose house is usually filled with cats, hoping for some acknowledgement that her work would inspire others, but being asked “Do you like emptying the litter box?”

Her answer would be, “ Do I like emptying the litter box? The litter box?? I enjoy cats. I love being around them. But no, I don’t like emptying the litter box.”

To understand what Letby wrote, you have to use her actual words, “I killed them on purpose because I wasn’t good enough to care for them.”

Here, “care” refers not to caring about them, it refers to delivering medical care, medical treatment, and when asked in her first police interview about what she had written she specifically meant the technicalities of how ventilators work, how she was supposed to know if something is going wrong, how the various medications work, and what are the situations where she would need to again and again disturb the specialist consultants by phoning them.

The word “because” modifies “on purpose” and she is contemplating, could the deaths be considered intentional by virtue of them being caused by her continuing to provide medical care while not knowing when she needs to call one of the doctors.

What she wrote is an example of what at least in England medics are encouraged to do, it is called ‘reflecting,’ and it is the consideration of intentions and consequences of your own past actions. It is not like in the last scene of a crime thriller where an inessential character (in many James Bond films, a tied-up couple) gives the villain an excuse to break the fourth wall and divulge the murder motives to the audience.

She was writing to herself. ChatGPT was useful in condensing my objection: if she were guilty and had committed the acts, it would be nonsensical to write a note to inform herself of something she already knows.

How Sandusky and Letby Were Tried Without Evidence

Another parallel is that the victims are given symbols.

In the Sandusky case there is Victim 1, Victim 2, Victim 3,… and in the Letby case there is Child A, Child B, Child C,….. In both cases, the defense is that none of the acts charged ever occurred while the prosecution case is that they all did.

It is worth pausing a moment to consider the absurdity of that.

Ordinarily one would expect that in a criminal trial, the facts of the case would be essentially stipulated the same way between the defense and prosecution. There would be no disagreement about things like that particular shell casings had been found, particular injuries had been treated in a hospital, or a particular item had been in one house and later was found in the house of an accused thief.

Ordinarily, one would think, the crucial role of the lay jury would be to ensure that there is no corruption in the agreement of facts reached between the defense and prosecution, and it is fair then to let the facts be passed on to a judge to rule on ethics and sentencing.

Consider the actual reality of the defense and prosecution presenting to the jury a huge list of technical facts and saying “We can’t agree whether these are all true or all false, can you go into the next room and decide on our behalf?” The notion exemplifies an actual tragic gap, not only in law, but in the relation between science and humanity, which will be the subject of the next installment of this series.

The next-to-last parallel I want to mention is how, in both cases, if a person studies and focusses on any one particular charge it becomes absolutely clear that the evidence had been misunderstood.

For example, in the Sandusky case, a maintenance worker, Ronald Petrosky heard another maintenance worker, James Calhoun, describing what might sound like failing to stem bleeding in a war injury years ago, or maybe an incident of abuse.

The Grand Jury presentment refers to the man in the story as “Sandusky, whose name was unknown to him.”

When police went to visit Calhoun and asked what it is all about, he had said, no, he does know who Jerry Sandusky is, he is a really good person and the story was about something else [1].

Petrosky had thought the perpetrator must be Sandusky, and Petrosky’s witness statement supports the notion in that he had seen Sandusky walking hand-in-hand in a hallway near the gym, and he had seen Sandusky sitting in a car with a child.

In court Petrosky describes his recollections from that time, although they had been many years earlier, as if they are all in one day. He recollects asking Calhoun “Are you sure that man that just left,” that Calhoun confirms that he’s sure, and that Petrosky tells him “You know who that is that’s Jerry Sandusky.” Petrosky summarizes for the court “He didn’t know who he was but he knows what he [saw] that night.”

Judge Cleland’s Snow Job: How Deer Tracks Became a Metaphor for Conviction

Judge John Cleland instructs the jury “…this is what’s called hearsay. And the reason you are allowed to consider it is because it’s an example of what is called an excited utterance…”

Cleland explains that even once fully admitted, the hearsay evidence wouldn’t establish a particular abuser or indeed any crime “…the statement of Mr Calhoun, as related to you by Mr Petrosky, is not sufficient standing to sustain a conviction. You must be satisfied that there is other evidence, either direct or circumstantial, that supports that a crime has been committed.”

Cleland appropriately doesn’t see it as relevant to instruct the jury on any standards of direct evidence on the matter, and sets out a careful standard for circumstantial evidence, “The example I commonly use is, you go to bed at night, there’s a fresh layer of snow in your yard [2]. You go to sleep. You see deer tracks in the snow. You did not see the deer there. You were asleep. You saw the tracks. That’s circumstantial evidence that a deer was present in your yard.”

The judge presumably is trying to explain that if you want to measure whether the standard of circumstantial evidence is met for a deer on a particular night, you need to test whether there has been something like a layer of fresh snowfall to clear away earlier incidents, then you have to test whether you’ve been able to identify that some animal tracks specifically match what deer tracks should look like.

By referring to the “fresh layer of snow” and “the deer” the judge introduces his example just at the point where the conditions have actually been satisfied already. There already has been a fresh layer of snow. There actually has been a deer. He’s not saying that as judge he has already performed either test.

He’s saying, in case you agree, as the judge suggests, that Petrosky’s recollections are chronologically sorted such that each new recollection during the day is like a fresh sheet of newfallen snow, such that his recollections of seeing Sandusky hand-in-hand — undoubtedly quite often — do identify the unknown perpetrator in Calhoun’s story, then you are hereby required to follow the judge’s instruction that if “I’m sure” is part of the excited utterance faithfully repeated by Petrosky you should assess whether the statement plus Petrosky’s recollection of Sandusky being hand-in-hand with a child identify Sandusky as the perpetrator with an analysis at least as reliable as a Centre County resident could identify footprints of a deer, and if not, whether the handholding alone identifies Sandusky as Calhoun’s perpetrator.

No Drugs, No Memory, No Crime—Still a Conviction: The Sandusky-Letby Parallel

In the Letby case likewise each piece of evidence is wrong. Insulin was never measured. No one was killed by air in a nasogastric tube. No intravenous air caused embolisms etc [3].

In the Sandusky case drugs officers who had repeatedly confronted kids eventually got deals if kids would say they just don’t remember being abused [4]. Something must have caused their life to unravel; times that made sense were times when they ‘blanked out’ and couldn’t tell their police interrogator what happened on a particular day during their childhood.

During an ordinary drug bust when a kid gives over the name of his dealer, there always is prima facie proof that a crime has occurred. The cops have the actual drugs. Details of the transaction are irrelevant. But here, if the kid is instead being asked to give-over the name of a possible abuser, the drugs themselves aren’t proof of anything.

It isn’t enough to get the kid to accept that although he has no particular recollection of abuse he does confess that he’d have no way to know whether or not Sandusky specifically may have intended to abuse him and he just didn’t notice Sandusky’s intentions at the time or (as for one ‘victim’ [5]) that the intention was probably there but the abuse didn’t happen because there’d never been an opportunity, or (as for another ‘victim’ [6]) it hasn’t started yet but the conviction is valid because it would have started to occur in the future. And also, not being able to rule out abuse was compensated with millions of dollars from civil lawyers.

Sparks That Ignited Sandusky and Letby Prosecutions

For the last parallel I want to mention, in both cases, the strongest evidence at the beginning (whose importance faded later) is the very precise “caught in the act” evidence, where an emotional witness says he was right there when it happened but didn’t happen to see it. For Sandusky Michael McQueary was right there near the shower room but didn’t see a rape; for Letby after having a premonition (McQueary had also had a premonition when he heard either two or three [7] ‘rhythmic’ slaps) Dr. Ravi Jayaram was right there noticing something…perhaps that a saturation level was dropping to 80 and a nurse hadn’t noticed, perhaps an alarm had gone off.

Both witnesses are like a kaleidoscope, McQueary changing which year it was that he was sure the event had happened, Jayaram looking at his watch [8], the time indelibly etched into his memory, until clarifications in other evidence meant that Letby wasn’t there at that time either. The jury had to consider, how likely was it that this happened only a few seconds subsequent to Jayaram’s premonition? In both the Sandusky case and the Letby case the coincidence in timing between the relevant premonition and its subsequent suspicious event is what ratcheted the criminal justice procedure to the first serious stage.

As absurdly, insanely incompetent as both cases eventually became, it is crucial to keep in mind that the police and prosecution were careful and ethical. When you hear of a case of someone being freed after decades in prison, due to new DNA evidence, you should take good note of this fact: that this means that some dutiful officers had carefully preserved that evidence for decades in an evidence room.

Police do not lie or manipulate, they are extremely careful and it is a monumental effort, a monumental task, to keep track of all the evidence not only from ongoing trials, but all that have taken place in the past whenever the evidence might be relevant later.

In the Sandusky case, police had to interview about 600 people before they found some who eventually would admit that they don’t for sure remember never ever being abused. And police were careful not to believe clients of one lawyer in particular who seemed to be coaching kids about what to say. This left just a few cases of concern, and it was right and fair to let the court service deal with these.

In the Letby case, documents in the Thirlwall enquiry [9] show that when the manager Tony Chambers had brought all the evidence about Letby to Chester police, much of which had been compiled by Dr. Stephen Brearey, the police had felt there is no need to investigate Letby, but Chambers and the police wanted to be sure, and they wanted to meet with Dr Jayaram in person. It was only after the final meeting that police felt there should be an investigation to completely clarify things.

Also, you cannot blame the prosecution. In the Sandusky case, Joseph McGettigan questioned witnesses with good emotional honesty. One witness, Jason Simcisko, had found Sandusky through a link between the Big Brother organization and Second Mile, Sandusky became “…like a father to me” [10].

Simcisko was eventually sent away to two group homes. He hoped to be adopted but Sandusky never called him to get him out. He went to foster care then joined the military. Recollecting their time together he described games which Sandusky has always described himself too: sometimes monkey-bites above the knee, sometimes lifting a T shirt to make a loud sound with the mouth. (The word-choice of monkey-bites is just from what had been my own school’s local vernacular; I’m referring not to actual biting, but to that playfighting vulnerability at the SP10 pressure point, also called the the xue hai accupoint, which can retaliate against kicking and wouldn’t be very effective against adults.)

Simcisko also describes some possibly incidental touching; when McGettigan asks “And did he touch any other parts of your body when you were sleeping there, and if so, can you tell us how,” Simcisko replies “No, not that I recall” [11] The questioning goes to types of restaurants and football games they would go to. Simcisko later comments [12] about the intimacy, “I wouldn’t let it go any further….I’d obviously [seen], like, pornographic videos and stuff like that, so I knew what was going on and that it wasn’t natural for an older man to—”

At this juncture, to win the charge unfairly, McGettigan might have allowed an elision between the video and whatever abusive actions Simcisko might have been willing to complain about, but this admirable prosecutor instead chose to interrupt: “Did you want that to happen?” and Simcisko replied “No” [13]. McGettigan also clarified during his summing-up that Petrosky had seen Sandusky with a child in the parking lot not once but twice.

As for Simcisko’s somewhat brutal interpretation of intimacy, McGettigan actually switches to an affectionate name for Sandusky which a few of the kids use, and shows how it was only Sandusky’s negligence in failing to allay his loneliness which were the true source of Simcisko’s allegations “There’s a kid who served his country in a war. He came back and talked about — can you imagine how difficult that must have been? He served his country in combat and came back and talked about how he as a child, that Jer over there, would call him and get him out and adopt him. That’s exactly how he is: Shrewd. Predatory” [14].

 How Charity Became the “Crime” in Sandusky and Letby Cases

In the Letby case, Nicholas Johnson KC asked “Is it your case that…” [15]. I wondered, why didn’t Benjamin Myers KC jump up to object? It wasn’t her responsibility to explain in case after case after case what was her expert understanding of all the complex medical issues.

People were mystified when Myers apparently felt no need to call any defense expert witness besides Letby herself. Yet, the end result of her being charged with having to explain everything herself meant, she did a better job of being an expert witness than did the prosecutor’s expert witness Evans.

In fact, Letby’s “not good enough” intuition was very accurate, for a reason which is explained in the 23 February 2025 article [45] by Professor Neena Modi, former president of the Royal Society of Paediatrics.

The chosen level 3 neonatal capacity of the whole NHS meant that during busy times babies were being sent to the level 2 facility at Chester, where the low and intermittent throughput of level 3 cases meant that consultants wouldn’t have regular experience. As Dr. Shoo Lee explained [46], once ventilation has failed for an interval of time, the safety pressure limit of a Neo Puff device means it would never be adequate for resuscitation. Brearey’s thematic review was detailed and competent, but only if we were talking about level 2 support.

The jury, without medical training, wouldn’t be in a position to assess that — they would have needed more expertise than the Chester consultants had — but maybe both lawyers hoped that history and legal precedent will be in such a position.

In both the Sandusky and the Letby case it is a situation where many people in the legal profession began over time to understand that the defendant is a model of humanity, charity, kindness and care, and that it seems as though these attributes themselves have been deemed worthy of attack, condemnation, and considered to be the worst crimes that could ever take place. (In fact, this is a sixth similarity, that reassuring letters which Sandusky wrote were considered possible grooming.

And his careful ‘confession’ could have been chosen to be sure any of the children he looks after who are mentally disabled or very young wouldn’t think he’s saying he dislikes them. Letby on Christmas morning, living alone, privately going to what had been the facebook page of a baby [16] was deemed ‘stalking’ because the baby had died and expressions of grief which were not private were deemed ‘attention-seeking’.)

In both cases, the way lawyers think, there was the hope that a case of pure ideal charity being condemned as criminal would be like a stone or diamond, as a terrible harvester or threshing machine approaches, which is crunching up and destroying all goodness.

Sandusky, Letby, and the Futility of Fixing Justice

Both cases spawned countless public spectacles, movies, films, inquiries, analyses and reports…. and the hope that some sort of stone or diamond would be strong enough to break the machine, as if indigenous people had found a way to allow nature to return to this intensively-farmed and otherwise barren field.

As for the big lesson, especially for the Sandusky case where appeal after appeal has failed, it has to do with the futility of trying to solve things. I remember someone, I had thought that it was McGettigan, referring to the Second Mile charity in an ironic way as a “conveyor belt for abuse.”

It is an ingenious notion even while I can’t remember who or whether anyone actually said it. Let me put it this way: It is the people who really understand the science who see these two particular cases as miscarriages of justice. Yet also, as in the recent stories about harm caused by microplastics, it is these same people, the ones who really understand science, who are to blame once they become involved in trying to help by applying their knowledge.

Bad science, as exemplified in the young RFK’s recent theories, is awful. It directly causes such miscarriages of justice and other disasters. The problem is that good science is even worse. This generation’s good science really is needed to mitigate damage caused by last generation’s good science.

But the train is trundling on, and crushes beneath its wheels even the most admirable examples of resistance. Only cognition which is unaffected by choices unprecedented during the significant time of evolution would be capable of constructing a consistent intentionality for the future.

The hypothesis-driven methods of Karl Popper [17] are the only paradigm we have to reliably and meaningfully understand science, but for all our decisions that affect the future, hundreds of thousands of years from now, experimentation is not an option. As the verdicts of lay juries teach us, neither is unguided intuition. That option is being wrongly taken away.

The most recent Royal Institution Christmas lecture [18] about evolution and food finished with a question to the audience, and one child asked “What should we do?” The answer was, just eat natural things like carrots and nuts. And yet these too, these species, these natural products, are inexorably being transformed into chemicals. The cognitive distortions which science causes don’t affect only scientists.

To be continued…

References.

1. Transcription of recording of Calhoun interview submitted for 2016 appeal.
2. Cleland summing up, transcript of 2012 trial.
3. Shoo Lee press conference, London, February 2025
4. The lead investigator Sassano was a narcotics agent. Pendergrast’s Big Trial article describes Struble having arrested for marijuana making a plea deal to testify against other dealers, that Struble’s first contact regarding Sandusky was with cpl Leiter, Struble didn’t remember abuse, Leiter advised him to make contact as soon as his memories of abuse arrive. I remember a more full account of a Pendergrast interview with a witness who said when he first gave Sandusky’s name he in trouble being questioned about drug dealing near a school.
5. Trial testimony, Rittmeyer said hands never touhed genitals and this is perhaps because holding hands curtailed the possibility.
6. Trial testimony, Konstas is the case where Sandusky was originally cleared, in the 2012 trial no evidence of abuse was presented but the existing evidence was reinterpreted as grooming for possible future abuse.
7. McQueary’s testimony for the preliminary perjury hearing of Curley and Schultz.
8. Letby trial testimony.
9. Chambers’ testimony for Thirlwall expertly supported by the barrister.
10. Sandusky 2012 trial testimony.
11. Same.
12. Same.
13. Same.
14. Sandusky 2012 trial, McGettigan’s summing-up.
15. Letby trial testimony.
16. Letby trial cross-examination.
17. Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959
18. C. Van Tulleken, A. Roberts, Royal Institution Christmas lecture 2024

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