I honestly think, to put an innocent spin on those answers, you’ve got to be wanting to believe she could be innocent.
Great post as usual MmmB777
I’ve read people elsewhere trying to justify their scepticism (extreme take on “innocent until proven guilty”) by arguing that they’d hate to condemn an innocent young woman to life in prison. To do so, they try everything in the power to imagine alternative explanations that may absolve her of responsibility. But that’s the equivalent of imagining really unlikely scenarios just to say “well, there’s a 0.000000000001% possibility it wasn’t her. Therefore BM successfully introduced “reasonable doubt”. Sorry, there’s nothing remotely reasonable about that. As the pathologist quite rightly pointed out, and has been said by many posters here, possibility & probability aren’t the same thing. [The latest example of this is someone saying on Reddit that by introducing evidence of LL’s ‘UAC/UVC line in situ'/‘air embolism’ training, the prosecution have given BM the perfect opportunity for a defence because it’s evidence that although the UAC/UVC training covered the risk of air embolus from the line being left in, it failed to show that the training covered the risk of air embolus from the administration itself. This allegedly further suggests that crucial information was lacking from the training; and so, BM must be laughing now because he can argue that it is the nurses’ lack of adequate training that resulted in the air embolism incidents — not LL killing them “on purpose”. Of course, they conveniently ignore that this supposed failure in training only negatively impacted LL, and not any of the other staff. And ignore all the other evidence that the prosecution produced.]
Some will attempt to overcome such difficulties by appealing to the distinction between ‘correlation’ & ‘causation’ in order to argue that the former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter. So LL (and no one else other than her) being present at the 24 deaths/collapses may all be down to coincidence. But that’s irrational because any field of knowledge that uses these concepts (whether statistics, science, data science or mathematics) will have to concede that where there’s a statistically significant number of correlations between two items that keep recurring concurrently (e.g. LL on shift/near baby + collapse or death) then that’s evidence of a relationship between the two items, the nature of which may not be clear until we investigate further. And the prosecution have done a fab & thorough job of shedding light on that relationship through all the evidence presented:
it was no coincidence.
To ignore all of that and continue to appeal to the possibility of it all being coincidence/bad luck (even though this is highly improbable) is just irrational. I mean I don’t need to literally see a ‘cause’ to know that x caused y, and I don’t need to visit Jupiter to know that it’s not made out of cheese. I can
deduce from facts that x is a cause, and that Jupiter is made out of gas. So to keep banging on that we can’t know/be sure of these things because it’s still (a logical) possibility that Jupiter is made out of cheese (or that LL’s presence at 24 incidents is a coincidence) is just mind boggling.
I agree MmmB777, the only way that someone could continue to be sceptical in the face of all the evidence is that
they really don’t want to believe otherwise. Ironically, in their quest for justice (not condemning a potentially innocent young woman to prison) they are ignoring the facts that conclusively link her to these crimes; and in doing so, are inadvertently denying justice for the 17 babies & their families.
were the only things I was thinking about tbh.
🩷
