i don’t believe there is a big conspiracy or cover up within the hospital or a deliberate framing of LL. However, some sequence of events on how the police began their investigation is important to me.
If the hospital asked for police involvement because ‘someone’ may be killing babies I feel their approach may have differed to requesting police involvement because LL is killing babies.
in the second example there will be tunnel vision, they will be looking for evidence that LL was guilty. Where LL can’t be linked to a death (or crash) those events may have had little further investigation as they are not useful in building the case against the prime suspect (LL was on annual leave here so that death can’t have been poison or air).
When we believe a theory to be true we look for evidence that supports our theory, we will not be provided in court all the evidence that the police found that doesn’t support the theory that LL is guilty.
in addition to tunnel vision is the reliance on statistics as ‘proof’. Statistics and data are very useful tools to use but having numbers presented in isolation does not give the full picture. Statistical anomalies occur all the time, if I was gambling heads and tails and tails came up ten times in a row while I backed heads my initial reaction would be that the person flipping the coin was cheating. The odds of this happening are small (1 in 1024), but given the amount of coin tosses in the world that must happen it will have happened many times in a row. The same applies for red v black during roulette, with similar odds.
Those are games of chance with two possible outcomes. The number of deaths that occur within a hospital ward during different time periods has so many external factors that can influence the result that conclusions are impossible with additional, unbiased information. The information presented to us, by both the prosecution and the defence is biased. Each want the opposite outcome.
In my previous job I looked at incident data at a mental health hospital. Sometimes there were patterns where certain staff members had significantly higher incident involvement than others. In isolation it was easy to infer that these staff had training needs, were winding the patients up or other factors where the fault lay with the individual.
Through unbiased investigation there was often a rationale explanation. Those people picked up the most overtime, those people worked with the most challenging patients or those people were the best at record keeping and actually recorded all of the incidents they witnessed or were involved in.
My natural thought process is to question information. Currently there is a lot of information that the prosecution is presenting that I can see holes in, it’s more than possible that the same will be true when it’s the defences turn.
The police do get it wrong, having enough evidence to bring a case to court isn’t enough for me to automatically assign guilt.