June 14: Technology Gone Wrong: Hugo Parra: San Diego: The controversial camera (licence reading) network is already under attack in North America and elsewhere for surveilling protesters, track abortion-seekers, and detaining immigrants. Ars Technica (Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger) adds to the disturbing list, in a story headed, "Man jailed for a month despite Flock showing he was 5 miles from the scene, " and sub-headed, "Cop seemingly ignored Flock camera timestamp to justify arrests," which notes that: "Flock cameras are supposed to help catch violent criminals and exonerate the innocent. But for innocent people who get accused of crimes based on Flock data, the technology can create lasting harms. Parra and Beltran are both left in a particularly vulnerable position, the Times of San Diego emphasized, since they now anticipate their prior records will influence cops and courts reviewing Flock footage and perhaps make them more susceptible to wrongful arrests."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Since his arrest, Parra told the Times of San Diego that he now gets “paranoid whenever a police officer or patrol vehicle comes into view.” “I remember all the horrible accusations being said by the [district attorney] and judge about me, and how I was a dangerous threat to the public,” Parra said. “I was able to experience being seen as guilty until proven innocent instead of the other way around."

---------------------------------------

"STORY: "Man jailed  for a month despite Flock showing he was 5 miles  from the scene,  by Reporter Ashley Belanger, published  by Ars Technica, on June 8, 2026. (Ashley Belanger is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.)

SUR-HEADING: "Obviously the wrong car."

SUB-HEADING: "Cop seemingly ignored Flock camera timestamp to justify arrests."

GIST: "A San Diego police department is facing a lawsuit after jailing a man for a month based on a Flock camera alert that cops allegedly should have known, based on the timestamp, did not depict the car that they were looking for.

Last November, Hugo Parra was arrested on felony charges after San Diego police relied on Flock data and a witness statement to wrongly connect him to an attempted carjacking at gunpoint, the Times of San Diego reported. Cops were looking for a red Alfa Romeo car with tinted windows and a man wearing a gray hoodie, and Parra happened to be wearing a white hoodie while riding in a friend’s car that roughly matched the vehicle description.

Although Flock cameras can capture license plate data, cops did not have even a partial plate to help them verify if the car was involved in a violent crime. But the Flock data cops used to justify the arrest actually showed that Parra was five miles away at the time of the crime, Parra’s attorney, Alex Coolman, told the Times of San Diego. Rather than arrest him, cops could have used that data, as well as Parra’s cellphone location data, to corroborate Parra’s statement that he was innocent, Coolman said.

“This Flock hit was obviously the wrong car, as it could not have been in both places simultaneously,” Coolman said.

Instead, police set aside the evidence suggesting that Parra’s car was different from the vehicle police were pursuing and called in the witness, who picked out Parra as the suspect in a lineup. However, the witness only identified Parra based on superficial features, including “the jacket and the beard” and “the skin color,” the police report said, according to the Times of San Diego.

Parra, who was on probation at the time of the arrest, was “in disbelief” after cops decided to jail him. He spent nearly a month in jail, “full of fear and adrenaline because I was being charged with a violent crime,” he told the Times of San Diego.

Now, he and his friend who owns the car that Flock flagged, Ariel Beltran, are getting ready to sue the city for negligence and civil rights violations. The Times of San Diego reviewed tort claims filed in April, which argued that “San Diego Police misread its own surveillance system and ignored exculpatory evidence in a rush to judgment.”

As a penalty, the city owes the men $1.5 million each in damages, their filing alleged.

Neither the police department nor the city will comment on the pending litigation, but Coolman told the Times of San Diego that “the city has denied the men’s claims,” so the lawsuit will proceed.

Making arrests “with less information upfront”

Backlash against Flock is mounting, as the camera network has been used to surveil protesters, track abortion-seekers, and detain immigrants, digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported. Some local groups are also resisting FBI moves to get “near real time” access to Flock data. While the EFF warns the cameras are most often used for low-level investigations like noise complaints or employment background checks, communities across political divides have questioned whether the purported benefits of the cameras are worth sacrificing privacy and risking government surveillance.

But San Diego has continued to embrace Flock. One month after Congress members called for probes into “inevitable” Flock abuse, the San Diego Police Department “looked to bolster its license plate reader program,” the Times of San Diego reported. On top of capturing audio and video, the cameras in the area could have begun collecting data from connected devices if the department signed a contract it was weighing in December. But the cops decided against using the new platform, Axios reported.

Although some police departments may not be ready to pilot Flock’s data-integration platform, they likely have encountered earlier Flock messaging encouraging cops to turn to Flock for purposes beyond its license plate reader functionality.

On Monday, the Raleigh News & Observer published a watchdog report warning “No plate? No problem” after obtaining a 2024 product presentation prepared for the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation’s license plate reader pilot program. In that presentation, cops were reminded that “cameras record data including a car’s make, decals, and body type,” as well as bumper stickers and other unique features that comprise a “Vehicle Fingerprint” that cops can supposedly rely on to track specific cars across the camera network.

It’s touted as a way for law enforcement officials to get more information “even when you don’t have full plate information” and to “build stronger cases with less information upfront,” that report showed.

Parra’s case in San Diego is a powerful example of what can go wrong when cops build supposedly strong cases using less information.

In his lawsuit, he plans to argue that cops ignored relevant Flock data when pushing forward with his arrest. Most glaringly, the Flock alert that popped up and set cops on Parra’s trail was logged 23 seconds after the cops tried and failed to stop the actual suspect. That log showed that Parra’s friend’s car was five miles away at the time the pursuit began, which Parra’s lawyer said makes it implausible that cops were pursuing that exact vehicle.

Seemingly, the car just looked too strikingly similar for the detective who saw the Flock alert to treat the hit with appropriate skepticism. The Times of San Diego reviewed Detective Gary Gonzales’ report, which noted that he saw the Flock alert and immediately “recognized the vehicle in the image as the vehicle [we] were pursuing due to the red paint and black tinted windows.”

Cops also could have checked other Flock cameras in the network to track Beltran’s car and verify Parra’s story.

Coolman told the Times of San Diego that “mass surveillance without any sense of skepticism, or common sense, is a recipe for disaster.”

“Law enforcement will come up with false positives all the time, the broader the surveillance net is cast,” Coolman said.

Flock misuse creates lasting harms

San Diego counts among cities that remain invested in Flock, spending $2 million annually to maintain access. Around the US, some communities have won fights to end such contracts and defund Flock, however, a mayor of a New York city recently showed how far some local officials might be willing to go to block defunding efforts.

In April, Carmella Mantello, the Republican mayor of Troy, New York, accused the Democrat-led city council of putting the city in “jeopardy” by working to halt Flock funding, The Washington Post reported. To keep Flock cameras running, she declared a state of emergency—which the Post noted is typically reserved for floods and blizzards.

In response, the city council sued the mayor and, as the battle lines have been drawn, is considering passing a law to permanently limit Flock’s use in the area.

Flock cameras are supposed to help catch violent criminals and exonerate the innocent. But for innocent people who get accused of crimes based on Flock data, the technology can create lasting harms. Parra and Beltran are both left in a particularly vulnerable position, the Times of San Diego emphasized, since they now anticipate their prior records will influence cops and courts reviewing Flock footage and perhaps make them more susceptible to wrongful arrests.

Since his arrest, Parra told the Times of San Diego that he now gets “paranoid whenever a police officer or patrol vehicle comes into view.”

“I remember all the horrible accusations being said by the [district attorney] and judge about me, and how I was a dangerous threat to the public,” Parra said. “I was able to experience being seen as guilty until proven innocent instead of the other way around.""

The entire story can be read at: 

\https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/man-jailed-for-a-month-despite-flock-showing-he-was-5-miles-from-crime-scene/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.  Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

June 13: Paul Quinn: UK: Bulletin: He has been sentenced to 24 years in a case that saw Andrew Malkinson jailed, in what has been characterised as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history, the BBC (Live Reporter Reporter Katie Williams reports, noting that: "Malkinson was convicted in 2004 after being misidentified in a police identity parade. He served 17 years before being released in 2020 and exonerated in 2023. DNA evidence: Advances in DNA evidence helped overturn Malkinson's conviction and identify Quinn as the real perpetrator. The handling of the case has been criticised and is being investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC)."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Malkinson  says in a statement. allowing the sentencing,  that Quinn "let me rot whilst he enjoyed his freedom". He adds that he is "insulted" by the sentence and hopes he does not get parole. 
--------------------------------------------

GIST: "Paul Quinn has been sentenced to 24 years for rape, strangulation and grievous bodily harm after he attacked a young mother as she walked home in Salford, Greater Manchester, in 2003.

The crime led to innocent Andrew Malkinson being wrongly imprisoned for 17 years, in what has been characterised as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history. Here's what you need to know:

The sentence: The earliest Quinn will be released is after serving 14 years of his 24-year sentence. You can find a full breakdown on the charges here, and our legal correspondent unpacks what it all means.

The judge said Quinn's lifestyle appears to have changed "significantly" after around 2017, but added that he saw "no sign whatsoever" that Quinn repented the crime.

Victim impact: In a statement read out by a barrister, the woman said she lives in "constant fear", adding that one night in 2003 changed her life. Judge Mr Justice Bright has called her a "hero".

Malkinson says in a statement following the sentencing, that Quinn "let me rot whilst he enjoyed his freedom". He adds that he is "insulted" by the sentence and hopes he does not get parole. 

How we got here: Malkinson was convicted in 2004 after being misidentified in a police identity parade. He served 17 years before being released in 2020 and exonerated in 2023. 

DNA evidence: Advances in DNA evidence helped overturn Malkinson's conviction and identify Quinn as the real perpetrator. The handling of the case has been criticised and is being investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC)."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c4g0n8pyrqlt

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.  Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

June 12: Technology: (Going Wrong?) Canada's government is testing AI in prisons to create profile reports of offenders, The Toronto Star ( Ottawa Bureau Reporter Mark Ramzy) reports. Question of the day: What could possibly go wrong?... "Mentioned in lengthy documents tabled in Parliament last month and confirmed by Correctional Service Canada (CSC), the test run comes as the Carney government tries to ramp up AI adoption, including with billions in a national strategy released this week. But the prison trial, which CSC says has not yet been used in real cases, is raising concerns from AI experts, criminal defence lawyers and the federal NDP’s public safety critic, who argue a widespread adoption could lead to crucial errors, exacerbate racial biases and put offenders and victims at risk."

QUOTES  OF THE DAY: "Accenture is only using “anonymized sample documents” or “artificially created” information for the trial, Mailhot  (Correctional Service Canada)  said, and the tool “has not been used in any operational setting.” But if Ottawa adopts this tool moving forward, mistakes are “very likely” said Jennifer Evans, principal at the consultancy and research firm PatternPulse AI. That’s because AI is a “probabilistic technology” based on pattern recognition, she said, and “it is always architecturally going to make errors.” “There is no dispensing with that. No amount of training, no amount of what people will call better data will ever erase the issues of hallucination, and in fact, when proper nouns, name, information, where there’s a lot of very specific components to the data, the hallucination rate is higher,” Evans told the Star. And putting in the work to catch those mistakes could cancel out any time savings, she said. “Errors are hard to detect, and they propagate, and unless you do have somebody paying very close attention to the accuracy of each individual record, you’re not going to know if it was conducted properly or not, and that almost obviates the utility of the software itself in this particular use case,” Evans said."

------------------------------------

MORE QUOTES OF THE DAY: "Howard Sapers, the executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association who was Canada’s Correctional Investigator from 2004 to 2016, said he commonly received complaints about outdated information in offenders’ files, an issue that will not improve with mistake-prone AI. “That stale dated or inaccurate information, when it gets replicated, it replicates the same problem, and that can result in a negative recommendation for parole. It can result in a higher than necessary security classification, and it can result in somebody not being able to get into a useful correctional program that would help them avoid criminality,” Sapers told the Star. Demnati, a member of the Canadian Bar Association’s committee on imprisonment and release, said she is also concerned introducing AI to the creation of criminal profile reports could exacerbate biases against Black and Indigenous people. “We already have concerns with assessments that are being done with humans,” Demnati told the Star."

----------------------------------------

STORY: "Carney government testing use of AI in prisons to create profile reports of offenders,"  by Reporter Mark Ramzy (Ottawa Bureau) published by The Toronto Star, on June 8, 2026. (Mark Ramzy covers federal politics in the Toronto Star’s Parliament Hill Bureau. He joined the Star in 2023.)

SUB-HEADING: "Mentioned in lengthy documents tabled in Parliament and confirmed by Correctional Service Canada, the test run comes as the Carney government tries to ramp up AI adoption."

CAPTION: "The criminal profile reports compiled by Correctional Service Canada, are detailed “foundational documents” prepared during a prisoner’s intake process that identify risks and play a role in major decisions like access to programs and likelihood of parole."

GIST: "The Canadian government is considering the use of artificial intelligence to save time creating influential assessment profile reports of offenders as they go to federal prisons, and is running a small-scale trial to test it, the Star has learned.

Mentioned in lengthy documents tabled in Parliament last month and confirmed by Correctional Service Canada (CSC), the test run comes as the Carney government tries to ramp up AI adoption, including with billions in a national strategy released this week.

But the prison trial, which CSC says has not yet been used in real cases, is raising concerns from AI experts, criminal defence lawyers and the federal NDP’s public safety critic, who argue a widespread adoption could lead to crucial errors, exacerbate racial biases and put offenders and victims at risk.

Criminal profile reports, as they are called, are detailed “foundational documents” prepared by CSC staff during a prisoner’s intake process that identify risks and play a role in major decisions like access to programs and likelihood of parole.

Drawing from scores of official documents, they include details about an offender’s criminal history, the circumstances of their crimes, patterns of violence or behavioural, mental health and addiction issues, family and social background, trauma history, education and employment records, and even victim impact statements.

“This is what defines your offence cycle,” criminal defence lawyer Nora Demnati said of those reports. “It will have an impact on everything else that comes.”

Following queries from the Star, a spokesperson for CSC said it’s “exploring whether AI can help staff review and organize information from existing documents more efficiently when preparing a criminal profile during intake,” while maintaining “human review, quality and accuracy.”

“The focus is on helping staff with time-intensive document review, analysis and information extraction from source materials used to prepare the criminal profile,” wrote Esther Mailhot, who added an evaluation is expected to be done by the end of June and no final decision is made.

The Carney government inked a $123,000 contract with consulting giant Accenture to run the pilot from February to end of May, according to documents released in Parliament in response to questions from a Conservative MP about details of all federal AI contracts.

Accenture is only using “anonymized sample documents” or “artificially created” information for the trial, Mailhot said, and the tool “has not been used in any operational setting.”

But if Ottawa adopts this tool moving forward, mistakes are “very likely” said Jennifer Evans, principal at the consultancy and research firm PatternPulse AI.

That’s because AI is a “probabilistic technology” based on pattern recognition, she said, and “it is always architecturally going to make errors.”

“There is no dispensing with that. No amount of training, no amount of what people will call better data will ever erase the issues of hallucination, and in fact, when proper nouns, name, information, where there’s a lot of very specific components to the data, the hallucination rate is higher,” Evans told the Star.

And putting in the work to catch those mistakes could cancel out any time savings, she said.

“Errors are hard to detect, and they propagate, and unless you do have somebody paying very close attention to the accuracy of each individual record, you’re not going to know if it was conducted properly or not, and that almost obviates the utility of the software itself in this particular use case,” Evans said.

That’s why the Carney government should slow down and consult widely, including with the CSC union, its lawyers and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada before going further, said NDP MP Jenny Kwan, the party’s public safety critic. Neither the Union of Safety and Justice Employees or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner have been consulted yet, they told the Star.

Kwan warned of a multitude of legal concerns that go both ways and can have a “cascading impact”: Violating the rights of inmates if mistakes are added to reports, on one hand, or hurting victims and prison staff if crucial information is missed by the AI summaries, on the other.

“When you have those kinds of risks associated with correctional policing matters, you can imagine what the huge ramifications might be,” Kwan told the Star. “You could potentially compromise people’s legal rights.”

AI use by the Canadian government, including military contracts with the controversial American tech company Palantir, have been under scrutiny in recent weeks.

Howard Sapers, the executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association who was Canada’s Correctional Investigator from 2004 to 2016, said he commonly received complaints about outdated information in offenders’ files, an issue that will not improve with mistake-prone AI.

“That stale dated or inaccurate information, when it gets replicated, it replicates the same problem, and that can result in a negative recommendation for parole. It can result in a higher than necessary security classification, and it can result in somebody not being able to get into a useful correctional program that would help them avoid criminality,” Sapers told the Star.

Demnati, a member of the Canadian Bar Association’s committee on imprisonment and release, said she is also concerned introducing AI to the creation of criminal profile reports could exacerbate biases against Black and Indigenous people.

“We already have concerns with assessments that are being done with humans,” Demnati told the Star.

CSC said that the “ability to assess potential bias was constrained” given the limited testing, but said that issue and “ethical considerations” have “been identified as risks, and more comprehensive testing would be required if the work proceeds further.”

Citing a recent auditor general report that concluded CSC “failed to identify and eliminate systemic barriers that persistently disadvantage certain groups of offenders,” Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree told the Star “there’s a world in which individual biases may be better addressed through a neutral system, as opposed to individual human decision making,” though he stressed humans are still getting the final say.

That’s a “bit naive,” Demnati said in response.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/carney-government-testing-use-of-ai-in-prisons-to-create-profile-reports-of-offenders/article_ce33a6c9-794a-423c-884f-ace1e91872e2.html

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.  Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;

June 11: Neonatal Nurse Lucy Letby: UK: Amanda Knox: Question of the day:There’s a really tragic story here. But is it a crime story or an institutional failure story?” Amanda Knox takes to 'Marie Claire Australia - in a wonderful story by freelance journalist Bek Day. to tell how a global movement of scientists and statisticians has attempted to dismantle the evidence used to convict Lucy Letby - "Britain's most prolific serial baby killer' - as she draws from her own ordeal at the hands of "a media burning at stake", wherein it is noted that: "Since Letby’s conviction in 2023, the narrative of “Britain’s most prolific serial child killer” has been met with rigorous opposition from parts of the scientific community. “The first people who started reaching out were the statisticians,” recalls Knox, “and they were really just aghast – not just concerned, but aghast – that the way statistics had been used in the case was completely erroneous and gave a false representation of reality.“They’re not medical experts, they are experts in statistics. And they’re saying, ‘If I know one thing, I know that that piece of evidence – which was super compelling to a judge and a jury – was wrong. So what else is wrong?’”

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "High-profile investigative pieces, including a 13,000-word exposé in The New Yorker and Channel 4’s Lucy Letby: Did She Do It?, have since also highlighted critical institutional failures at the hospital that experts argue could more reasonably explain the spike in infant mortality.   “There’s a really tragic story here, absolutely,” says Knox. “But is it a crime story, or is it an institutional failure story? There were staffing shortages, there were plumbing leaks that were leading to infection. All of these things could have contributed to this [spike in infant deaths], but the doctors were like, ‘No, that is not what is going on. It’s not staffing shortages. It’s not all of these really practical alternative explanations. It’s because we have a serial killer.’”Why Now?

----------------------------------------------------------

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "These statisticians point to the “smoking gun” shift chart, a spreadsheet presented by the prosecution that used a grid format to show that Lucy Letby was the only staff member present during 25 suspicious deaths and collapses. (Suspicious incidents that occurred when Letby was not on duty were excluded.) The chart has been called a classic example of something known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which data is cherry-picked to support a particular theory. Parts of the medical community are equally troubled by what they claim are key evidentiary misunderstandings at trial.  In a movement that echoes the scientific uprising that eventually freed Australia’s Kathleen Folbigg, a global panel of 14 neonatologists and related experts dismantled the crown’s forensic pillars. 

----------------------------------------------------------

PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The prosecution alleged Letby attacked her tiny victims by injecting them with air or milk or, in two instances, poisoning their feeding bags with insulin. It used descriptions of skin discoloration to prove air was injected, but many neonatologists now say those descriptions don’t actually match what an air embolism looks like in a neonate. Critics also point to the unreliability of the specific blood tests used to prove insulin was used, as they can produce false positives if not handled with laboratory precision. Another panel of experts called for a public inquiry into the forensic evidence. Despite being twice refused leave to appeal, Letby’s legal team is now pursuing a Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referral, bolstered by this new medical testimony."

----------------------------------------------------------- 

STORY: "Was Lucy Letby’s Wrongly Accused Of Murder?," by Ben Day, published by  'Marie Claire'  Australia, June 11, 2026.

SUB-HEADING: “There’s a really tragic story here. But is it a crime story or an institutional failure story?”

GIST: "When British nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of the murder of seven infants and the attempted murder of seven more, the world recoiled in collective shock. Yet for Amanda Knox – who spent four years in an Italian prison for a murder she didn’t commit – Letby’s media burning at the stake felt hauntingly familiar, even before the trial commenced. 

Now, as a global movement of scientists and statisticians attempts to dismantle the evidence used to convict “Britain’s most prolific serial baby killer”, Knox speaks to marie claire about her new mission to uncover the truth, the “Foxy Knoxy” trap, and why we must choose justice over vengeance, even in the face of the unthinkable.

You don’t have to have witnessed the semi-translucent chest of a premature baby rise and fall inside a hospital incubator to understand the abject horror evoked by the idea that anyone would intentionally harm such a fragile being.

To absorb the idea that someone murdered not just one, but seven babies – crimes for which 36-year- old nurse Lucy Letby is currently serving 15 whole-of-life sentences – causes a moral injury so brutal it’s almost visceral.

Yet it is precisely this level of horror, believes Amanda Knox, that creates the conditions for the type of mistakes that saw the American spend four years of her life imprisoned in a 21-square-metre cell at Italy’s Capanne prison outside Perugia for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher.

Now a mother herself, Knox is not immune to the shock the deaths of these children evokes, but experience has shown her the danger of surrendering logic to it. “It’s something I find again and again in wrongful conviction cases,” she explains from her home office in Seattle.

“Particularly in these really horrible, shocking cases, there’s this impulse to pit the original victims against the accused and say you can only care about one or the other, but it’s not actually true, and in fact does a great disservice to our legal system and our society.

“We can be concerned about the emotional and judicial stakes for the original victims, and also be concerned about reasonable doubt and justice,” she adds. She believes a similar miscarriage of justice has taken place with Lucy Letby, though she’s at pains to point out she didn’t “go looking” for a chance to get involved – rather, Letby’s people found her.

“My inbox was just flooded over a number of days, with emails from people responding to the conviction, saying they had not seen that kind of vilification of a woman on the basis of really questionable evidence since my own trial,” Knox says.

It’s how the 38-year-old, who has spent the past decade heavily involved in innocence projects and exoneree networks advocating for nuance in “trial by media” cases, finds herself the host and creator of a new eight-part podcast series, Doubt, which looks at the Letby trial and adds to the growing number of voices calling for an appeal to her conviction.

The Case For Letby’s Innocence

Since Letby’s conviction in 2023, the narrative of “Britain’s most prolific serial child killer” has been met with rigorous opposition from parts of the scientific community. “The first people who started reaching out were the statisticians,” recalls Knox, “and they were really just aghast – not just concerned, but aghast – that the way statistics had been used in the case was completely erroneous and gave a false representation of reality.

“They’re not medical experts, they are experts in statistics. And they’re saying, ‘If I know one thing, I know that that piece of evidence – which was super compelling to a judge and a jury – was wrong. So what else is wrong?’”

These statisticians point to the “smoking gun” shift chart, a spreadsheet presented by the prosecution that used a grid format to show that Lucy Letby was the only staff member present during 25 suspicious deaths and collapses. (Suspicious incidents that occurred when Letby was not on duty were excluded.) The chart has been called a classic example of something known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which data is cherry-picked to support a particular theory. Parts of the medical community are equally troubled by what they claim are key evidentiary misunderstandings at trial.

In a movement that echoes the scientific uprising that eventually freed Australia’s Kathleen Folbigg, a global panel of 14 neonatologists and related experts dismantled the crown’s forensic pillars.

The prosecution alleged Letby attacked her tiny victims by injecting them with air or milk or, in two instances, poisoning their feeding bags with insulin. It used descriptions of skin discoloration to prove air was injected, but many neonatologists now say those descriptions don’t actually match what an air embolism looks like in a neonate.

Critics also point to the unreliability of the specific blood tests used to prove insulin was used, as they can produce false positives if not handled with laboratory precision. Another panel of experts called for a public inquiry into the forensic evidence. Despite being twice refused leave to appeal, Letby’s legal team is now pursuing a Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referral, bolstered by this new medical testimony.

High-profile investigative pieces, including a 13,000-word exposé in The New Yorker and Channel 4’s Lucy Letby: Did She Do It?, have since also highlighted critical institutional failures at the hospital that experts argue could more reasonably explain the spike in infant mortality.

“There’s a really tragic story here, absolutely,” says Knox. “But is it a crime story, or is it an institutional failure story? There were staffing shortages, there were plumbing leaks that were leading to infection. All of these things could have contributed to this [spike in infant deaths], but the doctors were like, ‘No, that is not what is going on. It’s not staffing shortages. It’s not all of these really practical alternative explanations. It’s because we have a serial killer.’”
Why Now?

For the substantial portion of society still convinced of Letby’s guilt, the question of timing is a compelling one. For Knox’s detractors (of which there are still many, even a decade on from her exoneration), it fuels the accusations of attention-seeking or profiting from tragedy.

Why, three years after Lucy Letby’s conviction, is all of this just coming out? The answer may lie in the UK’s strict contempt of court laws, which – like Australia’s – can discourage external scrutiny while the trial is ongoing.

Under these rules, any public commentary deemed prejudicial could result in criminal charges and fines or imprisonment. It’s a wall of silence Knox experienced firsthand when she began looking into the case. “People were not just disincentivised to question it and scrutinise the trial, but people were afraid of losing their jobs, losing their friends, if they expressed any kind of doubt at all around Letby’s guilt,” she says.

“When I first began poking around and talking to contacts at the BBC, people were like, ‘Dude, no-one can touch that case unless you are doing the narrative that she’s a serial killer psychopath, no-one. You will lose your career if you look into this case.’

“And I was like, OK then,” Knox continues with a wry smile. Because for the woman who famously describes herself as “patient zero” of the digital age’s first great trial by media, the threat of cancellation is a spent match. And while the specific details of Letby’s case and her own couldn’t be more different, the pattern of similarities between the two women – and the media response to their trials – was too strong for Knox to ignore.
Fallen women

For one thing, both women arrived at their respected reckonings with slates that were not only clean, but the apparent inverse of what you might expect from remorseless murderers. No priors. No record of mental illness.

Knox was a Dean’s List language student, Letby a dedicated neonatal nurse. Knox argues it’s precisely this lack of any incriminating character evidence that creates a vacuum for prosecutors and the media to paint a sinister picture: the narrative of a cold, calculating psychopathy and the idea that the woman is so evil she has successfully spent her entire life performing normalcy. For Knox, it was the “Foxy Knoxy” myth, where a goofy 20-year-old’s lack of visible grief was interpreted as the mask of a killer.
For Letby, the beige, ordinary life she lived up until her trial as well as the absence of a motive have been held up as proof of secret malevolence. Even Letby’s frantic, handwritten Post-it notes, scribbled in a state of mental collapse and containing the phrase “I am evil”, were presented not as evidence of a breakdown but as a confession.

Knox knows this trap well: it is all-too reminiscent of her much-derided “yoga in the police station” that Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini argued was proof of a remorseless, abnormal response to tragedy as opposed to an overwhelmed young woman’s coping strategy.

“We are primed to find fault in a woman no matter what she does,” she says. “There’s no right way for a woman to act when you’re incentivised to find fault in that woman.” Knox doesn’t deny that there is trauma at the heart of her own pull towards advocacy.

Her release from prison at 24 ejected her back into a life in the States that was at once crushingly familiar and altogether foreign. And while the desire to be as far as possible from another murder trial might be understandable, Knox found a singular belonging in the community of fellow exonerees who’d shared her experiences. “There’s something about translating a painful experience into service for others that is really meaningful,” Knox reflects.

“And that can look like a lot of different things – mine just happens to look like this. “In prison I was so aware that I was in a situation that was going to change me, whether I wanted it to or not. I wanted to have agency in how it was going to change me. I saw how it wrecked human beings’ lives and I didn’t want to become an angry, bitter person who felt estranged from humanity for the rest of my life, so I’ve really sought out means to feel connected to humanity.

“Realising that lessons from my story can be applied and paid forward elsewhere, to me, is very meaningful,” she continues. “I think anybody who has been through a bad thing, it can either mean nothing, or it can mean something. And this means something.""

The entire story can be read at: 

"https://www.marieclaire.com.au/news/crime/lucy-lebty-false-conviction/?shem=rimspwouoe,#

PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.  Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;