Facing up to justice

The crimes and sentencing of baby-murderer Lucy Letby is driving fresh conversations about justice. Edward Smyth examines the confusion and contradictions within them.

Edward Smyth

A writer and speaker in the field of criminal justice and faith, Edward Smyth is now pursuing doctoral research on the 'through-the-gate' experiences of individuals who have found faith while in prison.

Lucy Letby's Police file photograph.

Cheshire Constabulary.

‘Christians need to be ready for the inevitable moment when Lucy Letby declares that she’s found Jesus in prison.’

So read one of many tens of thousands of tweets posted on the day Letby was sentenced to spend the rest of her natural life behind bars. I probably saw several hundred of those tweets that day; yet this one has lingered, niggling away at me whenever my mind is drawn back to a consideration of the appalling facts of a case that surely takes its place amongst the worst ever to have been prosecuted in this country.

One of the things about the Letby trial which has caused the most consternation has been her refusal to appear in court for some of the verdicts, and for her sentencing hearing. The strength and volume of the response to what is being almost universally termed her ‘cowardice’ has some challenging things to say about what contemporary society means – or thinks it means – when it talks of ‘justice’. And, as I write, the Government’s response has been to force criminals to appear. An interrogation of these responses might just help us all begin to be able to think through where this leaves us, too.

The sense seems to be that in refusing to enter the dock at Manchester Crown Court for her sentencing, Letby has somehow evaded what we might term her ‘just deserts’; and that her victims and their families – and indeed society – have been cheated out of some of the justice to which they feel entitled. If the act of receiving the sentence is viewed as itself part of the punishment (not an assumption by which I am wholly persuaded, but one which sits at the heart of this argument) then the outrage caused by Letby’s avoidance of her sentencing speaks to a certain weighting of the importance of that one morning in court as against the next forty or even fifty years Letby will spend in prison. What this boils down to, then, is retribution pure and simple. We think offenders should be made to listen to the impact of their offending because we want them to feel all the things that we believe they deserve: guilt, shame and pain. We want this because of some innate, deep-rooted sense of balance and fairness which dictates that an appropriate response to the imposition of pain is, in turn, the imposition of pain.

Our legal system exists, in part, to ensure that this remains proportionate: the state censures offenders to avoid the inevitable disproportionate vigilante or retaliatory action which would otherwise ensue, exercising what some criminologists refer to as its ‘displacement function’. Prisons, of course, are out of sight and usually out of mind which perhaps explains the importance of the sentencing hearing in cases like this: it is the only opportunity we have to see the convicted person suffer – and we need to see it with our own eyes to make sure that, even if we think ‘prison is too good’ (i.e. insufficiently painful), we have at least seen the convicted person suffer some pain.

Letby may have avoided being deluged by the waters of justice rolling down upon her ... in the dock, but we should be in no doubt that those waters are rising from the floor of her prison cell as we speak.

For Christians, though, the elephant in the room is that Letby has been sentenced to a ‘whole life order’. In passing that sentence the state is saying ‘we have no interest in your rehabilitation’; and that is something which should give all pause for thought especially Christians. I do not think there is a ‘correct Christian response’ to this issue, as it happens: personally, I would rather we didn’t have whole life orders, but equally I have no objection to someone spending the rest of their life in prison if that is the only safe course of action. If we were designing a Christian system of criminal justice, then whole life orders would be indefensible on the grounds that we have no right to make impossible redemption; but we’re not designing – or operating under – a Christian system of criminal justice; and redemption in the theological sense is still possible in prison. I struggle – particularly in light of cases like this one – to get too worked up about it.

But perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps the fact that my own theology opposes whole life orders but, when exposed to the facts of a case like Letby’s, I find it difficult to care very much is exactly the kind of confusion and contradiction of which I spoke at the outset of this article. And in that confusion and contradiction perhaps we find what it is to be a Christian, our instinctive and culturally conditioned human responses coming up against the teaching of the ultimate countercultural being and, so often, overwhelming it in our hearts.

Those hearts ache for the victims of Lucy Letby and their families. Have they received justice? She will spend the rest of her life in prison: I think they have. Is that justice compromised because she did not appear for her sentencing? I think it is not, on both secular and Christian grounds. Secularly speaking the state has performed its ‘displacement function’ and the punishment is being carried out whether she was there to hear it or not. The victims have – for better or worse – been removed from the conversation, which is why criminal cases are listed as ‘The King v. ...’ rather than ‘[Victims’ names] v … .’ Theologically speaking Letby may have avoided being deluged by the waters of justice rolling down upon her (as Justice is described in the Bible) in the dock, but we should be in no doubt that those waters are rising from the floor of her prison cell as we speak, and she will be soaked through soon enough.

The case of Lucy Letby – as with any case of great evil – is a violent challenge. For the Christian, it is one which can only be met with prayer, thought, and introspection. In short: they must pray their way to their own response. But whilst they are doing that as Christians in an increasingly secular world; a world where the responses that they know their faith obliges them to make are so quickly and easily monstered – I can only hope that they and we find in our Church an institution willing to preach that countercultural, unpopular Gospel.

'Modern man often anxiously wonders about the solution to the terrible tensions which have built up in the world and which entangle humanity. And if at times he lacks the courage to utter the word “mercy”, or if in his conscience empty of religious content he does not find the equivalent, so much greater is the need for the Church to utter this word, not only in her own name but also in the name of all the men and women of our time.'
Pope John Paul II

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Music

Sustainability

17 October 2024

4 min read

What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.