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

Weekend essay

Creed

Ethics

Justice

19 January 2024

7 min read

After the fall: the Post Office scandal and the search for justice

Falls from grace, like that of the Post Office’s CEO, prompt Graham Tomlin to dissect the problems of justice and mercy.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tense-looking woman, sitting at desk, stares into the middle disance.

Lia Williams as Paula Vennells in Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

ITV Studios/ITV.

It was November, and I was in Rome. With the new year on the horizon, newsagents were displaying calendars for 2024. One in particular seemed to show up in just about every street vendor available: the ‘Hot Priest Calendar’.

It had pictures for every month of young, bronzed, good-looking priests, resplendent in brand new, ironed black clerical shirts, smouldering into the camera. I've no idea whether they were real priests or just models in clerical garb. I didn't buy one, but it did get me thinking of why they had produced it. Was this a recruitment drive for clergy in the Roman Catholic Church? Something for the nuns to put on the wall of the convent? It was hardly aiming to attract women by saying if you become a Catholic you could bag one of these hunky chaps, as priests are, well, supposed to be out of reach.

I suspect it was just trying to tell the world that the Church is cool after all. That the church is for good-looking, shiny people, not just the regular ones with wrinkles and expanding waistlines.

The embarrassment and shame are real and proper and yet there is, in my view, something at the heart of it which seems to be mistaken.

I was thinking of this recently while watching the story of the Post Office scandal unfold. This dreadful story is, to be frank, a bit of an embarrassment for the Church of England. This horrendous miscarriage of justice has its heart not just a Christian but a priest. I met Paula Vennells once. While I was Bishop of Kensington, we planned a big conference for all the vicars in the Diocese of London. At the time, Vennells’ star was rising in ecclesiastical circles. People had just noticed that the head of the Post Office not only went to church, but was also ordained, and so she was getting invited to speak at all kinds of conferences. She agreed to come and, to be fair, was gracious, unassuming, polite. There was nothing to suggest she was soon to become the object of public opprobrium that she is now.

She would definitely not go on a Church Calendar these days. But then who would? The last decade has seen a succession of scandals and falls from grace – Harvey Epstein, Huw Edwards, Russell Brand, Philip Schofield - and Christian leaders are not exempt. Jean Vanier, Ravi Zacharias, Mike Pilavachi – the list goes on – and now Paula Vennells. We Christians hang our heads, as it seems such a deep failure - how can someone profess to be a Christian – even a vicar - and yet do such things? The embarrassment and shame are real and proper and yet there is, in my view, something at the heart of it which seems to be mistaken.

Celebrities are celebrated because we believe they are different from us ordinary mortals. But sooner or later, it turns out they have the same temptations, their bodies sag, their flaws get exposed.

Helmut Thielicke was a German theologian who opposed the Nazis during the Second World War and somehow survived. His was a crucial voice in the German church and nation as it struggled to its feet again after the trauma and destruction of those years. The big question Germany faced at the time was how a modern sophisticated Christian nation had been so easily seduced by evil? They also struggled with the question of shame. What were German Christians to do with the guilt that hung over them after the Nazi years?

Thielicke was a brilliant preacher and drew huge crowds to his church in Hamburg. In one of his sermons he took as his text St Paul’s line, that Christians are “a letter from Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, on tablets of human hearts.” He asked his congregation the question: what kind of letter are you? Is a Christian meant to be an advert for God? Is the Christian a shiny product of divine handiwork so that God, like some marketing agent, says ‘Look at her – isn’t she is fine person? Wouldn’t you like to be like her?’

When she was being feted by all, we might have said that about Paula Vennells. But not any more. And that’s the problem of celebrity Christians, or celebrities of any kind for that matter. They are used as adverts for the brand they profess, religious or otherwise: “Use this shampoo, follow this diet, believe this religion, like this celebrity does, and you could be like them.”

Celebrities are celebrated because we believe they are different from us ordinary mortals. But sooner or later, it turns out they have the same temptations, their bodies sag, their flaws tend to get exposed in the extra scrutiny they face in a gossipy age like ours. The hunky priests in the calendar may look good but I suspect their lives are as shadowy and compromised as the rest of us. Every now and again you find a life that is remarkable, but even then there are dark corners. Mother Teresa famously said that she rarely experienced the presence of God and struggled with lifelong depression. If we are meant to be adverts for God, we’re not very good ones.

Thielicke’s point was that Christians are not meant to be adverts for God but letters from him. And the letter, written on the human heart, says something like this: “Here is a poor, weak human being with their own strengths and frailties, moments of courage and moments of great weakness, struggling to live a good life but failing much of the time. And yet, despite that failure, God still forgives, accepts, loves and stands by them.”

And forgiveness is not an excuse. It doesn’t say ‘it didn’t happen’, but it says, ‘it did happen’ and it was bad, but a new start is always possible.

It sounds scandalous I know. Hearing about the Post Office scandal, all we want is for the perpetrators to be found guilty and punished. And rightly so. Justice must be done. Paula Vennells and her staff seems to have stuck stubbornly to the laughable view that the Post Office had been infiltrated by hundreds of criminal sub-postmasters, intend on defrauding the public purse. They lacked the sense or courage to question their own IT system, despite being warned it was faulty.

Yet divine and human justice work in different ways. Not least because God, unlike human judges, sees the dodgy things we all do, not just those whose sins get found out because they are in the public eye. Human justice systems must take their course, crimes must be punished, and attempts made to turn around the lives of those caught in patterns of criminality. Yet underneath human justice lies divine justice, which promises an ultimate judgment, even for those who escape human justice. Yet at the same time, it offers not just justice, but mercy - the gift of a more profound and ultimate forgiveness, which, if accepted, does not override the penalties of human justice, but enables the possibility of redemption in the longer term.

Martin Luther often used a Latin phrase to describe Christians – that they are simul iustus et peccator - ‘at the same time righteous and sinful’. Like an alcoholic who is never encouraged to say that were an alcoholic, but that they are a recovering one, an honest Christian doesn’t say ‘I was a chronic worrier, greedy, someone who struggles with lust,’ but ‘I am such things, and yet faith in Jesus makes a difference in helping me not to be.’ St Paul once said: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst.’ Not I was the worst, but I am. I remember Frank Bruno once saying “I’m not much of a Christian – I’ve been a sinner all my life.” He hadn’t quite understood - Christians are only ever recovering sinners.

Paula Vennells and the others responsible for the Post Office scandal will have to face justice one day. It may, for some, even mean prison. But, as many in our prisons up and down the country know, lots of people find God in prison - not as a literal ‘get out of jail free card’ – the justice system doesn’t play Monopoly – but a realisation that however bad your crimes, however murky our misdemeanours or sly our sins, forgiveness is possible. And forgiveness is not an excuse. It doesn’t say ‘it didn’t happen’, but it says, ‘it did happen’ and it was bad, but a new start is always possible, and the love and forgiveness of God is available, even for the worst of people - for good-looking priests who struggle with temptation, for celebrities who fall from grace. Or even ordinary people like us.