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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Politics

12 January 2024

5 min read

Why we need a gentle radical revolution

Our social arrangement needs to prioritise human relationships, argues MP Danny Kruger.

Danny Kruger

Danny Kruger is the Conservative MP for Devizes. He is the author of Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation.

A group of people stand in a field by a fence and a railway footcrossing.

Danny Kruger with a campaign group in his Devizes constituency.

Democracy divides us. The political system best calculated to hold together a diverse society is also one that exacerbates differences and obscures our common opinions and interests. A two-party system - and all Western politics is largely binary, split between conservative and progressive parties or groups of parties - encourages vicious disagreement across the aisle, and polarises opinion in the country.

The paradox is that, despite our party disagreements, the most popular opinion with the public is that ‘they're as bad as each other’. The view held in common across the country is that ‘they’re all the same’; that ‘there’s nothing to choose between them’. And deep down, the public is right, but in a good way. Fundamentally the parties share a worldview, which derives from our common inheritance as the heirs of the Christian tradition.

That tradition taught us that individuals are intrinsically, personally, valuable, without reference to the identities of sex, household, tribe or race which, in pagan cultures, gave people their only worth (or for most people, their lack of it). It also taught us that, despite our individual personal value, our mission in life was other-facing. Our object of worship was outside the self. God’s will was made material and meaningful through the institutions of our common life, in what we came to call civil society. These institutions in turn, especially the institution of the law, worked to protect the individual and make diversity safe.

This tradition split into two parts in the modern age, as an old, anti-Christian idea, which Christianity had expunged, crept back in. In my book Covenant I call it ‘the Idea’, as opposed to what I call ‘the Order’. The ‘Idea’ is that I am god, with the creative power to order reality and decide for myself what is right and wrong. This ancient heresy has been refreshed in our times precisely by the principle of individual rights and freedoms that Christianity gave us. This is because we have steadily degraded the other side of the Christian bequest: the other-facing, institutional life that gave individuals a more textured sense of who they were, i.e. members of a community with something to live for outside themselves. The consequence is both the narcissism of self-worship and the rise of identity culture - a return to the pagan belief that your value is determined by your sex, race or tribe.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency.

Individual value and dignity, made safe and meaningful by a social arrangement which emphasises solidarity, peace and care for the stranger - these are the elements of what I call the ‘Order’. They are not absolute principles: even individual rights to life and liberty must be constrained in certain circumstances, and other-facing generosity likewise needs to be limited in order to be sustained. To take a current example, ‘care for the stranger’ does not, in my view, mean offering a home in the UK to anyone who manages to arrive on our shores and claim asylum. It does mean treating every asylum seeker humanely, whether we admit them or remove them, and it means committing part of our wealth and power to preventing, or mitigating the effects of, war and natural disaster in other parts of the world.

How does such a covenantal politics approach other policy areas? The principles that Graham Tomlin set out in the report he compiled after the Grenfell Tower fire, after listening to local voices, are a helpful guide. We need to ‘humanise welfare’, dismantling the inefficient bureaucracies which see people as units to be managed, rather than as people to be helped and given responsibility and agency, and build instead relational systems of social support. We need to ‘provide homes’, which means so much more than the sterile term ‘housing’: it means attractive, affordable, safe buildings where people can live both with privacy and in community. As this suggests we need to help people ‘become neighbours’, with the means and the motivation to connect with others who belong to different identity groups. We should ‘notice faith’: as happened after Grenfell, it is local community faith groups which more than any official agency provide support, belonging, cohesion, and practical change at a local level.

And lastly, overall, we need to ‘renew democracy’. In Graham’s words, ‘we need to find ways to enable people, especially in more deprived areas, to have more of a say in issues that directly affect their lives, rather than politics happening at a distance by competing parties remote from local life.’ The sense of this is both deeply conservative (small-c) and deeply radical. Of course, we need power to be close to the people; this was the traditional way of things before the Durkheim and his followers decided that the centralised state, not local civil institutions, was the proper place for managing human services. In the Middle Ages, according to Robert Tombs’ history of England, fully a third of men, of all classes, played a responsible role of some kind in the management of their neighbourhood. Yet a return to this model would be radical, because it involves upending Durkheim’s assumptions - shared by his heirs in the school of New Public Management beloved of the Blairites - about the proper arrangement of society.

We need a gentle revolution: a return to some old ideas about social organisation that prioritise human relationships, the organic and the natural over utility, efficiency and equality of outcome; ideas which actually lead to a more useful, more efficient and genuinely more equal system. These are the ideas of what I call the Order, derived from theories of the social covenant that lie deep in our history but which are also best fitted to the modern world.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency. We can recreate a more localised economy, but this time more fair, equal and capable of supporting a larger and more diverse population than the pre-modern world knew. And we can make a democracy that more closely reflects the principle that we all, whether progressive or conservative, share a common inheritance and belong to a single political community.

Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation is published by Forum Press.