Inflicting harm for harm’s sake is anathema to human nature. We recoil from people who relish causing deliberate but needless pain. Small children who toy with defenceless creatures in the garden are taught not to, or learn not to let their curiosity and their power overcome their better nature. Those children who continue to do so are looked at warily, with the anxious suspicion that their willingness to inflict pain on another creature is a sign of a moral void.
If we had to guess at people in the public eye who, as children, continued to skulk in the far reaches of the garden, plucking the legs off beetles and peeling the wings from butterflies, politicians would doubtless dominate the list. Characters like Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson, or Suella Braverman and Priti Patel exude callous indifference. It is not difficult to imagine them torturing creatures smaller than them for no reason other than the fact they could.
But it is difficult to say that they are evil in an archetypal sense. Even if their actions, elevated into state policy, have malign intent behind them, it is simplistic to label them as evil. In all government policy, there is some objective beyond the infliction of pain and suffering. Even Braverman’s vendetta against asylum seekers is oriented around the idea of deterring many through the infliction of harm on a few. It may not accord with Kant’s ethics, but Benthamites might view it with grudging acceptance. State officials crafting and pursuing policies such as these are better seen as representative of Arendt’s banality of evil, where harm is legitimised by words transcribed on vellum and authorised by the thud of a rubber stamp. This is not to absolve the perpetrators of these policies – some of whom bear much culpability – but to distinguish them.
What they must be distinguished from is people such as Lucy Letby. Serial killers like Letby represent a more distilled form of evil. So far found to be psychologically normal and growing up in suburban comfort in Hereford, before studying nursing at the University of Chester, Letby waged a campaign of terror on her hospital ward. Self-evidently, there was no justification for these acts. No rational or comprehensible reason could possibly exist to explain why she did what she did. As Justice Goss, who presided over her trial at the Manchester Crown Court, told her, “your reasons are known to you alone”.
Knowing she had such desires, and knowing that – to judge from the scrawled notes to herself found in her bedroom – they were evil, she meditated and acted upon them. Not only did she pursue a profession with a duty to heal and protect, but from there, sought out a role that gave her unfettered access to the most vulnerable. Not just babies, but those infants born on the precipice of life and death, where their first experience of life beyond the womb is one of incubators, tubes, and bleeping monitors.
Reading Justice Goss’ sentencing remarks is harrowing. In sympathetic but clinical paragraphs, he details the ways in which Letby took each baby’s life, and how she tried to take others’. Aware that the same method would alert suspicion, she took significant lengths to disguise her actions. Over the course of thirteen months, she “killed seven fragile babies and attempted to kill six others”. Five, whose curious bluish pallor was noted by consultants, were killed through her “favourite” method of attack, as the prosecution described it, infusing air into the babies’ bloodstreams. Another was injected with insulin and another physically traumatised. Of those who survived – some with severe disabilities as a result of Letby’s brutality – she rotated through similar methods, careful all the while to ensure they were near-undetectable.
Her desire to inflict and see harm and suffering was not sated by the murders. After the event, she stalked the families of her victims online, searching for them on social media, seeking macabre satisfaction from the suffering she had inflicted. Whatever conscience drove her to scrawl “I don’t deserve to live” and “I AM EVIL” on notes left for investigators to find was not strong or constant enough to push her towards getting help. Notes like these wipe away doubts that she was nothing but a sociopath, unthinking on questions of right or wrong. She inflicted pain and got kicks out of its repercussions because it was wrong. Evil is the word we use because it is the only word we can use.
As a society, we do not know how to respond to evil like this. Our instinct is to lash out. The Bible’s lex talionisputs it most succinctly, calling for “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. Harm must be weighed against guilt, and a punishment doled out in proportion to the wrong. Murderers must die. Such vengeance gives succour to society. In this vein, Letby’s conviction and life-imprisonment (one of only four women to be told they will die behind bars) has been met with calls for the return of the death penalty. This is not because of the threat she poses, or because she will be released to live a normal life one day, but because it is the most monstrous act we can conceive of inflicting.
What this forgets is that nothing the state can do to Letby is equal to the pain and suffering she has caused. The trauma suffered by her infant victims and the grief inflicted upon their parents and their families cannot be revisited upon her. But even if it could be, whether through the rack or through some hypothetical technology for the measurement and infliction of pain, it should not be. Punishment, in a civilised world, is not a race to the bottom.
Rather, governments are supposed to function as guardians of the public good. Their role is to elevate society beyond the state of nature, not to drag it into the undergrowth. By executing criminals, the state exercises vengeance, not justice; it becomes the lynch-mob. Such reactions may be understandable – even, on a human level, desirable from the victims’ relatives – but not from the emotionless golem of the state. This is why we have a state.
As Letby will discover, death may be preferable to what she will face for the rest of her life. The nature of her crimes put her beyond the pale of your garden-variety criminal, and in general population, she would find that her status is beneath the lowest of the low. Women cut off from their children and families would not look kindly upon a baby-killer. With this in mind, she will be segregated and kept in a high-security wing and put on suicide watch. But such conditions are legitimately imposed by the state. The taking of a life is not a question for us, but sanctioning those who break its cardinal rules and protecting the rest of society is.
Andrew Malkinson, who was recently exonerated of rape and released, is held up as walking, talking evidence of the risk of capital punishment; executed men can’t walk free. The risk of killing an innocent man is an obvious and overwhelming reason not to legislate for the return of state executions. But it does not grapple with whether the imposition and infliction of death is a legitimate role for the state to play. There will be cases – although Letby’s is perhaps not one – where there is no doubt about guilt. Such cases do not mean the state should become a killer too.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.