Big lessons from the Sandusky and Letby miscarriages of justice

April 12, 2025 by John Atwell Moody

Part I.

It is amusing to notice similarities between two ongoing miscarriages of justice. In both cases, the prosecution had issued press releases about crimes which had never occurred at all. In both cases there is a supposed confession. We all remember Jerry Sandusky on ESPN. Most likely he would have been speaking straight into the blackberry device which his lawyer Joe Amendola was using in those days, as if it were the studio mic up in a grandstand. Darth-Vader-like he huffed and puffed into the microphone and spoke with a distorted voice, but what he said was unmistakable, “sexually attracted to young boys...kshk ...sexually attracted...gasp...I enjoy young people ...kshk...I love to be around them....huff, puff...”

Studio mic up in a grandstand

Less familiar to those outside Britain is the case of Lucy Letby. Letby is a nurse who was arrested in 2018 after an investigation at the hospital where she worked. In her house were post-it notes of insane-like scrawlings with the word ‘hate’ in capital letters circled in black marker. Understanding that she’s killed babies because she doesn’t care about them, police exhumed her garden; nothing was found. Letby was released on bail and later re-arrested.

In both cases, just from the original confession and using a clear mind, it is possible to get a sense of what is going wrong. Sandusky had dedicated years of his life setting up the Second Mile charity, which had helped thousands of underprivileged and sick kids. He was physically there for them, too, spending time with them. And he adopted some, and fostered many more. Yet on TV he was asked, in Bob Costas’ booming voice, “Are you sexually attracted to young boys.”

To understand what Sandusky said next, imagine a cat lady, who had dedicated her life to rescuing cats, whose house is usually filled with cats, hoping for some acknowledgement that her work would inspire others, but being asked “Do you like emptying the litter box?”

Her answer would be, “ Do I like emptying the litter box? The litter box?? I enjoy cats. I love being around them. But no, I don’t like emptying the litter box.”

The model of blackberry device Joe Amendola had bought

To understand what Letby wrote, you have to use her actual words, “I killed them on purpose because I wasn’t good enough to care for them.” Here, “care” refers not to caring about them, it refers to delivering medical care, medical treatment, and when asked in her first police interview about what she had written she specifically meant the technicalities of how ventilators work, how she was supposed to know if something is going wrong, how the various medications work, and what are the situations where she would need to again and again disturb the specialist consultants by phoning them.

The word “because” modifies “on purpose” and she is contemplating, could the deaths be considered intentional by virtue of them being caused by her continuing to provide medical care while not knowing when she needs to call one of the doctors.

What she wrote is an example of what at least in England medics are encouraged to do, it is called ‘reflecting,’ and it is the consideration of intentions and consequences of your own past actions. It is not like in the last scene of a crime thriller where an inessential character (in many James Bond films, a tied-up couple) gives the villain an excuse to break the fourth wall and divulge the murder motives to the audience. She was writing to herself. ChatGPT was useful in condensing my objection: if she were guilty and had committed the acts, it would be nonsensical to write a note to inform herself of something she already knows.

I killed them on purpose

Another parallel is that the victims are given symbols. In the Sandusky case there is Victim 1, Victim 2, Victim 3,... and in the Letby case there is Child A, Child B, Child C,..... In both cases, the defense is that none of the acts charged ever occurred while the prosecution case is that they all did.

It is worth pausing a moment to consider the absurdity of that. Ordinarily one would expect that in a criminal trial, the facts of the case would be essentially stipulated the same way between the defense and prosecution. There would be no disagreement about things like that particular shell casings had been found, particular injuries had been treated in a hospital, or a particular item had been in one house and later was found in the house of an accused thief. Ordinarily, one would think, the crucial role of the lay jury would be to ensure that there is no corruption in the agreement of facts reached between the defense and prosecution, and it is fair then to let the facts be passed on to a judge to rule on ethics and sentencing.

Consider the actual reality of the defense and prosecution presenting to the jury a huge list of technical facts and saying “We can’t agree whether these are all true or all false, can you go into the next room and decide on our behalf?” The notion exemplifies an actual tragic gap, not only in law, but in the relation between science and humanity, which I will return to discuss at the end.

The next-to-last parallel I want to mention is how, in both cases, if a person studies and focusses on any one particular charge it becomes absolutely clear that the evidence had been misunderstood. For one example, in the Sandusky case, a maintenance worker Ronald Petrosky heard another maintenance worker James Calhoun describing what might sound like failing to stem bleeding in a war injury years ago, or maybe an incident of abuse. The Grand Jury presentment refers to the man in the story as “Sandusky, whose name was unknown to him.” When police went to visit Calhoun and asked what it is all about, he had said, no, he does know who Jerry Sandusky is, he is a really good person and the story was about something else [1].

Petrosky had thought the perpetrator must be Sandusky, and Petrosky’s witness statement supports the notion in that he had seen Sandusky walking hand-in-hand in a hallway near the gym, and he had seen Sandusky sitting in a car with a child.

In court Petrosky describes his recollections from that time, although they had been many years earlier, as if they are all in one day. He recollects asking Calhoun “Are you sure that man that just left,” that Calhoun confirms that he’s sure, and that Petrosky tells him “You know who that is that’s Jerry Sandusky.” Petrosky summarizes for the court “He didn’t know who he was but he knows what he [saw] that night.”

Judge John Cleland instructs the jury “...this is what’s called hearsay. And the reason you are allowed to consider it is because it’s an example of what is called an excited utterance...” Cleland explains that even once fully admitted, the hearsay evidence wouldn’t establish a particular abuser or indeed any crime “...the statement of Mr Calhoun, as related to you by Mr Petrosky, is not sufficient standing to sustain a conviction. You must be satisfied that there is other evidence, either direct or circumstantial, that supports that a crime has been committed.” Cleland appropriately doesn’t see it as relevant to instruct the jury on any standards of direct evidence on the matter, and sets out a careful standard for circumstantial evidence, “The example I commonly use is, you go to bed at night, there’s a fresh layer of snow in your yard [2]. You go to sleep. You see deer tracks in the snow. You did not see the deer there. You were asleep. You saw the tracks. That’s circumstantial evidence that a deer was present in your yard.”

The judge presumably is trying to explain that if you want to measure whether the standard of circumstantial evidence is met for a deer on a particular night, you need to test whether there has been something like a layer of fresh snowfall to clear away earlier incidents, then you have to test whether you’ve been able to identify that some animal tracks specifically match what deer tracks should look like.

By referring to the “fresh layer of snow” and “the deer” the judge introduces his example just at the point where the conditions have actually been satisfied already. There already has been a fresh layer of snow. There actually has been a deer. He’s not saying that as judge he has already performed either test. He’s saying, in case you agree, as the judge suggests, that Petrosky’s recollections are chronologically sorted such that each new recollection during the day is like a fresh sheet of newfallen snow, such that his recollections of seeing Sandusky hand-in-hand — undoubtedly quite often — do identify the unknown perpetrator in Calhoun’s story, then you are hereby required to follow the judge’s instruction that if “I’m sure” is part of the excited utterance faithfully repeated by Petrosky you should assess whether the statement plus Petrosky’s recollection of Sandusky being hand-in-hand with a child identify Sandusky as the perpetrator with an analysis at least as reliable as a Centre County resident could identify footprints of a deer, and if not, whether the handholding alone identifies Sandusky as Calhoun’s perpetrator.

The judge introduces his example when there has been a layer of newfallen snow

In the Letby case likewise each piece of evidence is wrong. Insulin was never measured. No one was killed by air in a nasogastric tube. No intravenous air caused embolisms etc [3].

In the Sandusky case drugs officers who had repeatedly confronted kids eventually got deals if kids would say they just don’t remember being abused [4]. Something must have caused their life to unravel; times that made sense were times when they ‘blanked out’ and couldn’t tell their police interrogator what happened on a particular day during their childhood.

During an ordinary drug bust when a kid gives over the name of his dealer, there always is prima facie proof that a crime has occurred. The cops have the actual drugs. Details of the transaction are irrelevant. But here, if the kid is instead being asked to give-over the name of a possible abuser, the drugs themselves aren’t proof of anything. It isn’t enough to get the kid to accept that although he has no particular recollection of abuse he does confess that he’d have no way to know whether or not Sandusky specifically may have intended to abuse him and he just didn’t notice Sandusky’s intentions at the time or (as for one ‘victim’ [5]) that the intention was probably there but the abuse didn’t happen because there’d never been an opportunity, or (as for another ‘victim’ [6]) it hasn’t started yet but the conviction is valid because it would have started to occur in the future. And also, not being able to rule out abuse was compensated with millions of dollars from civil lawyers.

For the last parallel I want to mention, in both cases, the strongest evidence at the beginning (whose importance faded later) is the very precise “caught in the act” evidence, where an emotional witness says he was right there when it happened but didn’t happen to see it. For Sandusky Michael McQueary was right there near the shower room but didn’t see a rape; for Letby after having a premonition (McQueary had also had a premonition when he heard either two or three [7] ‘rhythmic’ slaps) Dr. Ravi Jayaram was right there noticing something...perhaps that a saturation level was dropping to 80 and a nurse hadn’t noticed, perhaps an alarm had gone off. Both witnesses are like a kaleidoscope, McQueary changing which year it was that he was sure the event had happened, Jayaram looking at his watch [8], the time indelibly etched into his memory, until clarifications in other evidence meant that Letby wasn’t there at that time either. The jury had to consider, how likely was it that this happened only a few seconds subsequent to Jayaram’s premonition? In both the Sandusky case and the Letby case the coincidence in timing between the relevant premonition and its subsequent suspicious event is what ratcheted the criminal justice procedure to the first serious stage.

As absurdly, insanely incompetent as both cases eventually became, it is crucial to keep in mind that the police and prosecution were careful and ethical. When you hear of a case of someone being freed after decades in prison, due to new DNA evidence, you should take good note of this fact: that this means that some dutiful officers had carefully preserved that evidence for decades in an evidence room. Police do not lie or manipulate, they are extremely careful and it is a monumental effort, a monumental task, to keep track of all the evidence not only from ongoing trials, but all that have taken place in the past whenever the evidence might be relevant later.

In the Sandusky case, police had to interview about 600 people before they found some who eventually would admit that they don’t for sure remember never ever being abused. And police were careful not to believe clients of one lawyer in particular who seemed to be coaching kids about what to say. This left just a few cases of concern, and it was right and fair to let the court service deal with these.

In the Letby case, documents in the Thirlwall enquiry [9] show that when the manager Tony Chambers had brought all the evidence about Letby to Chester police, much of which had been compiled by Dr. Stephen Brearey, the police had felt there is no need to investigate Letby, but Chambers and the police wanted to be sure, and they wanted to meet with Dr Jayaram in person. It was only after the final meeting that police felt there should be an investigation to completely clarify things.

Also, you cannot blame the prosecution. In the Sandusky case, Joseph McGettigan questioned witnesses with good emotional honesty. One witness, Jason Simcisko, had found Sandusky through a link between the Big Brother organization and Second Mile, Sandusky became “...like a father to me” [10]. Simcisko was eventually sent away to two group homes. He hoped to be adopted but Sandusky never called him to get him out. He went to foster care then joined the military. Recollecting their time together he described games which Sandusky has always described himself too: sometimes monkey-bites above the knee, sometimes lifting a T shirt to make a loud sound with the mouth. (The word-choice of monkey-bites is just from what had been my own school’s local vernacular; I’m referring not to actual biting, but to that playfighting vulnerability at the SP10 pressure point, also called the the xue hai accupoint, which can retaliate against kicking and wouldn’t be very effective against adults.) Simcisko also describes some possibly incidental touching; when McGettigan asks “And did he touch any other parts of your body when you were sleeping there, and if so, can you tell us how,” Simcisko replies “No, not that I recall” [11] The questioning goes to types of restaurants and football games they would go to. Simcisko later comments [12] about the intimacy, “I wouldn’t let it go any further....I’d obviously [seen], like, pornographic videos and stuff like that, so I knew what was going on and that it wasn’t natural for an older man to—”

At this juncture, to win the charge unfairly, McGettigan might have allowed an elision between the video and whatever abusive actions Simcisko might have been willing to complain about, but this admirable prosecutor instead chose to interrupt: “Did you want that to happen?” and Simcisko replied “No” [13]. McGettigan also clarified during his summing-up that Petrosky had seen Sandusky with a child in the parking lot not once but twice. As for Simcisko’s somewhat brutal interpretation of intimacy, McGettigan actually switches to an affectionate name for Sandusky which a few of the kids use, and shows how it was only Sandusky’s negligence in failing to allay his loneliness which were the true source of Simcisko’s allegations “There’s a kid who served his country in a war. He came back and talked about — can you imagine how difficult that must have been? He served his country in combat and came back and talked about how he as a child, that Jer over there, would call him and get him out and adopt him. That’s exactly how he is: Shrewd. Predatory” [14].

The SP10 self-defense pressurepoint

In the Letby case, Nicholas Johnson KC asked “Is it your case that...” [15]. I wondered, why didn’t Benjamin Myers KC jump up to object? It wasn’t her responsibility to explain in case after case after case what was her expert understanding of all the complex medical issues.

People were mystified when Myers apparently felt no need to call any defense expert witness besides Letby herself. Yet, the end result of her being charged with having to explain everything herself meant, she did a better job of being an expert witness than did the prosecutor’s expert witness Evans.

In fact, Letby’s “not good enough” intuition was very accurate, for a reason which is explained in the 23 February 2025 article [45] by Professor Neena Modi, former president of the Royal Society of Paediatrics. The chosen level 3 neonatal capacity of the whole NHS meant that during busy times babies were being sent to the level 2 facility at Chester, where the low and intermittent throughput of level 3 cases meant that consultants wouldn’t have regular experience. As Dr. Shoo Lee explained [46], once ventilation has failed for an interval of time, the safety pressure limit of a Neo Puff device means it would never be adequate for resuscitation. Brearey’s thematic review was detailed and competent, but only if we were talking about level 2 support.

The jury, without medical training, wouldn’t be in a position to assess that — they would have needed more expertise than the Chester consultants had — but maybe both lawyers hoped that history and legal precedent will be in such a position.

In both the Sandusky and the Letby case it is a situation where many people in the legal profession began over time to understand that the defendant is a model of humanity, charity, kindness and care, and that it seems as though these attributes themselves have been deemed worthy of attack, condemnation, and considered to be the worst crimes that could ever take place. (In fact, this is a sixth similarity, that reassuring letters which Sandusky wrote were considered possible grooming. And his careful ‘confession’ could have been chosen to be sure any of the children he looks after who are mentally disabled or very young wouldn’t think he’s saying he dislikes them. Letby on Christmas morning, living alone, privately going to what had been the facebook page of a baby [16] was deemed ‘stalking’ because the baby had died and expressions of grief which were not private were deemed ‘attention-seeking’.)

In both cases, the way lawyers think, there was the hope that a case of pure ideal charity being condemned as criminal would be like a stone or diamond, as a terrible harvester or threshing machine approaches, which is crunching up and destroying all goodness.

Threshing machine approaches

Both cases spawned countless public spectacles, movies, films, inquiries, analyses and reports.... and the hope that some sort of stone or diamond would be strong enough to break the machine, as if indigenous people had found a way to allow nature to return to this intensively-farmed and otherwise barren field.

As for the big lesson, especially for the Sandusky case where appeal after appeal has failed, it has to do with the futility of trying to solve things. I remember someone, I had thought that it was McGettigan, referring to the Second Mile charity in an ironic way as a “conveyor belt for abuse.”

Conveyor belt for abuse

It is an ingenious notion even while I can’t remember who or whether anyone actually said it. Let me put it this way: It is the people who really understand the science who see these two particular cases as miscarriages of justice. Yet also, as in the recent stories about harm caused by microplastics, it is these same people, the ones who really understand science, who are to blame once they become involved in trying to help by applying their knowledge. Bad science, as exemplified in the young RFK’s recent theories, is awful. It directly causes such miscarriages of justice and other disasters. The problem is that good science is even worse. This generation’s good science really is needed to mitigate damage caused by last generation’s good science. But the train is trundling on, and crushes beneath its wheels even the most admirable examples of resistance. Only cognition which is unaffected by choices unprecedented during the significant time of evolution would be capable of constructing a consistent intentionality for the future. The hypothesis-driven methods of Karl Popper [17] are the only paradigm we have to reliably and meaningfully understand science, but for all our decisions that affect the future, hundreds of thousands of years from now, experimentation is not an option. As the verdicts of lay juries teach us, neither is unguided intuition. That option is being wrongly taken away. The most recent Royal Institution Christmas lecture [18] about evolution and food finished with a question to the audience, and one child asked “What should we do?” The answer was, just eat natural things like carrots and nuts. And yet these too, these species, these natural products, are inexorably being transformed into chemicals. The cognitive distortions which science causes don’t affect only scientists.

Carrots and nuts will be turned to chemicals

Part II.

For deeper analysis we turn away from the similarities, and turn now instead to the contrast, between the Sandusky and Letby cases. In both cases a wise decision was formulated: let us ask now, why had the culprit never been caught earlier? In the USA the question came from cub journalist Sara Ganim. Another journalist at her newspaper was Charles Thompson. She asked why hadn’t the University president been arrested, and he duly was. She asked, is the state governor who’d started the investigation as AG culpable? This resulted in the Moulton report with terms of reference to decide culpability of the state governor, and young Ganim won a Pulitzer prize [19].

And talk about a kaleidoscope, Sandusky’s adopted son Matt was on Oprah, and in a film called “happy valley” he said he’d thought that all the accusers would just be proven to be lying. Elsewhere he admits, their accounts match his own experiences. I believe this. Like we’ve seen for Simcisko, none of the witnesses were making any actual accusation and yet for some reason the jury still convicted. But Matt did something which confuses me a lot. The police report by Tpr. Rossman had said “M.S. flatly denied that Sandusky had ever touched him inappropriately.” Over time, though, if a TV interviewer asked, “Did Sandusky do X and Y and Z?” Matt would adopt a sad dumb expression and retort “You can only imagine it.” The news would play the interview adding a comment to the effect “what a shame,” but then the next day, once print media is running with the story, Matt would be jubilant, “Wow, look! Sandusky did X and Y and Z to me! It’s right here in the newspapers!” For a specific example, Matt had always said he’d been adopted by Sandusky to escape an abusive step-parent. Telling the story of being in hospital after a suicide attempt, he said something like “My abuser visited me and said he wishes I’d finished the job.” News reports ran with stories saying Sandusky wished his son had died, Matt was jubilant. It is not Matt’s fault, but he seemed actually proud about how Sandusky acquired a new tagline, “My abuser, Jerry Sandusky!” [20]

The opposite was the journalist John Ziegler, a freewheeling conservative talk-show host whose methods had already come to the attention of the philosopher David Foster Wallace. Ziegler realized, uncharacteristically for him, that the battle of vague meta-concepts which had always been his forté would be, here, cruel to Dottie and Jerry Sandusky who had sobbed in disbelief [21] when Ziegler asked, when did you realize you might not be found innocent? Up until the moment of the verdict they never even imagined the jury system could let them down. A juror had written, the first time he was sure Sandusky is really guilty is when the verdict was read. There was no emotion and that must imply he knew he deserved the verdict [22].

Of the three, Ziegler, Matt, and Ganim, any two were like electrical wires of incompatible potential. Ziegler said Ganim didn’t deserve her Pulitzer [23]. Ziegler said Matt should burn in hell for what he said on “Happy Valley” [24]. Matt had Ziegler arrested and jailed when Ziegler showed up at one of Matt’s lectures [25] . In the absence of any clear archive of evidence, Ziegler created “Framing Paterno” and began collecting many hundreds of hours of testimony in his “benefit of hindsight” podcast with Liz Habib. The testimony was of such relevance and such high quality that a hundred pages or so were transcribed by the Forensic Psychiatrist Dr. R. Chris Barden and submitted to Pennsylvania court [26], but to no avail.

In the Letby case, the same terms of reference which had come from a gentle cub reporter here originate right at the top, from Lady Justice Dame Thirlwall: we’re not going to re-try the criminal case, protestations of innocence are just noise, but why were these events allowed to take place at the beginning? Of course, assuming guilt is a good way to gather evidence of innocence, but it is demoralizing to see that unconscious bias based on gender remains so stubborn. Letby’s grievance had been filed not by her individually but by the Royal College of Nursing. After Dr’s. Brearey and Jayaram had been asked to apologize to her when she’d requested phrases like ‘angel of death’ not be used in public areas, Jayaram pulled her aside and let her know that in his opinion she is just being manipulated [27].

Men who testify at Thirlwall (but never women) often begin by apologizing for what she (Letby) did. Her main defender in Parliament, the conservative Right Honourable Sir David Davis wrote pleading with Lady Thirlwall to keep “at least an opening in her mind that Letby may not be guilty.” He described her answer in cricketing terminology as “a dead bat answer” [28].

In the USA, the Moulton report [29] found that the Sandusky case had been initiated years earlier by Dawn Daniels, a single mom who’d already collected civil compensation related to non-sexual abuse of one of her children by a former partner, and who retained civil lawyer Slade McLaughlin to go after Sandusky on behalf of her son Aaron Fisher. Aaron and Sandusky had both described the noise-on-the-stomach game but that absolutely nothing else had happened. Michael Gillum, an untrained therapist, describes his sessions with Aaron as “peeling an onion” to get to the truth. Gillum used the phrase “oral sex” to describe the same innocent (and randomly infrequent during play) activity which both Aaron and Sandusky had already admitted to, and Gillum was willing to testify at the Grand Jury on Aaron’s behalf, with Aaron refusing to accept Gillum’s terminology, unless Eshbach could provide a second independent fragment of evidence suggesting Sandusky had at least abused someone [30]. The grand jury declined to indict [31] and everything was repeated for the second grand jury the next year with, I think, Aaron reciting Gillum’s words.

A lifting the T shirt game

Even throughout the days before the trial, Dawn and Aaron’s civil lawyer Slade McLaughlin still hadn’t learned of any abuse, saying even at that late stage nothing stronger than, where there is smoke there is usually also fire [32]. After the trial, even to this day, and even after collecting her settlement, Daniels has been careful not to commit perjury and still says she is not aware of any particular incident of abuse that Sandusky may have committed [33].

It had been over a span of years, during which time no evidence against Sandusky was ever found, that Daniels had drip-fed her possible concerns — about who was now nothing but one of Aaron’s ex coaches from the past — through her son’s school, through social services, and through emails and telephone calls to Eshbach at the AG office. Eventually there a rumor started to fly about Mike McQueary based on something in an internet forum, and it was found that separately a previous investigation had already cleared Sandusky. As I’ll explain a bit later, email communication between the AG office, police and judges wasn’t careful and professional.

Within the police department, Aaron’s story was given to Brett Swisher-Houtz during an interview. Swisher-Houtz had always denied being abused but admitted wrestling, didn’t like losing. Police were tape recorded telling Swisher-Houtz about Aaron (really Gillum) but exaggerating to try to elicit a response, and telling Swisher-Houtz that in the very same circumstance dozens of kids had been seriously sexually abused. Swisher-Houtz’ civil lawyer Benjamin Andreozzi was present while someone had pressed ‘record’ on the tape machine during a break when Swisher-Houtz had been sent outside [34]. He had been saying no abuse had occurred, and during the break the police described their strategy, essentially the Reid technique, to use lying as a way of gathering evidence. Andreozzi had been well-known in those days for his ethics and pro-bono work, and just as during witness testimony McGettigan had been careful not to score any points that landed in his lap in an unethical way, here Andreozzi wants to be careful that the history of the changes in his client’s testimony which will enrich the conditional fee agreement are fairly documented. Andreozzi was careful to explain to journalists that part of the reason his client is testifying is because of the experiences of other victims, and even as late as Sandusky’s sentencing hearing Swisher-Houtz kept his financial motive clothed in the demonstrably unsubstantiated police claims of others needing rescue “I hope that the others, who were abused ...will forgive me for not coming forward sooner” [35]. This is a phenomenon that a stats podcaster in the Letby case calls a feedback-loop of evidence [36], and which Ziegler terms the Loch Ness monster narrative.

Aaron came to understand everything a few hours after he testified. Ganim had always described Sandusky having chores, expectations and a college fund for Aaron just as he’d had for Matt and others. When Aaron hadn’t been home Sandusky had been angry, demanding Dawn explain where he’s gone. We recall from Moulton Aaron unwilling to switch to Gillum’s terminology until someone else said something. After court this someone — who could be none other than Swisher-Houtz — asks Aaron, would testifying earlier have saved Aaron’s pain. Realizing from the question nothing happened to Swisher-Houtz, Aaron decides he’s still not feeling ashamed of his testimony because Jerry had yelled at his Mom. We know this because the ‘Silent No More’ ghostwriter quotes Aaron [47] recollecting his verbatim reply to whom could only have been Swisher-Houtz, “If Jerry would have just left me alone when I said I didn’t want to hang out with him anymore instead of ... going crazy the way he did, I might not have said anything either.”

Dawn may never have had certain experiences like with an employer or a stable partner, where limits can be reached and everything’s still OK. Although the grand jury presentment mentions Sandusky having “shouting matches”, even a frank request [54] like saying: it’s two hours round trip, if Aaron wants to work next week have him phone to let me know, would have felt like it is the first crack in a little world which had shattered before, where Dawn and Aaron are always welcome and can do no wrong.

And this is very consistent with what Dawn said [48] to her neighbour after the argument, after Sandusky had left. She said what makes sense for a loyal wife, unfairly rejected by a husband asking for a divorce, and wanting to hold onto all the material remnants, “I’ll own his house.” And what makes sense for a woman with no choice but to try to support her kids with whatever remnants she hopes to cling onto from one after another failing relationship.

I’d be unfair to Aaron if I didn’t say more. Aaron actually had tried really hard not to throw Sandusky under the bus. In police interviews where the Reid method is used, saying that no crime occurred always just means you aren’t cooperating. Here it is even worse, as Curley and Schultz had been charged with perjury when they tried to deny that there’s a crime. Something like the Reid method actually is needed, otherwise anyone could shut down a police interview at the beginning by saying there was no crime, nothing to witness. The Reid method is when police tell people, whether it’s true or not, look, we already have proof that the crime happened while you were there. It’s considered an honest lie because it wouldn’t directly influence what the witness says they did or did not see. A witness is allowed to say, just as McQueary said, according to their testimony, to both his father and his father’s colleague the nephrologist Dr. Dranov before his first police interview, that he had not been able to see into the shower room. In fact there is no line of sight. The police can counter, as they must have done for McQueary, well, there actually is a line of sight because the wall opposite to your locker is installed with a mirror. This explains why in the preliminary perjury hearing [49] for Curley and Schultz, subsequent to the police interview McQueary instead says, “...as I turned and faced my locker I looked over my right shoulder into the mirrors. At a 45 degree angle from that mirror you can see into the showers,” while his actual quote about what he saw remains no more than an abstract judgement like a referee would say about a play in a football match, “what I had seen was extremely sexual and over the lines and it was wrong,” with no actual observation underlying this at all, of what it is or why it is wrong. When asked for details, he seemed to say he’s 100% sure, but also “I can’t tell you a thousand percent sure that was what’s going on.” In such a police interview, the only way to say you actually think it didn’t happen, if you don’t want to be confrontational, if you don’t want the interview to just stall when you might be hungry, or need to go to the bathroom, or have things to do, is to say “I don’t know” or “What?” or “Sorry, I just blacked out for a second.”

It is an obvious fact, but maybe one that needs repeating, that it is not actually possible to directly remember an interval of lost consciousness. We have no difficulty with the familiar notion “I fell asleep last night” but it doesn’t actually mean we witnessed ourself falling asleep. What it always means, of course, is that the fact we fall asleep each night is something we deduce in an obvious way each next morning once something like a person, or the dawn chorus of birds or an alarm clock or just the passage of time wakes us up.

In a police interview when Aaron says “I blacked out” it does not mean that he’s remembering that Sandusky actually drugged him, or knocked him unconscious at the relevant next moment when Aaron was supposed to be witnessing a crime. It refers to what happens during the interview. It means, Aaron was going along, telling police the things he remembers, and then no particular next thing arose in his mind. The sequence of recollections ended, at least temporarily. I don’t want to boast, but I think it’s a useful addition to the theory of recovered memories to try to attach a particular meaning to what a witness says when they say they have blacked out.

Eshbach’s careful wording of the grand jury presentment says Sandusky performed oral sex more than 20 times, and that one time Aaron did it and Sandusky’s hands contacted Aaron’s private area, throughout a two year interval. It is not totally clear whether the hands contacted the private area through the clothes, and whether this happened one time or more than one time.

We know that for some years Aaron described the T shirt game only, later allowed Gillum to use the phrase ‘oral sex’ to describe it, and finally after learning of Swisher-Houtz testimony, would recite Gillum’s words.

In the final trial we get to hear [50] not what is written about the grand jury testimony, but finally we get to hear Aaron’s actual words. When finally McGettigan puts to Aaron “Mr. Sandusky engaged in oral sex,” Aaron answers carefully, and he is still protecting Sandusky. He says these exact words: “He blew on my stomach, yeah.” And Aaron adds “And I did it once to him.”

That exact exchange, verbatim, absolutely does not imply any abuse beyond the T shirt game. It is already enough to explain everything Eshbach put in the grand jury presentment, if we believe that in real life the back of Sandusky’s hand had grazed the private area above the clothes on one occasion during the more than 20 times the game had happened to take place over the two years.

It is already enough to keep open the option of a civil settlement without being untruthful.

It was already enough for every journalist who received a copy of the leaked grand jury presentment without the precise wording to publish their news stories stating, whether it were true or not in the usual sense in which these words are interpreted, that the two individuals gave each other oral sex.

Note very carefully, to repeat this point, that what had been reported in the press before the trial, is not the same as what Aaron eventually actually said in court. He actually testified in court that at least 20 times, “He blew on my stomach, yeah,” and that Aaron had done it once.

Myself, I'd think that the clause at the end “ , yeah,” means that the T shirt game was the whole answer and that nothing further happened.

I did previously describe that McGettigan had been an ethical and admirable prosecutor during his questioning of Simcisko. Here again, interviewing Aaron, he needs to be sure, and we see the wisdom of an ethical prosecutor. McGettigan pushes for details. Here, Aaron starts to act as he would have been allowed to act in every police interview. Aaron does not want to throw Sandusky under the bus, and therfore he tries every card in the deck, one after the other, including “I don’t know.... I don’t even know...” and the truly wonderful and spectacular tactic: “I blacked out.”

This would be enough to get out of a police interview with Aaron free from blame, leaving ambiguous precisely what it was that Aaron doesn’t know, and precisely when his consciousness was lost, exactly, or how he knows that it was lost. McGettigan understands what is going on. McGettigan, is not going to allow a conviction to rest on the jury hearing Aaron’s vague manipulation. It has to be yes or no. McGettigan tells Aaron, “I have to ask this question.” Then McGettigan spells out an explicit sex act in complete detail and he challenges Aaron to answer. Did this happen or not.

I already said, in all the years before learning of Swisher-Houtz, Aaron had first refused to apply the terminology “oral sex” to the T shirt game, that was Gillum’s domain. Later, he would recite what Gillum wrote for him, using therefore that terminology, but to an explicit question about any sexual act he would always say ‘no’. The ghostwriter of “Silent no more” describes him saying “no” to the question during one of the grand jury hearings. Aaron really did not want to convict an innocent person. We actually know that the answer he gave throughout this whole time was the true answer, because the same exact question was put to the other Sandusky kids about what happens in and after exactly the same T shirt game, such as Shawn Sinisi on 15/01/08, and always with the answer of ‘no.’

I really hate to infect my article with a persistent porn meme, but I think it makes sense to include this once [51]. This is going to be a conversation that would have been repeated endless times with Aaron, and endless times with each of the 600 children interrogated by the police in their initial investigation. All the repetitions of this one conversation about a non-erasable porn meme if they were written down could fill dozens of lever-arch files. And of those many thousands of pages, each single one in turn, with absolute consistency, accounting for ‘more than 20’ events, events that happen ‘all the time.’

Sinisi: Like, he would lift your shirt up and blow on your stomach all the time.
Lawyer AJS: Do you recall him pulling your shorts down so he could blow closer to your genitals?
Sinisi: No. I don’t remember that ever.

To be very clear, to reiterate, as far as what Aaron willingly volunteers, even now in this final hearing, Aaron’s actual answer was exactly the same as Sinisi's answer shown above, “He blew on my stomach, yeah”. At the crucial point, when forced to answer if anything happened next, not allowed to say he doesn’t remember or that he blacked out, and in the belief that it doesn’t matter because there is another victim proving guilt, Aaron allows that just once he’s going to surrender to the porn meme, and he is going to change the ‘no’ answer that he and the others always consistently give, including to the grand jury, thousands or possibly millions of times in total, to ‘yes.’

Only hours later is Aaron’s first response to learning that there actually was no other victim, which means, no victim at all. Hearing Swisher-Houtz say he’s really sorry for what happened to Aaron and he would have come forward sooner, Aaron’s first response is it’s OK. Aaron had said “yes” to McGettigan, and even though there hadn’t been any sexual attack of anyone at all, it’s still fair because Sandusky had gone crazy.

The Grand Jury presentment doesn’t pull any punches about how Sandusky could go crazy, about how he could shout at people — but the thing is, it didn’t always end badly. Some kids put up with it, some kids stayed with the program and graduated from college — Aaron knew this.

But it is fair to ask, what about kids like Aaron where they maybe weren’t on a trajectory to be college-bound? The film ‘Paterno,’ with Ganim as its advisor, riffs on how neither the Paterno children, nor Paterno himself, ever saw any evidence of abuse, while their response was dour enough and staid enough, with their praying for the victims etc, to set the tone that something is very wrong. At the end of the film, Paterno envisions himself still wearing a business suit, and he imagines falling into the swimming pool where all the laughing, playing, confusion and accusation is taking place, and what you see beneath the water, is many many Sandusky children swimming, and what you see also is that they are playful, they are pretending, they are imaginative.

The film had also dealt with football injuries, and we can ask about that, about how contact sports and rough-and-tumble play are considered hugely important aspects of child development. But in college football, is it really right that the only one who experiences any rough-and-tumble is the quarterback, who sometimes gets brain damage and concussions from it?

What is consent? Can a child accuse Sandusky, “All I wanted to do was send the ball into the goal, and without my consent, this huge man came and kicked it away into the other goal!” In tickling, or getting kicked by kids, or using pressure points, there is never consent. While a dog is trying to pull a bit of rope out of your hands, prancing and growling, a friend might say “Let go. You are being unfair, clearly that belongs to the dog.”

Let go. That belongs to the dog.

Instead of ‘tickling’ I almost said ‘tackling’ though the two words always maintained a distinct origin. Tackling shares a proto-indo-european root with the game ‘tag’ and throughout all the years the word can be traced, seven thousand years, it has included a notion of acquisition.

I mentioned elsewhere that Matt Sandusky had said in his Rossman police interview that there had never been any inappropriate touching. In a leaked police interview during the time of the actual trial, he’d said he has no recollection of any oral or anal sex with Sandusky. Actually, that story gets a bit more complicated.

I mentioned there is a lawyer no-one was trusting — he and his therapist were dedicated, but misguided enough to tell kids what they have to say in court even if it’s not true.

This is complicated, but one of the things Ziegler did after some years was send a really nice kid, AJ Dillen, to gain the confidence of these two, asking if he can keep his phone on record since he has special needs; and eventually he’d just asked, wait a minute, how do I know I actually was abused at all? The lawyer said, oh, that’s between you and the therapist. The therapist said, oh, that’s between you and the lawyer. When Dillen said, so, how do we even know that Sandusky is guilty at all, the lawyer was like, gee, wow, I never even thought about that.

What is complicated is, when it was announced that Matt is saying during the trial that Jerry abused him and he’s going to testify, the first point is, it wasn’t actually Matt at all who said that, it is that misguided lawyer who said it. I already mentioned that people like McGettigan knew not to listen to one word of that. The lawyer’s press reports saying that Matt is accusing Jerry led Joe Amendola to decide not to let Jerry testify in case Matt would be called in rebuttal. Later McGettigan said he had no intention of putting Matt on the stand, and he really would have relished questioning Sandusky directly.

To be totally fair, the strange lawyer wasn’t totally unethical with AJ Dillen, who’d actually introduced himself by saying he had been abused in a particular way. The lawyer changed the story so Dillen would be able to collect compensation, and when Dillen suggested maybe it never happened, the lawyer basically said, then just go home.

Matt’s notion that he’s going to start remembering later reflects a more accurate accusation. The lawyer interview of Shawn Sinisi we’ve looked at was already by the same strange lawyer; we could use it since there was no financial motive to tamper with testimony about a T shirt game.

Another section of the Sinisi interview — and all were eventually published posthumously — shows the same lawyer’s method of fabricating a witness statement which, applied to Matt so early is what must have inspired Matt’s unique sharp commentary, and would have ended the trial as a truce between gentlemen if Matt had been unleashed to face McGettigan.

The lawyer chooses a date, saying, thank God for the internet, right, then [52] “Do you remember him soaping you up and washing you in the shower?” Sinisi says “No.” The lawyer says “OK, um, do you remember him lifting you up to the shower head and putting your head in the shower head?” Sinisi says, “No.” This second event which Sinisi denies, about lifting him up to a shower head, is actually copy/pasted from much earlier very careful testimony from someone else which had cleared Sandusky, and could create a believable MO if the lawyer can get Sinisi to say it.

They move to a different room when time is up and the lawyer tries again [53], “You were just about to talk to me about the shower head.” The lawyer suggests Sinisi can change his answer without being embarrassed as a female assistant is no longer there. Sinisi remembers both events in the same words which the lawyer had magically predicted, “He put soap on like my head and my back and lifted me up, like, under the shower head...” The lawyer asks more and Sinisi says “I remember feeling it.” Now the lawyer volunteers information of his own “And that was around where your butt was.”

Sinisi saying ‘no’ about being lifted up isn’t explainable on the grounds of embarrassment. Getting lifted up is not embarrassing. The lawyer rejected Sinisi’s ‘no,’ insisting ‘you were just about to tell me.’ Then his Frankenstein-like surgery threads the lifted-up modus operandi which he introduced and is insisting on — a staggeringly cruel thing to do because these are the words from a historical document which had always proved Sandusky’s innocence — onto a brutal vertical pain-in-the-butt of his own invention to bait a hook, if Sinisi had survived, to dangle over the deep pockets of a university facility, to fish for money.

Not to blame anyone, but during the disspiriting, literally endless wild goose chase for abuse, the child turned forever to actual drugs, to actual real physical drugs, and died of an overdose. Paterno too, not knowingly ill beforehand, died very soon after his public condemnation and termination by his board of trustees whom, Ganim observed, included the State Governor as an active member. Public pressure on McQueary also came directly from the State Governor who released news that McQueary failed to “meet a moral obligation.” I needn’t even mention the Linda Kelly press conference which used the word ‘allegedly’ once at the beginning, followed by a litany of supposed crimes and criminals and asked the public to augment the list by phoning the investigators on 814-863-1053 or state police on 814 470 2238 where they “have made it abundantly clear to everyone at both of our agencies we are determined to quickly respond to any new witnesses or any additional information that may appear.”

While saying this, Linda Kelly might possibly be slightly shaking as though experiencing either rage or stage fright. A person making really important life-or-death decisions doesn’t always need to be flustered or upset. It’s hard to see how a retrospective of the 40 or 50 year history of an old man’s involvement with a university can create a sudden emergency, where it is on the news, where people from outside have to contact the emergency hotline with new information. Particularly, it said, about one witness they are desperately searching for. If the, really, absurdly inexplicable pressure is what diverted drugs officers from what they should have been doing, providing understanding and support about their kids’ drug use, into wasting all their time canvassing for — what was so crazy — one particular elusive abuse witness, then Ganim’s question about the culpability of the governor might have had an extensive answer. On the other hand, it is known that the governor actively supported Second Mile, maybe the charity should have had an improved drugs outreach, it may have been dificult to govern from a distance, no one is perfect, and our own analysis from even greater distance could be misleading or just wrong.

What I’m converging on is, although that same always-intentionally-inaccurate lawyer said that Jerry had abused Matt, actually in the tape recorded police interview that was leaked, what changed is, not that Matt started saying that he started remembering abuse, but rather, whereas all along Matt had said Jerry never touched him inappropriately in any way, now one little thing has changed. His recollections haven’t changed. But what he says on the new tape recorded police interview is that he still has no recollection of any oral or anal sex at this time. What has changed in the last three words, and this makes a lot of sense, is that the lawyer is assuring Matt that the reason Jerry is guilty is that although Matt still, as always, has absolutely no recollections of abuse, the lawyer’s misguided therapist already knows things Matt has not yet started to remember, and she knows that Matt will remember them later on, in a subsequent meeting, which the lawyer has scheduled for him. Like for Sinisi, this is the crucial second meeting where “Do you remember X?” “No,” is scheduled to transform into “Guess what. I remember X.”

We can imagine what would have happened if McGettigan and Amendola had allowed Matt to prevail. Matt descending on the trial with his Mark Twain style of wisdom, explaining to McGettigan and the jury about how the lawyer explained that the way he knows Sandusky is definitely guilty is because memories which Matt does not have are going to start arriving the next time the lawyer will bring him to see the therapist.

If you remember about Simcisko, the incidental touching, and the things Simcisko was about to say when McGettigan interrupted his digression about porn videos, they also came from that same misguided lawyer. That same lawyer was Simcisko’s lawyer and that same misguided therapist was Simcisko’s therapist. McGettigan understood that a witness becoming confused or vulnerable after instructing an unreliable civil lawyer still deserves to be heard.

As I mentioned, years after the trial, Ziegler finally organized for Dillen to act as the sort-of double agent to infiltrate into this law firm, but Matt had done that already on day one. Yet because McGettigan was rightfully wary about letting that strange lawyer influence justice, the only thing that anyone ever learned of Matt’s brilliance is the press reports from the lawyer saying Matt has accused his dad of abuse.

I sometimes wonder, why did Matt persist once the trial was lost? When he never got to be the star of the big show about his Dad getting proven innocent, why did he persist with something so much worse? Perhaps if he’d just joined the thousands of young kids who said Sandusky is innocent, that would have no effect. The police, when they interviewed 600 second mile kids, mainly got kids saying he’s a great role model and a nice person, and their report says that. For Matt to join those ranks, to increase the number of supporters by one, would be ineffective.

The Sandusky kids, because they understand play, they end up having a sort-of multidimensional Mark Twain type of wisdom. But even the Paterno kids do have a stable ethics and honesty. Although the Paterno kids’ ‘victims don’t lie’ reassurances, and their candlelight vigil for the victims did confuse people, the Paterno kids are very clear that they knew Sandusky their whole lives without ever seeing any evidence of wrongdoing. The Paterno kids, when it comes to McQueary, they are the ones who established that just like Jayaram in the Letby case, there was never any contemporaneous account of McQueary reporting anything sexual. The testimony of McQueary’s father’s friend Dr. Dranov confirms this. The justification for jailing Curley and Schultz had been that Paterno had said “sexual nature” in the grand jury. It is one of the Paterno kids who explains what that means. He is the one who had actually brought Paterno to the grand jury hearing, and accompanied his dad when he was being prepped for the hearing. When he was being prepped, Paterno’s kid remembers, Paterno was told you have to list anything McQueary said which is not of a sexual nature and anything he said which is of a sexual nature. Paterno’s kid explains that Paterno went into the hearing with the notion of ‘sexual nature’ versus ‘not sexual nature’ as the categories of things he was required to discuss. The two categories had been given to him, with that exact wording, by the grand jury prosecutors. They were like subject headings on the top of pages, and one of those pages, the supposed list of things McQueary said that are of a sexual nature, was an empty page.

Regarding Aaron, I think that he does want to recant. Aaron is more intelligent than just to show up at the AG office saying “You win. Put me in handcuffs like the others.” What he does do is to give the finger to the phone camera on a facebook page while laying on a bed of cash. And went back-and-forth with Ziegler in social media debates about starting a public discussion about what really happened.

Or perhaps, if we really put all our effort into trying to understand this, Aaron’s book “Silent no more,” which the memory expert Elizabeth Loftus cited as evidence of Sandusky’s complete innocence in an appeal to Pennsylvania court, never did have a ghostwriter. Perhaps the title “Silent no more” refers, not to the hackneyed meme of stifled or unconscious or sad and dumb victims absent of agency, or blacked-out unconscious victims, trying to regain their lost voice after abuse, but rather refers to the courage to explain what really happened. To violate the supposedly proven premise, to admit also having made a mistake, to admit having hurt someone. Granted that Aaron did not go to college, but maybe we do not need a PhD memory expert to cite Aaron’s book, or to be the one to explain to all of us, look, I don’t know whether Aaron realizes this, but what he says in this book actually implies Jerry was totally innocent all along.

This has been a long section, which I’d wanted to add-in explaining how I’m being unfair to Aaron. Now I want to do the same, to add-in, before going onto the bigger issues which they noticed, how I’ve been unfair to Ziegler and Ganim. One of the things that had offended Ziegler’s sensibilities early on was the political assassination of Sarah Palin. This is not to say Ziegler agreed with Palin’s politics or ideas, or vice-presidential candidacy. But it had to do with how mainstream journalism dismissed Palin based on her low-class dialect, or the teams of supporters proud of never going to college, who wore high-school letterman jackets and cheered her on.

And I saw something similar in Ganim. Among her articles quoting Dawn Daniels, Ganim quoted Dawn exactly one time without correcting her grammar. And I think this was necessary, so readers might see that it isn’t a situation like Huma Abedin, with great lexical facility and familiarity, wanting to set a careful legal precedent. Dawn had had her feet kicked out from under her, the last time being when she understood, for whatever reason, it is no longer clear that Aaron’s future can ever be as one of Sandusky’s successful protogeés. Actually, something really poignant I just realized, the day Dawn said to a neighbour “I’ll own his house” wasn’t immediately after the last meeting with Sandusky, the shouting match. It was after she’d been asking Aaron why Sandusky has not been coming around anymore, and they’d had an argument about it. It is times like this, times of asking the reader to adjust to this slightest edit of the text, that we shall allow a break from reading, if desired, for the reader to have a snack or do something fun, or allow a minute or so of crying. In the film Paterno, it was clearly Ganim who made the choice to cast for Dawn, a shy, careful, diminutive upper-middle class blonde actress who isn't going to allow the audience to say “I see the problem here, she's not one of us. ” Whose legitimate case is, I am so confused, please, someone explain to me what is going on here.

A way to understand what was going wrong in the Sandusky case at the beginning is this: the lawyers who were involved (with perhaps one exception) were careful in what they were doing, The grand jury presentment is almost like an Excel spreadsheet, with all the relevant data. And Ganim’s reporting, quite simply, followed what must be principles of good journalism. At the time she won the Pulitzer, commenters observed uniquely that those who support Sandusky say her journalism is accurate, and those who oppose Sandusky say the same. Ganim was able to convey an accurate representation of the scientific data to the audience.

But efforts like those of Ziegler and Ganim will never be enough.

In the local example, headlines are not controlled by newsmen, they are controlled by sub-editors. Before he died, recently, Frederick Crews himself wrote his defense of Sandusky for frankreport.com, accusing Ganim of having broadcast a headline saying “Sandusky used his charity to abuse kids.” In fact, Crews is being as inaccurate as the journalists here, the headline actually said “Report: Sandusky used his charity to abuse kids.” Moreover, Ganim’s description of the grand jury presentment didn’t say that at all. That is the sub-editor’s impression from misinterpreting what may have been the only snippet of Ganim’s article he/she had had time to read.

Just, sticking to the science a bit here, if there are 50 articles with clickbait headlines saying Sandusky is guilty, when none of the actual articles say that, then a person reading the headlines and choosing to read 3 of the articles ends up seeing 47 incriminating headlines that had not been debunked by reading the actual article.

I believe this fact, this way that journalism can work to facilitate a political assassination, is what offended Ziegler, and also it is what made a fair trial impossible. One attempted ground for appeal against Sandusky’s conviction was a notion that the prosecution had sort-of blackmailed the defense into waiving the preliminary hearing, in the meeting in the Hilton Garden Inn with Judge Cleland. But I remember those times. All we were hearing were one after another headline saying another kid has accused Sandusky of another act. The grand jury presentment was carefully constructed. But every detail, whether it is exculpatory or incriminating, just merged with the others. Headlines about real events included nonsense like one of his adopted children accused him.

Mix this with anger, and with the well-intentioned efforts to ease the suffering of the victims via praying for them and candlelight vigils, and the whole media experience is obviously destructive to ever finding an impartial jury. Sandusky and Amendola wanted to go with a local jury who would have genuine knowledge, independent of the media firestorm.

When you really analyze it, what went wrong in this instance is mainly such a simple thing: just the ratio between the number of headlines a person sees versus the number of articles a person reads. That ratio had a blip because people for the first time were reading articles on the internet, where you search Google and see a few dozen headlines with every one search. That ratio is just the number of hits on the first page of a Google search. So, with people being used to the days when you buy one newspaper, and see one headline for every one article you skim, now you see 50. And actually, come to think of this, you do see the actual guilty parties here, the array of snippets totally out of context!

And if you think about it, there was even an intentional reason this was getting forced on people. People had installed Google Chrome to escape the corruption between Microsoft’s “File Explorer” and “Internet Explorer,” whereby Microsoft could sell — and virus sites could steal — access to your desktop through the internet. Those were exactly the days Google’s Chrome was itself starting to try to obscure the fact that you can directly go to URL’s without searching. Any mistyped URL just instigated a ‘search from url’ anyway, until it became default to access any url first by searching Google. Then, using cookies and cooky agreements, Google could track which headline you clicked, hence knew which URL you went to, and could sell them your identity, despite violating the whole principle, with the W3 Consortium understanding Berners-Lee’s original vision of the internet, that you freely arrive at a URL as an anonymous observer. Any javascript processing has to happen in your inviolable client-side sandbox where, by design, a site can never see anything but its own cookies. Google Chrome, for the financial purposes of Google deceiving users into searching for every single URL they want to go to, created the side-effect that surrounding each trip to a chosen news site is a list of unrequested sites, and unrequested snippets, comprising a randomly shuffled intermixture of vocabulary.

And a reason it is important for someone like John Ziegler to highlight this is that we can’t now say, everything is better now as we all have got accustomed to how you can’t just read the page of headlines. Because technology doesn’t stand still for us to get used to it, and a crucial point which we are heading towards is, there is no such thing as getting used to it. (And what I predicted a decade ago is starting now, British schools asking children to leave their phones in a box at the gate.) The capacity of an individual brain is not adequate for that. Actual evolution of culture depends on actual biological evolution which has taken place, it makes us what we are, but it takes place on a scale of millions of years, and changes that even happened on the subcellular level are shared in symbioses with other animals and other species and comprise the most meaningful and significant components of human thought. There is not the freedom in human evolution for an atom of Magnesium in a neurotransmitter to morph into an atom of Aluminum. Despite genetic ‘science’ the constraints in evolution of actual human thought — the difficulties of any notion of upgrading the hardware — have unimaginable complexity.

The problem with AI is not that in the future it’s going to have bad intentions etc, obviously, it has no intentions. It is a glorified version of what in those days was a page of Google hits. But even if tech were to stand still, we could never ‘adapt’ to the slightest and most innocent tech change even if it stood still for a million years.

Ganim and Ziegler do want to be careful and each in their own way resolve not to allow a type of political assassination based on class. It is carefulness reminiscent of the ‘Guardian liberal’ attitude, and because it includes the American perspective it is more insightful; the ‘Guardian liberal’ attitude includes a shard of brutal colonialism. By saying that people close to nature are disempowered, attempts in British scholarship to give them agency which they supposedly lack, mask presuppositions embedded in the compassion. And again, I am not blaming. I am procrastinating about a sad eventuality, the slow realization that the introduction of scientific thinking being earlier here in Britain is what caused our more severe disjunctures of understanding nature. In another article I’d once wondered, why, when indigenous people are given a choice, do they just go and live in garbage dumps near cities? After a lot of thought actually realizing, that is us. We actually are the indigenous people. There is no such thing as graduating from that. We never graduated. Even this still could not start to approach becoming a meaningful observation — of how we choose to live — unless it could be accompanied by some explanation of why it happens. This is very difficult but we have to try. We have to keep going into some deeper and very sad aspects of the Sandusky and Letby cases for our first examples.

We never graduated

Part III.

Network television just then had been having made-for-TV movies about multiple personalities and abuse. It was what we’d nowadays call a meme, and these not only formed the basis of Gillum’s ‘onion’ theory that he can testify that what Aaron really is trying to say is different than what he testifies, but the memes also influenced media coverage during and before the trial. Frankie Probst was on TV for a good half-hour [37] explaining that just one thing made him a bit suspicious: driving in a car, if Sandusky took a hand off the wheel, instead of wrapping it around a kid’s shoulders, he’d just put it on the knee. The interviewer Natalie Morales understood that it is because this is safer, but she asked what had been the one nagging question for everyone. Although she phrased her question as about memory, she seemed to be wondering, in effect, yes you are telling us what this personality is saying, but what about your other personalities? Probst never testified in court, that same never-intentionally-accurate lawyer I've already mentioned so many times eventually claimed that from some perspective he actually had been abused. He received a huge multi-million dollar settlement, and, I think, huge admiration even from other lawyers besides his own for his ethics in carefully protecting Sandusky in every way from even the slightest consequences of his decision to go for a settlement.

Once the verdict was in, once Sandusky was convicted of all the counts except McQueary, including Calhoun, Simcisko and Aaron, then double-entendres about Sandusky versus naked children were everywhere on TV in comedy routines and monologues; they were seen as nothing but funny. What is very interesting is that the same memes and double-entendres had existed even before the conviction.

When the regime changed, the incoming AG Kathleen Kane from another political party wanted to request the email histories during Sandusky’s investigation. She learned that personnel in the AG office even before the conviction had already been trading email jokes and innuendo with judges and police throughout the investigation [38]. The concept (as she described it, of Sandusky not having porn but his investigators and prosecutors having it) became known as ‘porngate.’ The actual emails were leaked to the national press, and then Attorney General Kane was jailed a short while later, for a complicated reason.

To me, it’s almost a joke in itself now that the assistant coach (Sandusky), the University president, the university head of security, the university head of sports, the investigative journalist (Ziegler), and the actual State Attorney General were putting each other in and out of jail over this, in two cases (Tim Curley and Gary Schultz) because their witness statements had been ruled to be false.

The state Attorney General Kathleen Kane escorted to jail

The crucial point is that even before Sandusky’s conviction, humor about children (for example a Playboy-style cartoon of a clothed child ogling a naked woman related to growing up and learning what women are good for) had been intermixed with correspondence about the investigation. For me the humor is reminiscent of all those animated cartoon memes from the 1950’s about chickens trying to prevent their eggs being boiled in a pot. A cartoon of a servant child of slaves running terrified from a noose, harmless and fun. A chicken, terrified and squawking, considered just funny.

A chicken trying to save its egg was funny

The brilliant ad analyst Jerry I. Mander showed [38] that people in those days had become unaware of how their thoughts were being organized by TV memes. Mander explained that beneath that, beneath the memes, there isn’t anything like a safety layer, there is no layer of more valid or more real thought.

Here in Britain, in the days after Peter Cook’s politics, Mary Whitehouse’s campaign against innuendo on the BBC became interpreted as ridiculous [40] yet feminists continue to worry that pornography may damage the groups whom it depicts. A housewife telling the milkman, “I can’t pay for milk this week, is there any other way...” is seen from various perspectives as morally damaging both to the person whom the milkman represents and to the person the housewife represents. In part I we saw that when Simcisko had had only one paternal role model in his life, he had been in a situation like a navigator with only a single non-magnetic compass bearing, or, let us say, with a compass which has had no choice but to define true north as what is known from a porn video, knowing only that his relationship with his parent is different somehow, but with no second concept of where the relationship “is going.”

Fragmentary model of intimacy

And here we see not only prosecutors, also judges and police authorities reassuringly sharing among themselves soft-porn memes about childhood, nudity, and incipient sexuality. In this connection, it was Ziegler who first noticed he’d need to point out to his readership that in all the Sandusky witness testimony, there was no account of nudity among all the children who had been adopted, fostered, or were sleeping over at Jerry and Dottie’s house, and no account of intimacy such as cuddling among children who’d worked out with Coach Sandusky at the gym or on the fields and been side-by-side with him during showering-off afterwards.

The earlier police investigation had cleared Sandusky, when he had once lifted a childhood cancer victim to rinse soap out of his hair and eyes. It included two reports (the Chambers report and the Seasock report), along with Sandusky’s careful recollections and those of Zach Konstas and his Mom, which identically described instant-by-instant and centimeter-by-centimeter, sometimes by careful indirect references, precisely which point of space had been occupied by every part of each body at each instant [41].

Yet no amount of precision could prevent such notions from being intermixed in the familiar memes of the lawyers and judges who were acting against him. Sandusky was like a real milkman who had had some mercy on housewives not wanting their family without milk until they can pay, when milkmen are expected to respond “How dare you make such a suggestion to me!”

As chickens being our agreed food had led to cartoons ignoring the plight of chickens, the same happened with cows, even later. In the animated film “Cars,” the friendship between Lightning McQueen and the good-ole boy Mater (a pickup-truck) is cemented when Mater takes Lightning around Cow Tipping. It amounts to forming an alliance of friendship based on agreeing who is the legitimate underdog, who is so well protected against our empathy that it is just funny and safe to violate them. The tipped cows are like old trucks trapped, maybe forever, because they have been upended. No one mentions rescuing them.

It was funny when the cow is tipped

The last time I visited my father near the sea, I’d told him about things I was writing; he’d expressed faux-concern about whether I would be able to “get published.” For the first time this visit, he’d been unenthusiastic about going out in a lobster boat. Thinking now, his perspective aligns well with David Foster Wallace, whom I’ve mentioned here, discussing the genuinely gentle and humanist Maine homespun politics which transcended left-wing versus right-wing, but in the context of a lobster-boiling party on the beach. My father showed me that if you just upend a lobster, balancing it like a tripod face-down on a flat stone, it ceases flapping and just waits. It’s hard to think of an evolutionary precursor (my choice of ‘precursor’ isn’t meant to say evolution provides only vague primitive outlines of things that modernity has completed in detail; I refer to what one might visualize as a gallery of detailed symbioses in principle equally valid in past and future possible worlds) unless, like domesticatable dogs, or like ants which fill a rivulet with their bodies so others can cross, those lobsters who’d strayed near the shore and been collected by people have essentially always, for some reason we don’t know, given themselves over as if willingly (though the willingness would not be part of the individual cognition of any particular lobster). Nowadays in reality when they are caught there, they are frozen in plastic crates which fit together in a shipping container. I have heard it said that oysters in days past were trained in their oyster beds not to open during intervals of non-high tide — by moving them up the beach — so that they would stay closed and not spoil during transport.

One can try to research cow tipping, and it seems never to have been a real activity, but it is only an apocryphal artefact of some ambient myth somewhere, perhaps originating in treatment of slaves in America. That a sort-of male bonding adventure for slave-holding children in the South — they were called ‘Master’ instead of ‘Mister’ — may have involved children going out to trap innocent slaves.

Quote from film, “I don’t care who you are, there’s nothing funnier than that”

Auschwitz really was intended to be a work camp. In early years if parents hadn’t survived, their children had been sent to orphanages [42]; it was sympathy for the children which led to keeping them with their parents no matter what. The titulus or motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” was meant seriously. Only as trains were arriving too fast there arose a desperate and almost funny predicament. I can imagine the humor being shared with the residents at times “No space in the dorm for you, you know what that means, ha ha.” This with no more ill-will intended than when a farmer chooses which chickens to boil or which egg to take and any squawking or distress is interpreted as being harmlessly absolutely and purely funny.

Another aspect of porn memes is that, according to Ziegler, the first police visit to McQueary was about his own behaviour sending porn photos of himself to undergrad students. The claim seemed unlikely until Ziegler’s Framing Paterno website received further chat messages and porn photos which McQueary sent [43] even after the trial to a woman who had once worked for Sandusky’s first lawyer Amendola. She’d out of curiosity sent a generic dm to McQueary expressing some mild admiration about a news story that had mentioned that McQueary had helped rescue a geriatric car crash victim, and received in reply the photographic rendering of his particulars. Ziegler claims that McQueary’s cooperation with the police was a sort-of vague deal to keep pressure off himself; if so, this is further evidence of how social media porn memes affected witness perspectives.

Before our internet social media, and even before network television, there had been the advent of radio, fireside chats, and the polarization between Axis and Fascist which I’ve already alluded to.

Today, articles by top scientists when they do have to touch base with reality need to speak of ordinary things, yet we don’t have, nor could there ever be any meaningful global vernacular any better than memes, cobbled together.

If we look earlier, when the old Roman empire was fairly uniform, there too were things that it is totally OK to laugh at, like things in the colosseum, and to a much greater extent the crucifixion of the innocent slaves for example if one slave has killed the master, or as humorously described in Titus Plautus’ fictional comedies. It is sometimes said that they’d be nailed or tied in funny positions like a party; graffiti and funny signs were allowed. Johannes Bach’s John’s passion [44] has Pontius Pilate explaining the sarcastic titulus, deciding that it’s funnier to say this is the king of the jews than only that he thinks he’s the king of the jews, and a main road the soldiers would need to take is the best place for the funny billboard. No one may have much cared who volunteered to play the role behind that big sign. Bach doesn’t claim the Nazarene volunteer was ever poisoned, he took a sip and once he’d said “It’s fulfilled” his friends stood guard against soldiers breaking his legs. Whether he may or may not have been brought down alive shouldn’t have been an essential detail in the mosaic of middle-to-late Abrahamic stories which became a woke version of Roman history.

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In all the instances of humor I’ve mentioned, in the Roman crucifixions, in slaves being hung from tree branches, in the jokes about Sandusky, perhaps even in the plucked chicken, the victim is known to have been totally unclothed. In the Roman empire, if one slave has attacked the master, all the others are unclothed. And also at Aushwitz, in the gas chambers, which were seen as funny places by the managers. Roman technology was pretty much the same as ours today, there are intricate metal pumping mechanisms and plumbing in Pompeii. I honestly think that it wouldn’t be wrong to make a connection between Roman roads, Roman centralization of travel, Roman centralization of water, with the widespread social polarization which allowed slaves to be seen as safe and comfortable objects of derision.

It is a worry what charities like Water Aid are actually doing. An early advertisement for such a charity told the story of a child who walked two miles across a biodiverse hill each day to collect pure water from a stream. The idea was, she must be weary, and the charity aims to replace the stream with a pipe. That water must be piped and covered, metered and billed, and the requirement for employment seen as legitimately moneymaking should be the carrier of rights to water, rather than a weary child. That this process of “lifting” people out of poverty is different than gentrification, or the cruelty of industrial-revolution era coal mines, and should be encouraged by charities.

We can see the same effect of memes and global communications in the Letby case. Despite myself having facility with the idiotic statistical paradoxes that originated the case (Simpson’s paradox, sharpshooter paradox etc), an aspect that is relevant to our immediate discussion is how some tragedies of an unsurviving neonate were brought to national attention in Chester while equivalent cases at other hospitals were accepted as normal. Dr. Shoo Lee’s harrowing explanation about neonatal alarms in his streamed press conference [46] was interrupted when a phone rang somewhere; Shoo Lee rescued the shocked audience with a bit of light relief, confessing he also had thought it is an alarm. This led to parents contacting journalists to complain.

Dr. Shoo Lee frightened by phone ringing

We can’t condemn press conferences for the ethical contradiction, only. Before technologically enhanced-mobility, one knows what communities had been like. Although our own thoughts are comprised of memes, we can think of the meme of the Southern American family with all the children side-by-side in bed appearing nearly identical. And in rural places this did happen, where the children in a family of six look nearly identical, and the local schoolteacher occasionally calls any one of them by the name of the oldest, who had first made the particular impression on her.

Appearing nearly identical

Intermixing of genotypes is compounded generation-by-generation. If Mom looks like all her sisters and Dad looks like all his brothers, then you have cousins all looking somewhat the same due to having one similar-looking parent. People talk about inbreeding in those southern American areas as a health problem, but no-one discusses the opposite, out-breeding, where generations of technologically-enhanced mobility result in extensive random intermixture.

An individual mind cannot cope with this, not only in the sense that two physically identical people could differ due to recessive traits, but rather for the much more significant reason that the mind of any individual can’t correlate or cluster those traits which are observable. In the meme about the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, there would have been some identifiable trait or small cluster of traits which would mean that you know with one glance who is a Hatfield and who is a McCoy. Some look involving an expansive voice and an aquiline nose, or whatever it would be. Technologically-enhanced mobility means you could have someone with all the traits one mind attributes to a Hatfield, but in every other way as likely to be different as to be the same. The cognitive degeneration which has taken place, replacing any cognitive substructure with only memes, results in racism where visually identifiable traits like pigmentation come to the fore for meaningless reasons. And an imperative like “We must not die” becomes distorted or amplified based on the extent of media circulation.

In a family where all the kids look and act nearly identically, one can think, the only circumstance where a child identifies which one in the family he is, may be once in the morning when he/she is called by name. Like twins, if you ask one, “which one are you,” the answer doesn’t actually matter. If they live together, they actually are interchangeable, and if one day you said “One of you must be sacrificed and die,” neither twin would be very concerned which twin it is which must die. It would only mean that the question would have an easy unambiguous answer from now on, when someone asks “which one are you” the answer would be “Ellen” because Sue had died. But interchanging the names is inessential in every way, even emotionally. So, the same phenomenon in the old American South would also have meant, if one child didn’t survive to adulthood, it would be a tragedy, but a small tragedy.

Once people are randomized, and government policy aligns with the notion that every individual matters, there actually have been policies saying we must not have contraception ever, nor abortion, nor miscarriage, nor neonatal fatality, nor child mortality, nor infertility, nor loneliness and incels. An opposite, when governments have had a one-child policy for a few generations, is where no-one has any brothers or sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles, no nieces, no nephews, no second-cousins. I will return later on to this topic and explain it more.

It is important to understand, I’m not pointing at any particular meme and saying “Here is the problem, we have to do away with this meme.” What I’m doing is reminding ourselves of Mander’s observation that when tech like radio, television or the internet result in memes cobbled together, there isn’t anything underneath that which holds cognition together in any meaningful way. And from an evolutionary Psychology perspective, that is the answer we should expect.

Comparing our cases of Sandusky and Letby, whereas in Pennsylvania the prosecution originated at the top, from the incoming State Governor, in Britain the prosecution started locally, with a local Chester DI, who nearly made the right decision at the beginning to send everyone home. And there had been careful scrutiny, organized by the hospital management, by the Royal College of Paediatrics, which hadn’t ascribed any blame to Letby.

At the end, things like the Moulton report were mainly ignored, and even a report by the legendary legal thinker Dick Thornburgh; while in Britain, the Thirlwall inquiry is attaining accelerated importance, along with press conferences championed by Sir Davis and others.

Some of the differences are explained by what we started worrying about already, the earlier introduction of scientific thinking in Britain. When I lived near woods in America that hadn’t been developed, I had a huge misconception about what certain words would actually mean in England. I hadn’t understood that ‘wasteland’ in TS Eliot’s poem means land which is economically wasted because it hasn’t been cleared yet. I didn’t realize that “countryside” in England also refers to artificially cleared land. I didn’t realize that the ‘roundabout’ in Penny Lane is an urban traffic circle. Most of all, arriving here in England, it shocked me to the core to see that the few remaining biodiverse places (unless designated) were considered just to be pre-existing disgusting places where it’s totally OK to throw trash. Most of all, it shocked me to realize that when English environmental groups get funding for an area of nature, they buy chain saws and chemicals, often even remove topsoil and lay a plastic floor to make a big flower-pot. They chop out any dandelions, nettles, daisys, thistle, teasle, ponds, swampy areas, clover, mushrooms, black-eyed susans, queen-anne lace (which they call ‘cow parsley’) and the grabber sends them away. They have an idea of which species are supposed to be there, they don’t care that they’ve paved things and removed huge areas of viable habitat. They want to “attract” specific animals. Nothing in the world has ever made me more angry than this and I even have trouble explaining it. Attract them from where?? From outer space??

Having lived near woods where there is just endless, ever-surprising and ever-transforming nature makes me realize that I must have learned something from living there, which people here do need to learn. The only way I can put it into words is to say that British environmental science causes me dismay.

Even British environmental education causes me deep dismay. Children are taught, “Animals aren’t really cute and fluffy like on Disney. They bite you and each other.” Walter Disney animals and even David Attenborough animals do attack each other every five seconds. Disney animals are maudlin, traumatic and manipulative creatures. Real American animals had been gentle and wonderful, they had healthy, gentle, intelligent and wonderful lives, but they really are becoming scarce, desperate and sick, with a few species overpopulous in suburban niches like rats and pigeons already are.

It is true that in Britain, with nearly all nature having been removed, the rate of removal is lower than in America. In America when Google Maps started out, some people had experiences of being led into a dirt road and driving for half an hour before reaching a locked gate, and needing to backtrack. That is to say, an area of land of diameter 20 miles had been newly laid with roads owned by the developer for an upcoming housing development. In Britain, between each pair of farms there had been an untended wild area known as a hedgerow. The hedgerow defines the boundary, and either farmer could expand his ownership by removing the half which is on his own land, a type of frontier land acquisition, at the expense of the neighbour feeling violated. But this never happened, and, earlier, there were farms where each peasant family had one furrow, or, rather, long mound of earth. No family would be acquisitive and widen their furrow at the expense of next-door. It would just be obvious, the furrows have a particular familiar width, and someone whose furrow is wider than the others is just obviously a selfish and horrible person. Likewise the farm fields have a particular size and symmetry and way they fit into the landscape. It was the technological introduction of petrol tractors, and earlier, steam tractors, which made it efficient for one interest to buy and combine several farms, and remove the hedgerows which had separated them.

The hedgerows which had separated them

American land development in those times was abrupt, accelerated by a cultural separation between colonists and the indigenous American Indians. In Descent of Man Charles Darwin contrasts Spanish settlers content to become hispanic and intermix with the indigenous American Indians versus British colonists who kept themselves separate. King George saw the damage taking place and addressed it in his 1763 proclamation which stopped colonization at the natural boundaryline formed by the the Appalachian ridge. A motivation for the revolutionary war was to retain the “freedom” to “go west, young man” with no awareness locally in North America of the damage and brutality of the cowboys. In Britain the word is still the most common word to apply to dishonest and destructive tradesmen. The 1772 Mansfield ruling, nine years later, forbade slavery in England while in North America, nearly a century later confederates fought to try to retain the “freedom” to own slaves. Thus, while earlier technology here destroyed the woods sooner and led to diminished understanding of what things had ever been like, the damage in North America was later yet sudden and acute, displacing sustainable living with geo-engineering projects, damming-up huge biodiverse rivers to make power or decorative lakes.

Both perspectives, as extreme as they have become by July 2023, meet in the Scottish sun story, “cowboys have ruined our garden.” The garden is shown. It has not even one plant, nor animal, nor mushroom nor stone anywhere. It is bare concrete and planks. The workers are “cowboys” because they don’t know how to countersink screws, because a stair nosing kicked loose.

Cowboys have ruined our ‘garden’

This is the end of my personal rant and rave, with its sub-lesson that if there is an alternative to the triumverate of good science, bad science, and naive intuition, it would have to be a notion for nature analogous to de Gournay’s “Laissez-faire” for economics. Or like Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” for drugs. And yet, and yet, my experience of the tiny cultural shift between the USA and Britain leads me to understand that this too is next-to-impossible. Before we can say “leave nature to do its thing” or “just say no to removing nature” we would have needed to formulate a definition of how we thought it might be possible to think of “nature” as a separate word from “non-nature.” Already people say this may not be possible because of concepts of the shifting baseline paradigm and generational amnesia.

Here on TV, Simon Reeve, driving through Columbia, gets annoyed at bumpy roads “Only 10 percent of these are tarmacked so-far.”

Sandi Toksvig begins a TV series about rewilding. She bought 15 acres, half is a lawn, the other half an ancient woodland where her winter cameraman gets unscripted glimpses of badgers, red fox, dormouse, roe deer, mushrooms, insects. I expected she’d stop mowing the lawn for the woodland to double in size. Her paid forestry expert reassures her, no, the little ancient woodland is the part that was always neglected. It’s on a north facing hill with low wet access. Swampy ground needs to be replaced with hardcore, a central strip cleared to build a logging track. The existing natural clearing replaced with an artificial pond. Once she clears undergrowth and removes some useless trees with chainsaws, the site will “produce timber for years to come.” Public visitors will arrive. Since the logging track is going to be driven through the woodland the lawn is uninterrupted for parking.

Forestry scientist says that the red-marked parts have been a problem for centuries

The woods in Western Europe including Romania, in violation of actual protective legislation there, are likewise becoming networked by logging tracks which will become roads.

The wishes of British environmentalists like Reeve and Toksvig, to put logging tracks in ancient woods, and to pave logging tracks with tarmac, are satisfied by criminals removing the vast ancient woodlands of Romania. Here in Britain, while remaining ancient woodland cover will soon decline to 2% by area, the same activities are not illegal, they are actually encouraged by forestry scientists and advocated on television. Again, just to pause for a minute to think about what Toksvig is doing: the ancient woodland part of your land is a problem, it has poor wet access and was neglected for centuries, to rewild it we’re going to drain it, pave it, clear it and bury a big plastic sheet.

Toksvig’s pond expert Pete laying a plastic floor

I know why there are almost no ponds in England. I’d occasionally been in a village pub with an old retired engineer who had a house in the village. One time he got angry drunk and started expressing disgust about his neighbours when he was growing up. They were oik farmers. They never installed a single drain. Charles Dickens was disgusted by his New England train journey, the scent of New England salt marshes and “decaying vegetable matter.” The phrase ‘ancient woodland’ to an English person means an arboretum. It means a sign and a big parking lot and a few ancient trees.

Toksvig earthworks

A feature of British society is something that I don’t understand well, my impression of it oscillates between thinking of it as irony or as brutality. When good friends have wanted me to babysit, they have tended on leaving me alone with their child, to choose just that moment to be irascible and unfair to their child, to discipline or spank the child, seeming to me like a trust fall, sometimes leaving me to start our time together by comforting either a confused or crying child.

I wonder if Johnson was that way with Letby. She was at times being supported by a (married) doctor, called in the transcript “Dr A” who would talk about her cases by text message, over coffee or meals. Once in texting about some hectic schedule he’d joked that she could “go commando,” Letby hadn’t known what this means, had repeated the message to a girlfriend of hers who didn’t explain it; Letby never bothered to learn what the phrase means. In court, Johnson asked her three times if she knows what “go commando” means, each time she said she does not know, him seeming to be accusing her of lying. When she’d described being arrested in her pajamas, Johnson went in for the attack, saying, those are not pajamas, why did you lie?

Here is where I have difficulty getting chatGPT to understand my point. Her answer about why she lied “I don’t know” is in my opinion a completely honest answer. She had been wearing a nightgown tucked into a blue twosie, technically a leisure suit. Why hadn’t she been more specific and correct? She accepts that she lied ... as she did ... but now says she does not know why she lied.

For a medic, if someone asks “do you know the dosing schedule for ibuprofen,” you might say “I don’t know” even if you sort-of know the dose for adults but not for babies. Here, in a trial in court that will determine the fate of her whole life, she too deferred to being careful and if she wasn’t sure why she lied, said, “I don’t know.” She may have known that it had to do with simplifying things in a context where people in court are busy; using the single word like “pajamas” to describe an outfit which includes a night gown together with something she would also put on if she were going to be cold, which resembles pajamas but hadn’t had the label “pajamas” affixed when it had been bought. Then when asked to explain, rather than conjecture about her motivations for lying, especially when those motivations are being explored by a barrister and a jury, it is most honest to admit not fully understanding her reasons for having lied.

In forums people suggested this is the moment they decided she is guilty. They hadn’t been sure if she lied, but then she admitted lying, and so the jury is absolved of all ethical responsibility now, she’s confessed it.

I wasn’t going to include this next point, it precipitated after I’ve written the article and seems to be just a coincidence, and it’s a peripheral concept here, yet I will include this because it is striking. The law allows that when someone is being arrested and charged, they lose some rights over their privacy and autonomy.

Now, we already know the story of the Rhylstone women’s institute where geriatric women, some recent widows, decided anyway to fundraise by making a nude calendar. The Royal Marines eventually followed suit with their ‘go commando’ charity initiative.

And, we already know about nice and genuinely funny influencers like Tim Bradbury who still phones his school receptionist “I’m just letting you know that today, I’m meant to be in school but I’m not coming in.” When she asks “OK, who is this?” answers, “My name’s Tim. I’m not coming in because the police have been round looking for uncle Barry’s plants in the attic so I’m not coming in today.”

The receptionist (and everyone) knows that it is Tim Bradbury, laughing she says “What kind of plants are they, Tim?” and he replies “They’re not daffodils!”

As he became a celebrity and was too-well recognized, rather than giving up on the joke, he’d still go about, a full-grown man telling one of his fans “I’m three, nearly six!” The pretend child is lonely and neglected, and falls in love easily, with Bradbury happily crooning as he walks away “Bye! I love you! I love you!”

In this very dark courtroom, if she’s truthful, not understanding, Johnson persists. According to the telegraph, he asks if she is referring to the Royal Marines. She does not reply. If she’s lying, his joke about her nudity “It’s not the Royal Marines!” would dismiss her lie like how Tim dismisses Uncle Barry’s innocence. If she is telling the truth, Johnson’s joke is private between him and the jury. When Bradbury shared his joke equally with the victim and the audience, they delighted in suspension of disbelief. Here, it no longer even matters what Letby said or what she knew. She is funny and she will die in prison.

The argument could be seen as putting the jury in mind of earlier brutal times when motives for murder in women were considered to include possibly extremely strong desires towards men.

Or putting the jury in mind of stonings of women, or the way in some countries victims of rapes are considered guilty of having had dangerous desires. I have trouble understanding how men think this way. Granted a lonely incel who hasn’t made an alliance with any partner could retrospectively interpret prospective partners having been to him inexplicably drawn into alliances with others like in “I want you” by Elvis Costello, or the throwaway song “No reply” the John Lenon and Paul McCartney “If I were you, I’d realize...” But if he weren’t being ironic for the benefit of the jury listening in, would Johnson suggest any hyper-intense attraction such as to Dr A would have so overwhelmed a woman as to lead her to become a serial killer? That a criminal conviction is deserved in the same way a woman who rejects a proposal already deserves stoning or acid, according to logic that “A woman could only reject the the ideal partner ( me ) if a pathological attraction to others were impossible for even her to control and therefore dangerous enough to motivate serial killing and deserve punishment”.

It may not make sense to ask if Johnson understands the meaninglessness of the charges, like one wants to ask about Matt Sandusky, is Johnson a psychopath? Or is he enacting irony on behalf of the jury? Is he being like when McGettigan had said “Shrewd. Predatory.”

One concept that admitting lying doesn’t contradict truthfulness is the same as the concept that her writing in the post-it notes “I am evil” doesn’t justify a judge to pass sentence. This is the enlightenment concept of scientific relativity as how Galilean relativity allows two people passing by to each truthfully say “I am not the one who is moving, but you are the one going past me.” A person can think “I am evil because I donated only 75% of my salary to charity last month instead of my usual 85%.” A statement that one fails to meet one’s own moral standards is as meaningless as a person deciding whether he/she is moving or not. Scientific and mathematical paradigms can seem to open the mind to an understanding of how meaningless particular sentences are to state once they are removed from their real-world context. It doesn’t, though, ever replace the missing context with any more meaningful alternative.

We are near the end of the article, having focussed on a dark aspect of the Letby case, and with me honestly wondering, could Matt be a psychopath? And here, I can’t leave without including an optimistic note about people, even while nothing short of a substantial respite for nature could start to untangle inconsistencies of human cognition or the resulting and certain imminent death of nature. Let me start about Mike McQueary. At the point where he said there is no line of sight, and the police refuted this by mentioning the mirror on the wall opposite to his locker door, all Mike would have needed to do is go back and verify that there is no piecewise linear arc of sight comprising two lines whose angle of incidence at one point of the mirror are equal and opposite. Even if there is, as McQueary appears to mention looking back at an angle, he could just have said, if he really can’t recollect any image of Sandusky with a child, that at whatever moment he was turning to put in his shoes, and may have looked at the mirror, the angles must just have been such that the piecewise linear arc of sight didn’t happen to meet Sandusky or the child. Instead, McQueary seems to have thought, the fact that his ‘line of sight’ argument was defeated, means he is now required to admit what police already said, that there is a crime and he was a witness. This leads to him confessing that, rather than him being involved, rather than the accusations against him merging into a crime ring, that he rules that the crime he witnessed is ‘over the line.’ This would refer not anymore to the line of sight, but to other language like a goal line or a foul line.

Matt seems almost to riff on that. When he was describing what happened to Swisher-Houtz, in the film ‘Happy Valley,’ Matt repeats what McQueary said, as if he is making a parody. Matt actually says, “I looked into the mirror. And I saw....”

I am very sure that with the McQueary paradox filling the news channels, the whole ‘Happy Valley’ audience must have been waiting with bated breath for what Matt saw in the mirror. What did he see? Matt continued, “I saw myself.”

And Matt continued further, “And I then I knew. There are two directions I can go. Am I going to continue to be a coward, the way I have always been in my life up to now?”

McQueary eventually decides that he did see an image, though describes different images in different settings. In the preliminary perjury trial for Curley and Schultz, McQueary hears two shower heads running, and sees Sandusky with both arms wrapped around a ten-year-old child whose hair is wet, and although he does not see any evidence of arousal or sexual contact of hands or genitals, he is sure that ‘some sort of’ intercourse is taking place.

Matt also seems to riff on Swisher-Houtz’ testimony. He corroborates friendly intimate contact between Sandusky and Swisher-Houtz, then says, there were vulgar things: Sandusky had, for Swisher-Houtz, just as he had done for Matt, organized educational school programs. Sandusky had, for Swisher-Houtz, just as he had done for Matt, found people, donors, who would provide funding so that Matt could go to college. Is Matt's corroboration of the vulgar things just missing from the list, or is it when they allocated Second Mile college money to themselves?

Something more directly funny is, it would have been a trivial thing for Sandusky to lie and say he knows who the kid in the shower is, and then present to the public whatever old friend of his is willing to say ‘it was me.’

What actually happened is, Sandusky said that McQueary actually did bring his concerns to Paterno, Paterno had in turn sent Schultz to ask Sandusky what it is about. Sandusky remembers the conversation. He offered to set up a meeting between Schultz and the kid he’d been in the showers with on the relevant day. Schultz had declined. Sandusky remembers the name of the kid, it is Allan Myers. The story could indeed seem to us like a setup because Myers is a former Sandusky kid who’d been in the Marines and Sandusky had been a guest of honor at his wedding. As we’d expect, Sandusky has Myers meet with Amendola and sign a sworn statement that he was never abused. Also, though, that never-accurate lawyer also meets with Myers and writes on his behalf a totally different statement saying he was abused. During the trial, that never-accurate lawyer says Myers is testifying for the prosecution, but Myers can never be found. McGettigan, who up to now would have accepted the testimony, upon learning that the misguided lawyer is involved, now says even if Myers could have been served, he no longer believes Myers could possibly have ever been the kid in the shower because, for example, he would have been older than ten at the time.

The never-accurate lawyer would always send his evidence to a very honest negotiating law firm with a good reputation, Ross-Feller-Casey, where Casey’s brother Bob was a senator. When Ross-Feller-Casey got the evidence pack for Myers, it included a recorded phone message of Sandusky appealling to Myers to show up for the trial “Just come forward. Everything will be OK. Just come forward and tell them the truth.” Realizing this is exculpatory, Ross-Feller-Casey give the phone message to journalists to play on the news, aligning with Myers’ pretext that the reason is because the message, a voicemail from a retired coach to a retired U.S. Marine, constitutes harassment. My whole point about that is, the only way he ever was involved at all is that amidst all the uproar just before the trial, when Sandusky could have given any name, or appointed any adult to lie for him, Sandusky truthfully went to Myers and told him that one day as a child, he actually had been that kid who had been in the shower on the day that Gary Schultz was referring to when Shultz had come to speak with Sandusky.

The opposite of being shrewd or predatory, Sandusky had been simply honest, and although he was convicted, this was despite protective strategies by more worldly people. Either one of the following two protective strategies one by Myers, and one by McGettigan, was sufficient to protect Sandusky from his own naivety/honesty and ensure he was never convicted of any charge regarding Myers. One was, Myers actually going into hiding during the trial, the second is McGettigan, as he explained, even if Myers had been located, being totally prepared to tell the white lie that the age discrepancy disqualifies Myers from testifying anyway.

According to Ziegler, Amendola was aware of Sandusky’s legal naivety/honesty, and recounted Sandusky saying, why can’t we all just get together in one room and figure out where is the misunderstanding?

Let’s verify that there’s no misunderstanding at least for the reader. The accusations prior to Linda Kelly’s emergency hotline explain how after his conversation with Swisher-Houtz Aaron deduced there'd been no attacks. New witnesses from the hotline say extreme things, being snatched off the road by a silver convertible and raped. That no one ever being told about it was because Sandusky said I'll murder your family. That a mom never seeing bloody clothes was because a victim was forced to clean up the crime scene. These would not have been believable by the kids who'd known Sandusky for years. The purpose of the hotline was finding Myers but he knew and was just hiding. With an error tolerance of more than one year on the prosecution side they'd never know whether someone calling in is even the right person anyway. The phenomenon was rhetoric ramping up but influencing no-one besides the jury, like in the Letby case when a witness paid to look at a medical scan tells the jury this looks like something from a car crash.

The jury was mislead by the extreme language and by other things. The intentionally inaccurate press release about Matt perforated sequester instructions and reached the jury where it was described to NY Times on 23 June by a juror as a “ unifying moment” for the jury, supposedly after the trial was done and sequester instructions lifted. It also caused Amendola not to call Sandusky to testify and the same juror said on Penn State student radio, reported by Pam Cunningham on October 9, 2012 for wfmz radio “I would have liked him to say it face-to-face, honestly”. Thirdly, although there had been no substantial accusations in court, the presentment headed “findings of fact” and not clarifying that Aaron refers to a mouth on the stomach as being oral sex, along with false clickbait headlines in advance of the trial, primed the jury with an indelible and overwhelming impression that that there had already been some infallible proofs of guilt.

Now to say a bit, because I’ve been unfair to Matt and to Johnson. Some very advanced perspective, maybe from Johnson for Letby, or from Matt for Sandusky, indeed could have been, or still could be, like a lightning bolt from a different universe, could have melted hearts, could have changed the outcome. Misguided criminal verdicts are just little examples of people being heartless, causing damage to innocent people. Causing damage to nature involves an unpreventable feedback whose comprehension is beyond any natural image that can be conveyed or imagined. We can imagine something chaotic, and also something so badly tangled it will never be untangled. Scientific paradigms can describe the combination, chaotic tangling of their own consistency beyond von Neumann-Morgenstern, beyond generic failure of Frobenius’ theorem. We can imagine situations of a mouse caught in a glue trap, where every attempt by the mouse to make things better will actually make things worse, where only an external saviour can help, and we can imagine an external saviour, a sort-of Mighty Mouse version of Johnson or Matt. It is harder to imagine, but true, that there never ever was any meaningful concept of ‘better’ or ‘worse’, nor ever a concept of suffering or kindness or cruelty. After all, the mouse is bad, for example, it is vermin carrying disease and needs to be discarded. These words, ‘better’ or ‘worse’ conveyed local contextual meaning which had meant different things to different people in different contexts and communities in nature. The meanings were consistent, not in the sense that they could be universally agreed (we all hate mice etc), but rather there was a conditional type of local invariance which could be learned and understood from the perspective of each social actor in each social and environmental context, as that person’s life transformed along with the social context transforming in a natural setting, in nature, as part of the eternal transformations of nature which are and always will be outside human comprehension.

Things which people said during the criminal trials can seem to us limited, poorly advised and meaningless, which is why they are instructive as examples, but because a criminal verdict is just a single bit of information, they are examples like a mouse in a glue trap, where rescue is theoretically possible, where there is someone like Matt or Johnson who has a scientific education and might be prepared to reach in and rescue the mouse. In the real world, in nature as it is perishing, there is no hierarchy. There is no great thinker. Each scientific description of individual thought, each religious notion of a soul inheriting meaning from a universe, has failed immediately. Physics tried to describe Brownian motion with continuous paths, while Heisenberg noticed, because anything meaningful is detected in finitely many measurements, continuity cannot have any real-world manifestation. Poincare tried to envision quasi-Riemann beings with contrivances to understand Euclidean space, while Feynman noticed such general relativity wouln’t even describe easy familiar things like the reduction of gravity due to the earth spinning once (more correctly 1.0027 times) per day, without an odd conjectural connection with stars — though a modern interpretation might ask about consistency of a rigid geometry among cells of the actual living cortex. It was linguistics rather than science which could give meaningful descriptions, never about thought, if there even is such a thing, rather about biological expressions, about relations among living things, about language in its not-so-special role as one such expression.

The only person here who has not yet had their apology from me is the unnamed misguided lawyer and therapist, and here I go then. One thing to notice in this whole analysis is that, if we're sure that tech issues hadn't perforated the sequester — postponing the jury's unifying moment until after the trial, and if Amendola hadn’t been mislead by the press release to decide not to call the defendant as a witness, no action by that team would have affected the Sandusky verdict. Seeing all these cooking programs on TV these days, what that lawyer reminds me of, in a kitchen of busy professional chefs, is one guy who is standing there a bit in the way, who tries maybe a dozen times to place the roast cauliflower into the dishwasher, but fortunately doesn’t know how to turn it on; people saying please get out of the way, or, where is the roast cauliflower? Look in the dishwasher. Gosh, not again! It is just a situation of a nice guy being out of their depth in that particular kitchen. Some university insurers had their funding get wasted, they say a hundred million (correction, only 31,900,000.00 for this particular lawyer [55], thanks to Frank Parlato for that information, also for most of the ideas and rigorous primary documents I’m relying on in the whole article). Then some premiums would have increased as a result. And it may have done some good; Sandusky recently said all the attention on child abuse (not the fault of the misguided lawyer), misguided though it it is, may have prevented some child abuse, though even that may be doubtful. Matt’s involvement with survivor groups may have been very effectively charitable, both in helping people recover from past abuse, and may have clued some people into verifying whether they may have had misguided suspicions about an innocent dad, granddad, uncle or religious guy, may have in some cases prevented heartbreak and isolation or the type of imprisonment that happened to Sandusky himself, which might not have been prevented if Matt hadn’t had examples of how well-intentioned thinking often does go wrong.

When I promised to come back to the issue of genetic variability and government policy, what I had wanted to say is, just as I said in part I that consequences of a technologically-informed decision because they include possibilities not precedented during the significant time of evolution would depend on an impossibility of a few minds encompassing all of nature in one cognitive model: that is what has happened in Britain regarding the comprehension of the environment.

One little hopeful sign is, a manager in the Highways agency pushed through what I could call a policy of “laissez-faire” or “just say no” for roadside verges everywhere in Britain. He managed to overrule objections that natural plants impede visibility. When he was interviewed, it turns out that his notion of leaving areas un-cleared was not because of his relation with any general principle, but because he’d had particular species planted. He was old, he somehow thought that most of the verges comprised things he’d been responsible for. By then, the whole British public had seen for all the seasons of three or four years, a first clue of something many of them perhaps had never seen in their lives, a sweeping, unpredictable, changing rhythm, epic vistas, of variation in nature.

Roadside verges no longer cleared

And although an algorithmically selected “wildflower mix” looks less regimented than floral displays would have been, some British people may have noticed over the next four or five years and over the distances they travel, a sense of something more meaningful than a wildflower mix. Although doomed by the proximity with roads and meaningless as a habitat, still a sense of a meaning of nature being not entirely decorative, not entirely recreational for them.

And I am not claiming that people have been blind, uncaring or uninsightful about the limitations. Inevitably, we can only think like the highways agency manager. The damage by proximity to roads, including acid rain, was mitigated by the good science of catalytic convertors but only over decades where the necessary consequence of evolutionarily unprecedented choices, which is inconsistency among our own wishes, manifested in what were then imperceptible things like the conversion of villages into highway rest stops, road salt, road kill, culverts, runoff and CO₂ levels becoming entrenched. Human cognition, as one function of people roaming nomadically or living in clans, even with all its variability in nature with wind and sunlight, storms, all the diverse plants and animals, and even with what we know as free conscious choice, it is such that the faculty for cognition, the biological brain, as a natural product of evolution is something which, considered in isolation, is just extremely simple. The long-term accumulation of human activity was not ever encompassed in one brain, or in the minds of a clan or group of people, not in any way that can be consciously understood. It is only in symbiosis with all of nature that human thought had ever made any sense at all.

References.

1. Transcription of recording of Calhoun interview submitted for 2016 appeal.
2. Cleland summing up, transcript of 2012 trial.
3. Shoo Lee press conference, London, February 2025
4. The lead investigator Sassano was a narcotics agent. Pendergrast’s Big Trial article describes Struble having arrested for marijuana making a plea deal to testify against other dealers, that Struble’s first contact regarding Sandusky was with cpl Leiter, Struble didn’t remember abuse, Leiter advised him to make contact as soon as his memories of abuse arrive. I remember a more full account of a Pendergrast interview with a witness who said when he first gave Sandusky’s name he in trouble being questioned about drug dealing near a school.
5. Trial testimony, Rittmeyer said hands never touhed genitals and this is perhaps because holding hands curtailed the possibility.
6. Trial testimony, Konstas is the case where Sandusky was originally cleared, in the 2012 trial no evidence of abuse was presented but the existing evidence was reinterpreted as grooming for possible future abuse.
7. McQueary’s testimony for the preliminary perjury hearing of Curley and Schultz.
8. Letby trial testimony.
9. Chambers’ testimony for Thirlwall expertly supported by the barrister.
10. Sandusky 2012 trial testimony.
11. Same.
12. Same.
13. Same.
14. Sandusky 2012 trial, McGettigan’s summing-up.
15. Letby trial testimony.
16. Letby trial cross-examination.
17. Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959
18. C. Van Tulleken, A. Roberts, Royal Institution Christmas lecture 2024
19. Pulitzer organization, local reporting prize 2012
20. Bleacher Report, March 3, 2015, My perpetrator walked into my room the next day, and the very first thing he said to me was, ‘You can’t even kill yourself right.’” versus Syracuse.com 1 April 2016 “He woke up in a hospital bed to find Jerry Sandusky there. ‘You couldn’t even kill yourself right,’ Matt Sandusky remembers his abuser saying.”
21. Framing Paterno website
22. “ The look on his face... no real emotion, just kind of accepting...you know, because he knew it was true,”, juror Josh Harper, NBC interview June 2012, and “ He knew it was true, it made me confident that we made the right decision ”, NY Times, June 23, 2012
23. Framing Paterno website.
24. same
25. same
26. Jerry Sandusky appeal filed March 2023
27. Thirlwall inquiry, Jayaram’s testimony.
28. Shoo Lee press conference 2024
29. REPORT TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL ON THE INVESTIGATION OF GERALD A. SANDUSKY, G. Moulton, May 30, 2014.
30. The same report mentions that in November 2008 Aaron made only non-sexual claims while Gillum introduces sexual terminology. Aaron’s mother Dawn contacts Eshbach repeatedly including in October 2010 to say that internet postings suggest Sandusky is a molester but still no second accuser is found. Eshbach emails Fina in November 2010 to mention that reporters knocked on Dawn’s door and that Dawn “denied any knowledge.” In August 2010 Eshbach mentions in an email that Dawn has contacted her four times. No second accuser was found by August 2011 and the Silent No More ghostwriter quotes Gillum quoting Aaron in a meeting that month including Eshbach and Dawn saying with Aaron saying“I’m out” and that he is going to withdraw his testimony.
31. same
32. NBC 10 news report of WCAU-TV Philadelphia interview by Luan Cahn, McLaughlin says “In my view, in my experience as 30 years as a lawyer, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and there’s a whole hell of a lot of smoke surrounding Jerry Sandusky right now.”
33. One source for this is Ganim’s report after Sandusky’s guilty verdict, Dawn is in a car and pulls over and mentions she still doesn’t know what Sandusky may or may not have done to Aaron.
34. Sandusky trial transcript.
35. CNN, Ann O’Neil, October 13, 2012
36. Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering Baby C based on evidence from a day when she wasn’t on shift, Medium.com, “By falling into a feedback loop of their own reports...” author TriedByStats
37. NBC news report, N. Morales, November 22, 2011
38. Pennsylvania Attorney General Exposed 1000s of Pornographic, Racist Government Emails But Now Faces Her Own Scandal, ABC News, June 22, 2016
39. Four arguments for the elimination of television, G. Mander, 1978
40. Where do I sit, Peter Cook and Spike Milligan comedy show, 1971, received complaint by Whitehouse and later was cancelled.
41. Chambers and Seasock reports.
42. One reference is “Nazi Germany 1933-1939” on MyJewishLearning.com, it mentions that in 1933 Jehovas Witnesses were killed and their children sent to orphanages. I think I’ve seen similar stories regarding all persecuted groups and that a self-justification for changing such policies and sending children with the parents was believed to be humanitarian from the Nazi perspective.
43. Framing Paterno website
44. JS Bach, Passion of St John
45. “I was part of the panel that reviewed the Lucy Letby case. I believe that the trial was fundamentally flawed”, N. Modi, Guardian, 23 February 2025
46. Press conference, 1 Great George Street, 4 February 2025, including Shoo Lee, Neena Modi, Sir David Davis
47. A. Fisher, Silent No More, page 194
48. Josh Fravel, interview with J Ziegler uploaded on 2 May, 2015
49. Transcript, McQueary testimony in preliminary Curley and Schultz perjury hearing, 16 December, 2011
50. Transcript, Sandusky trial, 6 June, 2012
51. Lawyer interview with S. Sinisi Exhibit B page 013 in Amended Motion for New Trial CP-14-0002421-2011
52. Page 10. of Exhibit B of CP-14-0002421-2011
53. Page 22. of exhibit B of CP-14-0002421-2011
54. Some quotes from Silent No More are, “My mom said she didn’t understand why Jerry was acting that way... Jerry told her he needed me to schedule time with him. He also said that he was paying me for some odd jobs and I was being irresponsible ... Jerry just kept screaming at me. ”
55. Frank Parlato, False Recovered Memories At the Root of Sandusky Conviction — and Nobody Challenged the Junk Science, April 8, 2025