May 2012 Archives
Mon May 7 12:20:35 EEST 2012
...And justice for all
Wikipedia on
Prosecutor's fallacy
The prosecutor's fallacy is a fallacy of statistical reasoning made in law. In this fallacy the context in which the accused has been brought to court is falsely assumed to be irrelevant to judging how confident a jury can be in evidence against them with a statistical measure of doubt.
The Sally Clark case
Sally Clark, a British woman who was accused in 1998 of having killed her first child at 11 weeks of age, then conceived another child and allegedly killed it at 8 weeks of age. The prosecution had expert witness Sir Roy Meadow testify that the probability of two children in the same family dying from SIDS is about 1 in 73 million.
Mrs. Clark was convicted in 1999, resulting in a press release by the Royal Statistical Society which pointed out the mistakes
A higher court later quashed Sally Clark's conviction, on other grounds, on 29 January 2003. However, Sally Clark, a practising solicitor before the conviction, developed a number of serious psychiatric problems including serious alcohol dependency and died in 2007