2007-04-08

Lucia de B.

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badscience - Losing the lottery

April 6th, 2007 at 11:14 pm (bad science, statistics)

Ben Goldacre
Saturday April 7, 2007
The Guardian

It is possible to be very unlucky indeed. A nurse called Lucia de Berk has been in prison for 5 years in Holland, convicted of 7 counts of murder and 3 of attempted murder. An unusually large number of people died when she was on shift, and that, essentially, along with some very weak circumstantial evidence, is the substance of the case against her. She has never confessed, but her trial has generated a small collection of theoretical papers in the statistics literature (below), and a major government enquiry will report on her sentence in the next few weeks. [...]