Reflections
Lucia de Berk is a Dutch nurse who has spent six years of a life sentence in jail for murdering seven people in a killing spree that never happened. She will hear about her appeal on Wednesday, and there is now little doubt that she will be cleared. The statistical errors in the evidence against her were so crass that they can be explained in one newspaper column. So will the people who jailed her apologise? – Read more
Richard D Gill has written a lot about the fiasco:
- Elementary statistics on trial (one in twenty-five innocent nurses go to jail (joint with P. Groeneboom; preliminary version)
- On the (ab)use of statistics in the legal case against the nurse Lucia de B, preprint at arXiv.org/math.ST/0607340, final version published (with discussion by David Lucy) in Law, Probability and Risk, 2007, joint with Marieke Collins, Michiel van Lambalgen, Ronald Meester.
- Lucia talk at Vierhouten hackers conferencee Lies damned lies and legal truths
- Astin day presentation: a story in a story Statistics and Ethics (Dutch outside, English inside)
- Lies, damned lies, and legal truths (2009), prepublication
- Remarks on the Lucia data – why the numbers keep changing (2009)