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Fighting murder convictions that rest on shoddy stats
- discretion22 4y agoThe currently ongoing UK trial of Nurse Lucy Letby has made a number of such statistical claims plus other allegations. Is this article submitted because of this or is it (also) co-incidence?
- OldManAndTheCpp 4y agoYes, that seems to be a consideration. From the article: In a report peer reviewed and distributed by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) in September 2022, Gill and colleagues detailed the statistical missteps in past medical murder trials and made recommendations for how legal systems can do better. Gill hopes the report will help with the case of another British nurse, Lucy Letby, who is now on trial for the alleged murder of seven babies and attempted murder of 10 more in a neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
- extasia 4y agoI thought Lucy letby literally had a confession note at her house? [0] It seems this was in fact the case. I agree with your broader point however. 0. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/lucy-letby-nurse-note-picture-b2202448.html?amp https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/lucy-letby-nurse...
- lazyasciiart 4y agoI don't know anything about her, but that suicide note also says "I haven't done anything wrong", which indicates at best confusion on her part.
- h0l0cube 4y agoHow tragic would it be if someone’s deep empathic nature made them feel personally responsible for a death beyond their control – to the point of suicidal ideation - and was then imprisoned for it?
- eyelidlessness 4y agoToo common and too tragic.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoThere was a case in the Netherlands in which they got a nurse to confess to a killing spree. Unfortunately it is impossible to explain to people that a confession is meaningless.
- api 4y agoGood investigators withhold details about a crime from the public mostly to filter out false confessions. This speaks to the fact that false confessions are common enough to make filtering techniques common practice.
- Eleison23 4y agoThat's not the only goal. This also reduces the effectiveness of copycat crimes, and differentiates any would-be copycats from the original. Also, it enhances the ability of authorities to receive and authenticate tips from the general public. In fact, in a high-profile case, it's common practice to deliberately plant misinformation in the form of slight immaterial errors, for many of the same purposes.
- smolder 4y agoCan you stop writing these garbage GPT comments, please? No one wants to waste time reading this shit.
- 4y ago
- chrischen 4y agoAssuming those kids did die in her care the notes do sound like anguish rather than guilt.
- Nextgrid 4y agoThat sounds like a troubled, mentally unwell person? Let’s say someone who’s mentally unwell wrote notes to confess to crimes, is it enough to convict them based on that evidence alone? And if so, should it be?
- aidenn0 4y agoIn the US, at least, a confession is always considered sufficient evidence. It probably shouldn't be, since interrogators have managed to get people to confess to crimes that evidence was later found to exonerate.
- public_defender 4y agoThis is not true. Many states have what is called a corpus delicti rule, which requires that a confession be corroborated by other evidence in order to sustain a conviction. I am inclined to assert that this is actually the law in most US states, but I haven't researched it.
- watwut 4y agoThe other evidence can be quite weak. And fairly often it is pseudoscience.
- public_defender 4y agoOf course I agree with that. It's not an argument for relying more heavily on confession "evidence."
- aidenn0 4y agoIANAL, but I thought corpus delicti only means there needs to be evidence that the crime has been committed, not that the crime has been committed by the person confessing to it. So if they find a body with multiple stab wounds and I go in and say I stabbed the person, I can be convicted. If I say I murdered Audrey Farber, and the police can't even find a record of an Audrey Farber gone missing, then I can't be convicted because there's no evidence than an Audrey Farber was murdered at all.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago>> Is this article submitted because of this or is it (also) co-incidence? The submission on HN is coincidence. I don't know about the publication of the article.
- exabrial 4y agoMan, every time a prosecutor gets a case overturned, they themselves need to be put on trial. Was was their motive? Did they ignore evidence? Dig deep into why they tried so hard to get an innocent person behind bars.
- irishloop 4y agoIt is literally their job
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoJust following orders?
- jonny_eh 4y agoChoosing to not press a case is also part of their job.
- lelanthran 4y ago> It is literally their job A job which also includes prosecutorial discretion. IOW, it's also literally their job to decide which cases to pursue and which to drop.
- _fat_santa 4y agoThe rabbit hole of wrongful convictions goes deep but long story short there are a number of reasons, most of which is "tunnel vision", that is when a prosecutor or detective gets a lead, they will often ignore other evidence in favor of that lead. It's less about dirty prosecutors and more about how psychology and our brains work. I would highly suggest listening to a couple of episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom[1] and check out the Innocence Project[2], both are fantastic for getting into the world of wrongful convictions. [1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wrongful-conviction/id1151670380 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wrongful-conviction/id... [2]: https://innocenceproject.org https://innocenceproject.org
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
- gronky_ 4y agoI want to see a serious statistician look at the Hans Niemann chess cheating case. There could very well be similar bias and shoddy statistics at play there
- AmericanChopper 4y agoWhich case? The multiple instances of cheating he has confessed to? Or the one that he denies?
- czx4f4bd 4y agoHe confessed to cheating online, not over the board. People have used shoddy statistics to allege that he cheated over the board, but none of them have held up under scrutiny. I'm not saying the guy is a saint, but low-effort cheating in low-stakes online games by looking at an engine in the background seems substantially different than what would be required to cheat completely undetectably in major tournaments with many people watching.
- fsckboy 4y agobut in the same sense those two things seem substantially different, the trajectory of his late blooming career success is also substantially different from that of just about everybody else playing and also calls out for explanation.
- kennyloginz 4y agoThis idea has spread far, but isn’t true. Even the chess.com report shows that his trajectory was not much different than other juniors.
- harimau777 4y agoThat seems like a "lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas" situation. If someone doesn't want to be accused of cheating in a high-stakes game then they shouldn't cheat in a low-stakes game.
- yieldcrv 4y agoI find something similar with relationships People aren’t willing to acknowledge the high probability that someone just had a string of bad partners
- lelanthran 4y ago> People aren’t willing to acknowledge the high probability that someone just had a string of bad partners Nonsense. Choosing a partner is not a random event, like drawing a card from a deck, or spinning a roulette wheel. The odds are very much against "poor guy/gal had 10 boyfriends/girlfriends in the last 10 years, all of whom turned out to be meth-heads" being a random event. In relationships, what is true most of the time (the odds on) is that a string of bad relationships for a man/woman has one common factor - that man/woman.
- yieldcrv 4y agoyeah sure but two or three in a row occupying a half a decade or more of time is very plausible
- lelanthran 4y ago> yeah sure but two or three in a row occupying a half a decade or more of time is very plausible Over 5 years? Two is not "a string of bad partners". Three meth-heads in a row is almost certainly NOT "very plausible" (probability approaching 1). The subject is almost certainly selecting for meth-heads. Three alcoholics in a row over 5 years is also not "very plausible", but it is at least somewhat plausible - alcohol addiction can be hidden very well from someone you don't live with. Three cheaters in a row (over 5 years) is maybe what I would consider to be approaching "very plausible". Even then, at around 20 months per relationship (the most optimistic way to have each relationship be long), you gotta wonder why the subject is choosing only players to date. Still looks like a selection bias on the subjects side. I guess what I'm trying to say is that your original assertion could not be any more wrong than it already is. Someone with a string of bad relationships most probably has a selection bias for certain traits in a partner which make them unsuitable as a partner.
- nequo 4y agoNot (directly) a murder case, but Mark Duggan and Steven Levitt's 2002 paper on match fixing in Japanese sumo is also interesting.[1] While the suspicion had lingered for a decade or two that sumo matches were rigged, the analysis of the paper precipitated a scandal years later that led to the cancellation of a sumo tournament in 2011, and the expelling of 23 wrestlers.[2] [1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mgduggan/Research/MD_Levitt_2002.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~mgduggan/Research/MD_Levitt_2002.p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match-fixing_in_professional_sumo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match-fixing_in_professional_s...
- downwithdisease 4y agoThere is a tendency by some to take a story like this one and insinuate that all prosecutions are wrongful ones and all prosecutors guilty of malpractice etc. Kudos to this article's authors or editors for acknowledging the reality that not all cases are "witch hunts" and that sometimes there are "real witches" (or real monsters I'd prefer to call them). For the sake of balance (in these comments), sadly some similar incidents have been very real and the wheels of justice very slow: https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/how-san-antonio-baby-killing-nurse-finally-got-justice/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/how-san-antonio-baby...
- jdthedisciple 4y agoVery good point. I also dislike the presupposition that since there was malpractice in one instance, one must assume the same in all others.
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoHopefully both "believe in science" folks and "I do my own research on substack" folks are paying attention. Science is really hard and, while government agencies can do a better job than amateur substack research, they still screw up on regular basis. For example, CDC carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be a total hogwash and ruined health of countless people. You should probably still follow mainstream recommendation, because one must follow something and alternatives are less reliable on average. But you have no right to force everyone into it or shush them up when they discuss other opinions.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> For example, CDC carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be a total hogwash and ruined health of countless people. I would guess that reality is closer to "the carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be total hogwash and had negligible impact because almost nobody cares what the government wants them to eat".
- jquery 4y agoYou have to include the fact that the pyramid, while being hogwash, was still better than the average American diet of fast food and candy. So it may have been a net positive overall despite being existing somewhere on the scale from heavily flawed to total nonsense.
- irthomasthomas 4y agoIt really wasn't. Just lookup a graph of obesity over time and see if you can spot when the low fat diet was implemented by the U.S. government. Spoiler: https://cms-static.wehaacdn.com/hoards-com/images/Obesity-1980-chart.13136.jpg https://cms-static.wehaacdn.com/hoards-com/images/Obesity-19...
- thaumasiotes 4y agoThey're close. But the pyramid is not significant enough to account for that much change. Other things happened in 1980 too. (Also, your graph doesn't show obesity, and the pre-pyramid 45% rate would already be alarmingly high if it was obesity, which it isn't.)
- Metacelsus 4y ago[flagged]
- egberts1 4y agoI feel for the many different types of forensic labs. These forensic labs have their own brand of "Never the twain shall meet" while they do blind analysis especially when the lead crime investigator has to clue them in ("fentanyl", in one case). When doing network-based forensic, just because a "ping" happened, doesn't mean that "causation equal correlation". Worse is the misuse of end-users' search history; a lone query made 7 years ago being used as a lead-in (but lone) evidence to a suspect's alleged behavior. Really? Or an innocuous Google Scholar watch doing a trapping of some suspected but heavily watched URL? One simple lab exercise of such forensic analysis is a reconstruction on the chaining of events given a set of evidence; it gets hilarious at times to see such "conspiratorial-like" theories. Now the world witness the continuing saga of misusage of statistics from the US FDA VARS database being flooding with death by COVID inoculants.
- atombender 4y agoShould have "(2022)" in the title. After reading the first three paragraphs, I realized I had read this a year ago. It's from the January 2022 issue of Science, despite the byline saying February 2023.
- jdthedisciple 4y agoVery interesting, but I do wonder some things: 1. Isn't 1 in 49 still hugely statistically significant and therefore suspicious? The probability of this happening by chance is still only 2% 2. What were De Berk's the "great secrets" and "secret compulsion"? Was there any other evidence presented against her besides the raw statistics? 3. In the case of Folbigg I just wonder: Why would she have so many kids if all she does in her diary is complain about their existence ... ??
- archi42 4y agoAd 1: That's a huge chance. Just imagine how many nurses there are in the closest hospital, and that each of them had a 2% chance for some unvaforable pattern.
- mindvirus 4y agoThey don't give enough detail in the article (Wikipedia has some more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk), but based on the chart I suspect it's something like this: Imagine someone goes to a casino, and play a game where you flip a coin 20 times in a row, and win if they're all heads. There's about a 1 in 1 million chance of flipping 20 heads - so people are suspicious that the person cheated. However, imagine that during that same time period, 10 million people played that game. Looking at that, you'd expect there to be 10 winners of the game. Suddenly it's not suspicious at all. So I think the argument is that this is the chance a nurse experienced this many deaths is 1 in 45 - so with 45 nurses, you'd expect one to experience it.
- Mirioron 4y agoTo add: there are over 4 million nurses in the US.
- meindnoch 4y ago>Isn't 1 in 49 still hugely statistically significant and therefore suspicious? The probability of this happening by chance is still only 2% 2% means a false positive for every 50 nurses.
- yellowapple 4y agoThe abuse of statistics aside, it's weird that the charges/convictions (at least as described in the article) jump straight to outright murder. Did prosecutors in these cases present any evidence demonstrating intent? If not, then do these legal systems not have concepts of negligence? Unintentional homicide/manslaughter? Incompetence? In any case, do these legal systems not presume innocence until actually proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? If not, then these cases seem like perfect case studies as to why said presumption of innocence is mandatory for a society to be considered free and just - and if they do presume innocence, then I'm baffled by how these cases not only resulted in convictions but upheld convictions given the abundance of reasonable doubt.