Dear all

Like many I have been following all the Meadow's cases (we have to call
them that) with increasing concern.

John Whittington has explained several good reasons to doubt even that a
crime has been committed, let alone who has committed it.

But I must say that the track record to date of supposed expert witnesses
that should have been challenged by Counsel for the Defence leads me to
question his suggestion that jury trials are less safe than those
conducted by experts.

Wasn't this exactly how these travesties occurred in the first place -
believing experts appointed on the basis of their knowledge?  And the
bigger the actor, the more likely they are to get a 'result'.

This is one of the many areas where lack of responsibility, logic and
numeracy among supposed professionals - very highly paid for their sins -
has not served society at all.  Shame on them.  I would rather trust my
fellow man and woman who may not be able to count too well but I hope has
rather more common sense.

John

John Logsdon                               "Try to make things as simple
Quantex Research Ltd, Manchester UK         as possible but not simpler"
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+44(0)161 445 4951/G:+44(0)7768982349       www.quantex-research.com


On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, John Whittington wrote:

> At 13:58 20/01/04 +0000, Robert Moore wrote:
>
> >I have not followed the minutiae of the case decided yesterday - but did it
> >depend solely on a misunderstanding of probability? Or have I (to coin a
> >phrase) misunderestimated the complexity of the case?
>
> Robert, I think this issue goes far deeper than the statistics.
>
> To my mind, the main issue is that in this case (and, I presume, many
> others like it) there is absolutely no 'physical' evidence that any crime
> has been committed by anyone, let alone the person accused.  Autopsy not
> only failed to determine a cause of death, but also failed to reveal any
> signs of any sort of 'foul play'.  Available medical science is therefore
> completely unable to assign any probability to, let alone draw any
> 'confident conclusion' about, the question of whether the deaths were
> 'natural' or 'unnatural'.
>
>  From that consideration alone (and, of course, in the absence of any other
> direct evidence {such as a witness'!} of any 'foul play' having been
> involved), I cannot see how any conviction could possibly be 'safe'
> ('beyond a reasonable doubt').  If there is considerable doubt as to
> whether any crime has been committed at all, there surely must be at least
> as much doubt as to whether a particular individual has committed the
> alleged (quite possibly non-existent) crime.
>
> There is obviously a desire to avoid a situation in which a person can 'get
> away with' committing 'a perfect crime' (i.e. one that leaves absolutely no
> evidence, even evidence that a crime has been committed) - but, in the
> final analysis, it is clearly (I would have thought!) 'unsafe', hence
> unacceptable, to merely 'guess' when there is absolutely no evidence.  This
> is, to my mind, in a different league from, say, convicting someone of
> murder when no body has been found.  In the SIDS cases, we DO have the
> bodies, and cannot derive from them any direct evidence that death was due
> to unnatural causes.  I doubt very much whether anyone would be convicted
> of murdering an adult if the victims body was available and showed no
> evidence of having died from unnatural causes, even if the actual cause of
> death was not apparent.
>
> As for the actual 'statistical issue', I think it goes a lot further than a
> mere misunderstanding/misinterpretation of the probabilities.  The stupid
> statistical claims (about the allegedly very low probability of one family
> suffering multiple cases of SIDS) were, of course, based on the
> very-probably-incorrect assumption that SIDS events are necessarily
> independent.  On the contrary, although we understand very little about
> this syndrome, there is every reason to suspect that there will probably be
> at least some families in which multiple episodes of sudden infant death
> are anything but independent - indeed, in the extreme case, some (hitherto
> undiscovered) genetic factor which renders it extremely probably that there
> will be further infant deaths after the first has occurred.
>
> However, that's merely a statement in statistical language of the
> problem.  What perhaps worries me most is that one really does not (should
> not) need to know anything about statistics to see the flaw in the
> argument; it's just 'common sense'.  Even if the jury somehow managed not
> to notice that, the judge surely should have done.
>
> One can think of countless possible analogies.  Using similar reasoning
> (and incorrect statistics), in the total absence of any direct evidence,
> one could convict someone of fraud/arson if their firework factory burned
> down two or three times over a period of time!
>
> The more I see and here of jury verdicts, the more I come to the conclusion
> that I would be extremely nervous if my fate was ever in the hands of '12
> good men and true'.  Great though the idea of juries is in theory, I think
> I would be far happier if my fate were in the hands of people who had been
> appointed on the basis of their ability and training to make sensible and
> rational judgements/ decisions.
>
> Kind Regards
>
>
> John
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
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