18
Feb
2007
Sally Clark and the appalling cost of bad science
Last week’s news of the death of Sally Clark, who suffered the most awful injustice a mother could imagine, brought back all the anger. The case illustrated our poor ability to reason using probabilities. Sally’s fate was sealed not by an expert in statistics but by a paediatrician who used statistics outside his abilities and by a judicial system that failed to question the statistics, the reasoning applied to them and the implications for due process.
read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler