“There was a vain and ambitious hospital director. A bad statistician. ..There were good medics and bad medics, good nurses and bad nurses, good cops and bad cops … Apparently, even some people in the Public Prosecution service found the witch hunt deeply disturbing.”
This is how Richard Gill, statistician at Leiden University, describes a feature film (Lucia de B.) just released about the case of Lucia de Berk, a nurse found guilty of several murders based largely on statistics. Gill is widely-known (among other things) for showing the flawed statistical analysis used to convict her, which ultimately led (after Gill’s tireless efforts) to her conviction being revoked. (I hope they translate the film into English.) In a recent e-mail Gill writes:
“The Dutch are going into an orgy of feel-good tear-jerking sentimentality as a movie comes out (the premiere is tonight) about the case. It will be a good movie, actually, but it only tells one side of the story. …When a jumbo jet goes down we find out what went wrong and prevent it from happening again. The Lucia case was a similar disaster. But no one even *knows* what went wrong. It can happen again tomorrow.
I spoke about it a couple of days ago at a TEDx event (Flanders).
You can find some p-values in my slides ["Murder by Numbers", pasted below the video]. They were important – first in convicting Lucia, later in getting her a fair re-trial.”
Since it’s Saturday night, let’s watch Gill’s TEDx talk, “Statistical Error in court”.
Slides from the Talk: “Murder by Numbers”:
Filed under: junk science, P-values, PhilStatLaw, science communication, Statistics Tagged: Richard Gill
