this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
27 points (96.6% liked)

United Kingdom

4108 readers
155 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Archive link here: https://archive.ph/mwFp9

Is the Royal Statistical Society debasing itself by pouring doubt on our judicial system, or is there something to it?

top 6 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] PrettyFlyForAFatGuy 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Her conviction has never sat right with me.

[–] ladel 4 points 2 months ago

Same here. I don't know that she's innocent, but there didn't seem to be any hard evidence. It's terrible for the parents to have this certainty over the deaths taken away, but I expect it will get overturned eventually.

[–] Streetlights@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

It's uncanny how much of it exactly mirrors what happened to Lucia De Berk.

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This article doesn't explain exactly why the statistical anomaly should be inadmissable in court. She was a common denominator in being on shift when a large number of infants died on the ward. From my understanding of the case too, various colleagues had been raising suspicions about her for several years; one consultant testified that he walked in on her standing over a baby that was in medical distress while only watching and not taking any actions to assist it. I think there were unexplained results in the autopsies too.

It seems reasonable to have the shift rota as one part of the case against her given that it was more like corroborating evidence instead of the centerpiece for the prosecution.

[–] Streetlights@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This article doesn't explain exactly why the statistical anomaly should be inadmissable in court.

Were they asking for it to be inadmissible? My take was the RSS are implying the court allowed the jury to be misled as to its significance by not having a statistician on hand to explain it. It's almost an exact replay of what happened in the Lucia De Berk case, later overturned and since described as "the greatest miscarriage of justice" in the Netherlands. Worth a read if you're interested.

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I think the subtext of it was that she could have been a victim of a miscarriage of justice if this one piece of evidence was invalidated. However from reading about the case it just seems like on piece of circumstantial evidence as opposed to the lynchpin for the case.