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Abstract:
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Last year, a group of three judicial "wise men" in the Netherlands finally settled the fate of a very unlucky nurse, Lucia de Berk, who was serving a life sentence for murder and attempted murder. Lucia was in prison, mostly because of human susceptibility to mathematical error, and our collective weakness for rushing to conclusions. When a court first convicted her, the evidence seemed compelling. Investigators looked into a series of "suspicious" deaths or near deaths in hospital wards where de Berk had worked from 1999 to 2001, and found that Lucia had been physically present when many of them took place. The odds were only 1 in 342 million that it could have been mere coincidence. Later, a number of Dutch scientists argued convincingly that the figure was incorrect and worse, irrelevant to the proceedings. This story will be discussed by author Mark Buchanan in his presentation.
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