Why

Appendix A. Notes

Chapter 1. Beginnings

¹ The statistic Meadow used can be found in Fleming et al.(2000). For Meadow’s commentary on his use of that statistic, see Meadow (2002).

² Meadow, who used the number in his testimony, was later found guilty of professional misconduct and struck off the medical register, making him unable to practice (though he was later reinstated on appeal).

³ See Thompson and Schumann (1987). Another famous example is the case of Lucia de Berk, a nurse in the Netherlands who, like Clark, was wrongly convicted before later being exonerated. De Berk cared for a number of patients who died unexpectedly, and an expert witness calculated the odds of that occurring by chance alone as 1 in 342 million. For more on Lucia de Berk’s case, see Buchanan (2007). As in Clark’s case, this figure was equated to the odds of de Berk being innocent, with the prosecution arguing that it was such a remote possibility that it must be false.

⁴ It should be noted that SIDS is only one possible cause of what’s called SUDI (sudden unexpected death in infancy). In fact, in Clark’s case there was key evidence showing that one child had a bacterial infection that could have been deadly. However, this evidence was not disclosed by the pathologist (he too was later found guilty of serious professional misconduct and banned from practice for a period of three years).

⁵ Aristotle’s discussion of causality can be found in Aristotle (1924, 1936). For an introduction to causality in ...