Exercise

Exercise 5 - Misuse of Statistics in the Courts

After Sally Clark was found guilty, the Royal Statistical Society issued a statement saying that there was "no statistical basis" for the expert's claim. They expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts". Eventually, Sally Clark was acquitted in June 2003.

In addition to misusing the multiplicative rule as we saw earlier, what else did Sir Meadow miss?

Instructions

50 XP

Possible answers

He made an arithmetic error in forgetting to divide by the rate of SIDS in siblings.

He did not take into account how rare it is for a mother to murder her children.

He mixed up the numerator and denominator of Bayes' rule.

He did not take into account murder rates in the population.