Hacker News Reader

Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

I suppose, but it wouldn't be the first time a judge or jury was swayed by dubious statistics.

At least that is exactly what happened to Lucia de B [1] (which they mention in the article), which at first glance looks eerily similar.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk

View on HN

Please; write 'Lucia de Berk', not 'Lucia de B'. She was exonerated in full, and has since indicated quite clearly that she wishes to be known under her full name, not the initialized suspect name.

Oh, seems I got that exactly the wrong way around. I was a bit on the fence about it, and figured not using her real name was the safest option.

However if Lucia de Berk herself wishes people to use her full name then that is a very noble decision. The edit window has passed unfortunately, but I will use her full name in future.

The difference is that statistics were used in de Berk's prosecution, but were not used in Letby's prosecution.

Just implicitly assuming that something couldn't have been chance is just trying to do statistics on pure intuition, which is notoriously difficult.

Though unlike the Lucia de B case it doesn't seem likely these deaths could all have been natural. The evidence pointing towards Letby seems mostly probalistic in nature though, which should be treated carefully.

Woa, careful. That's not true. The staff duty roster was used by the prosecution to argue that Lucy Letby "the common denominator" in all the suspicious deaths:

Chief among these was the duty roster spreadsheet showing staff shifts, through which the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was "able to show the jury that Letby was the one common denominator in the series of deaths and sudden collapses on the neonatal unit".

https://theweek.com/law/lucy-letby-and-the-importance-of-und...

That is totally statistical information - even though it's, shall we say, lay statistics and not what you'd expect to see from a statistician.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com