I can’t find it now either, but I’ve read about a German doctor convicted as a serial killer solely because she was present at the deaths of too many patients. In that case she was present at the death of every patient for like 3 months, which sounds like strong evidence against her. Until you think about it and realize that if she murdered them, that means no one died of natural causes for 3 months. Also in that case the number of deaths on the ward actually went up after she was arrested.
Similar but not to do with doctors, Sally Clarke was wrongly convicted of killing her children, purely because both of them had died of SIDS. The prosecution said SIDS is rare and so it happening twice was impossible. What’s worrying about that case is, everyone now says the miscarriage of justice was that the prosecutor incorrectly calculated the chances of two children dying of SIDS, when the actual fallacy was using the statistics as evidence at all. 1 in 73 million is the chance that one specific child will die of SIDS. The chance that any child will die of SIDS is 100%! 200 die in the UK every year! You can’t just go around arresting every parent on the basis that they were unlucky!
What’s really missing in everything I’ve seen is an actual statistical analysis. Everything I’ve seen is just “She was present at 20 deaths, when her colleagues were only present at 10”. Yeah, but how unlikely is that? How many nurses per year will be in exactly the same situation in the UK, or in the world? How unusual was the number of deaths in that hospital while there was supposedly a serial killer operating, versus a normal year?
Its frustrating that most people seem to just see that she was present at 20 cases and terminate their thinking at that. To me, that’s not enough proof to convict. I wonder, for example, how many infants died at places she worked, where she wasn’t present? An analysis by someone with all the numbers, of the probability of this happening, would be really crucial, I think. Are there any other nurses in the UK who have been on shift for a similar number of infant deaths in a similar timespan? Should we try them for murder too?
I’m not sure about this because I’m too busy to dig into it properly and the information isn’t available readily, but I think the injection of insulin is provable, i.e. you can tell post mortem that an insulin injection was given, which is murder
I can’t find it now either, but I’ve read about a German doctor convicted as a serial killer solely because she was present at the deaths of too many patients. In that case she was present at the death of every patient for like 3 months, which sounds like strong evidence against her. Until you think about it and realize that if she murdered them, that means no one died of natural causes for 3 months. Also in that case the number of deaths on the ward actually went up after she was arrested.
Similar but not to do with doctors, Sally Clarke was wrongly convicted of killing her children, purely because both of them had died of SIDS. The prosecution said SIDS is rare and so it happening twice was impossible. What’s worrying about that case is, everyone now says the miscarriage of justice was that the prosecutor incorrectly calculated the chances of two children dying of SIDS, when the actual fallacy was using the statistics as evidence at all. 1 in 73 million is the chance that one specific child will die of SIDS. The chance that any child will die of SIDS is 100%! 200 die in the UK every year! You can’t just go around arresting every parent on the basis that they were unlucky!
What’s really missing in everything I’ve seen is an actual statistical analysis. Everything I’ve seen is just “She was present at 20 deaths, when her colleagues were only present at 10”. Yeah, but how unlikely is that? How many nurses per year will be in exactly the same situation in the UK, or in the world? How unusual was the number of deaths in that hospital while there was supposedly a serial killer operating, versus a normal year?
Its frustrating that most people seem to just see that she was present at 20 cases and terminate their thinking at that. To me, that’s not enough proof to convict. I wonder, for example, how many infants died at places she worked, where she wasn’t present? An analysis by someone with all the numbers, of the probability of this happening, would be really crucial, I think. Are there any other nurses in the UK who have been on shift for a similar number of infant deaths in a similar timespan? Should we try them for murder too?
I’m not sure about this because I’m too busy to dig into it properly and the information isn’t available readily, but I think the injection of insulin is provable, i.e. you can tell post mortem that an insulin injection was given, which is murder