The Sally Clark Case: When Data Analysis Goes Badly Wrong.
A tragic tale of the misapplication of probability.
In today’s integrated and interconnected world, we are surrounded by data. Data is growing at quite an extraordinary rate and so much more is being collected to improve decisions regarding every facet of human life. In sports, retail, start-ups, governments and businesses, the reliance on data has never been more pronounced.
Given the degree to which we are beholden to and reliant on data, what happens, when we fail to interpret what’s been presented to us accurately?
Sally Clark.
In November 1999, Sally Clark became the greatest victim of the greatest miscarriage of justice in modern British history, when she was convicted of murdering her two infant children. The first child that she gave birth to died within a few weeks of birth in December 1996 and the other child died in similar circumstances in January 1998.
The prosecution relied on evidence provided by a pediatrician professor, who said that the chances of “two cot deaths” in an affluent family was 1 in 73,000,000. An event so rare, that the only conclusion that the prosecution came to was that Sally Clark was responsible for the deaths of her babies.