On the Role of Statistics in Miscarriages of Justice

I have been invited by Jon Robins (the Justice Gap) to speak today at the third meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice, hosted by Barry Sheerman MP, in the House of Commons. Jon Robins will be talking about his outstanding new book "Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Crisis in Our Justice System" at the event. The book includes a description of the Ben Geen case for which I provided a report to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2015 showing that the sequence of 'unusual events' at the Horton General Hospital (where Ben Geen worked as a nurse) was not especially unusual.

My short talk today focuses on the role of statistics in miscarriages of justice. A transcript of the talk can be found here.

Norman Fenton

See also

• Statistics of coincidence: Ben Geen case revisited
• Ben Geen: another possible case of miscarriage of justice and misunderstanding of statistics 
• Jon Robins, “Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Crisis in Our Justice System”. Biteback Publishing, 2018. ISBN 978-1-78590-369-4
• Fenton, N. E. (2018). On the Role of Statistics in Miscarriages of Justice. In 3rd Meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice. House of Commons, London 25 June 2018
• Review of the use of Bayes in the Law (pdf report)
• Barry George case: new insights on the evidence. 
• Sally Clark case: another statistical oversight