Question
In 1999 in Great Britain, Sally Clark was convicted of murdering her two sons after each child died weeks after birth (the first in 1996,
In 1999 in Great Britain, Sally Clark was convicted of murdering her two sons after each child died weeks after birth (the first in 1996, the second in 1998). Her conviction was largely based on the testimony of the pediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow. He claimed that, for an affluent non-smoking family like the Clarks, the probability of a single cot death (SIDS) was 1 in 8543, so the probability of two cot deaths in the same family was around 1 in 73 million. Given that there are around 700,000 live births in Britain each year, Meadow argued that a double cot death would be expected to occur once every hundred years. Finally, he reasoned that given this vanishingly small rate, the far more likely scenario is that Sally Clark murdered her children. Carefully explain at least two errors in Meadows argument.
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