Here's a draft report I am writing for Sweeney's lawyers. It is all so awfully familiar...
Scientific Conclusions Following from Study of TNO “Experiments” and other “Scientific Evidence” in the Sweeney Case
Richard Gill
Faculty of Natural Sciences
Leiden University
30 May, 2007
Summary: the case must be reopened
Contents
1. Scientific judgements on key scientific evidence in the Sweeney case
2. Proviso
3. My credentials
4. Conclusion
1. Scientific judgements on key scientific evidence in the Sweeney case (especially concerning experimental design and interpretation of statistical evidence and probabilities)
* By the nature of their design, the TNO experiments bear no relevance whatsoever to the question whether or not the fire could have been caused accidentally since no experiments were done simulating the situation in which a fire was accidentally started by a smouldering cigarette unaided by deliberate application of large quantities of liquid fuel.
* The experiments are spectacularly badly designed for answering the question whether or not the fire could have been caused by arson since factors which surely have enormous influence on the course of a fire and the kind of damage it makes were not reproduced (temperature, humidity, ventilation, ....).
* The likely cause of death (CO poisoning) and the position and stance of the body are more consistent with a slowly smouldering fire which only “flashes” into a conflagration later, most probably after the victim was unconscious, than with a major fire started by igniting fuel.
* The fact that witnesses did not notice a raging fire, and the evidence of the time of fire alarms, is more consistent with the scenario of the defence, than with the scenario of a fire caused by deliberate ignition and rapid combustion of 8 l of fuel
* The fact that a witness reports having smelt a fire when questioned again, a year after the accident, but did not report this when questioned immediately after the fire, raises severe doubts into this witness’s reliability and the reliability of the method of interrogation used by police investigators
* The reports of the state of the jerry-can and other fuel containers strongly support the hypothesis that these containers, and especially the jerrycan, were open and empty when the fire started. Others were full and still sealed. This matches exactly the scenario in which a fire starts accidentally in a place where people had been recently been decorating.
* The fact that on autopsy, no trace whatsoever of flammable liquids were found in the body of the victim, further supports the hypothesis that large quantities of flammable liquids were simply not present, let alone deliberately used.
The defendant’s story concerning the likely course of events is completely consistent with all scientific evidence presented to the court with which I am so far familiar. I include here also the results of the TNO experiments.
The scientific evidence contradicts at vital points the scenario put forward by the prosecution. The TNO experiments are essentially irrelevant (they give no support for or against the prosecution’s scenario).
Since not many people murder their wives, while accidental fires (causing deaths) caused by smoking in bed, in particular in combination with drinking or emotional stress, are extremely common, and since Dutch police and public prosecutors have a well established track record of manipulating scientific evidence in order to secure a conviction once they are just a little bit confident that a conviction is possible, the balance of the probabilities points to Sweeney being completely innocent. Moreover, complex scientific evidence is habitually misinterpreted by scientific laymen and in particular by many lawyers and judges.
Since the defence has had three chances (though whether they were fair chances or not, is another issue) the burden of proof now lies, legally speaking, on the defendant. That is why I must emphasize that all the scientific evidence not only supports the case of the defendant, but also discredits the case of the prosecution. (The prosecution is now the “defendant”; Sweeney now has to show beyond reasonable doubt that the prosecution is guilty).
I hereby state that it is scientifically established, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the prosecution in this case is guilty, aided by the police investigation, and in collusion with incompetent and prejudiced “scientists” (employees of state supported “scientific research organisations”) of having misinterpreted and manipulated scientific evidence in order to mislead judges and force an unsafe conviction. To support my case I will mention that it is beyond reasonable scientific doubt that no one was murdered by anyone, let alone by Sweeney. This conclusion was long ago inescapable to any scientist prepared to look beyond the borders of his own narrow discipline and apply his or her scientific outlook and training also to the so-called scientific evidence presented by other witnesses, and in particular, to consider the mismatch between how that evidence has been put into the public domain by police investigators and other agents of the prosecution, and its actual content.
It is also evident to me that a British subject would have been bewildered by the conduct of the trial, which was against all reasonable Anglo-Saxon expectations. The defence were not given a fair opportunity to find decent contra-expertise while the prosecution has all the scientific institutions of the state at their disposal. It is now well documented that scientists in Dutch national “scientific” institutions are extraordinarily (from an Anglo-Saxon point of view) wary to criticise work by colleagues, and that they have a child-like faith in the integrity of the judicial procedures in this country. Experts I have spoken to knew very well that the evidence “from their field” which was presented at the trial was deeply flawed, but they had heard the “propaganda” from the prosecution concerning the strength of evidence of other kinds, as well as the gossip and rumours spread by the prosecution concerning his character, which made them believe that Sweeney was guilty anyway, so no need to get into trouble. “Divide and conquor”. The arrogance, self-righteousness, appalling ignorance, and paternalistic attitude of a board of Dutch judges has become legendary in recent years.
2. Proviso
At this point I have clearly not studied all the scientific material presented at the trial. I have studied the key items (the key items according to the judge’s own summing up). In that summing up I discern major errors of logical reasoning including the infamous “prosecutor’s fallacy”. From a decent, unprejudiced and intelligent person’s point of view, the conviction is evidently “unsafe”. In the Anglo-Saxon world (and I would like to say, the civilized world) this should be sufficient grounds for a re-trial, at the least.
3. My credentials
I am a scientist, mathematician, and statistician, with more than 30 years experience contributing to scientific research, analysis of observational data and experiments, and design of experiments, in engineering, medicine, biology, social sciences, language and literature, and psychology, among many other fields. I have large experience in evaluating and comparing scientific research proposals, applications for research positions, and submitted scientific papers, again across a multitude of disciplines. I am regularly asked to sit on evaluation committees for international, science-wide project application review committees, and scientific evaluations of departments or institutes (again, science wide). I have taught scientific method to non-scientists.
I was elected a fellow of the Institute of Physics though I am not a physicist, though I have collaborated with both experimental and theoretical physicsts. A paper of mine from 1982 contributed to a breakthrough in development of statistical methodology for clinical cancer trials and probably has saved hundreds if not thousands of lives through improvement in development of new cancer treatments. It is one of the most cited papers by a Dutch scientist. I became elected a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (I am the only mathematical statistician among the so-called “active” members, and one of only 10 mathematicians in the whole academy. Election is by the combined membership of the natural-sciences sections of the academy). I am currently president of the thousand-strong Dutch Society for Statistics and Operations Research, whose members include people working in industry, business, advertising, management; people who use statistics in biology, medicine, forensic science; as well as academics in all university faculties. My curriculum vitae and publication list are publicly available on my web site at Leiden University. I have published in the Proceedings of the US Academy of Sciences (this comes just after Nature and Science, in the usual rankings) on interpretation of results from experiments in quantum physics, designed to settle the still unresolved controversy between Einstein and Bohr. I have broad cultural interests (can, and do, read half a dozen languages). I am passionately interested in the role of science in society and I become passionate when confronted with abuse of science, whether in a good cause or a bad one. As is well known, the sciences of probability and statistics are especially prone to abuse and misunderstanding, though they are of crucial importance in modern society (finance, medicine, biology, physics, climatology).
Apart from this generalist background, I have deep understanding of the use and meaning of statistics in both experimental and observational studies, in logical reasoning and mathematical modelling, on the distinction between correlation and causation (I have published on causality and participated, on invitation, in multidisciplinary scientific conferences on causation).
4. Conclusion
The case must be reopened.
Richard D. Gill
Faculty of Natural Sciences
Leiden University
30 May, 2007
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Lies, damned lies, and legal truths
Lies, damned lies, and legal truths
If there’s one thing which makes me sick it’s having people always quote “Lies, damned lies and statistics” at me. Particularly if they are lawyers. Sometimes they refer to Mark Twain, sometimes to Disraeli. Well, Disraeli is apocryphal; Twain was actually misquoting the famous British Prime Minister George Canning who about 1820 said “you can prove everything with statistics except the truth”. (Canning was probably the best PM Britain ever had, but his term was one of the shortest, since he died “young” from a cold caught while at a funeral in the rain).
I have been looking for a long time for a counter “bon mot”. And I think I have found it. In the Lucia de Berk case, a Dutch judge said at the appeal (and she was not corrected by the supremum court, even though this strange fact was pointed out to its learned members) “it has been scientifically indisputably proven that ...". What this judge actually means is that, of half a dozen so-called scientific experts (one just needs “prof.dr” in front of your name and some professional activity which is vaguely related to the scientific field under issue; your “scientific” advice could have been based on a quick Google search the evening before) one could be found who said that it was their scientific opinion that ... It is quite irrelevant that five possibly better qualified experts thought that it was not scientifically proven at all.
My legal friends say that this is perfectly correct because, of course, notions of legal truth and legal facts are not the same as scientific truth and scientific facts. And, sorry, clearly not the same as man-in-the-street’s truth and fact. I guess this is why it takes so long to study to be a judge or a lawyer, and why lawyers have such big salaries and judges have a job for life.
The judge’s written summing-up, perhaps the longest in Dutch legal history, available on internet but fortunately for Netherland’s international reputation only in Dutch, is stuffed full of similar stupidities, but one can only know that they are stupidities, if one has access to the documents submitted by all the experts and “experts” at the trial, and they are obviously not public. One thing which highly amuses me is that a law professor with a hobby in PC’s (he gives Excel and Word courses to fellow lawyers) was an official expert in statistics and was able to confirm the validity of another “expert’s” statistical computations, a guy who quit statistics two years into his PhD programme, thirty years ago, and is now also a law professor. Of course these guys are very decent fellows who are able to explain their findings to other legal minds very well indeed.
Be that as it may, from now on I want to promote the quotation “lies, damned lies, and legal facts”. It would evidently be a legal fact that this was said by a well known British prime minister, if I (a professor in statistics) say so in a Dutch court. However, I have been heard to say to my friends that I am really worried that this country is in danger of becoming a banana-republic (nonsense – we don’t have widespread corruption yet, do we? Anyway, it’s a monarchy!). This means that I am a Danger to the State and will probably never be allowed to give expert evidence in a Dutch court.
I can tell you that it is now a scientific fact that “lies, damned lies, and legal truths” is a quotation by a well-known Anglo-Dutch scientist which correctly expresses the current state of the use of scientific evidence in Dutch law courts.
If there’s one thing which makes me sick it’s having people always quote “Lies, damned lies and statistics” at me. Particularly if they are lawyers. Sometimes they refer to Mark Twain, sometimes to Disraeli. Well, Disraeli is apocryphal; Twain was actually misquoting the famous British Prime Minister George Canning who about 1820 said “you can prove everything with statistics except the truth”. (Canning was probably the best PM Britain ever had, but his term was one of the shortest, since he died “young” from a cold caught while at a funeral in the rain).
I have been looking for a long time for a counter “bon mot”. And I think I have found it. In the Lucia de Berk case, a Dutch judge said at the appeal (and she was not corrected by the supremum court, even though this strange fact was pointed out to its learned members) “it has been scientifically indisputably proven that ...". What this judge actually means is that, of half a dozen so-called scientific experts (one just needs “prof.dr” in front of your name and some professional activity which is vaguely related to the scientific field under issue; your “scientific” advice could have been based on a quick Google search the evening before) one could be found who said that it was their scientific opinion that ... It is quite irrelevant that five possibly better qualified experts thought that it was not scientifically proven at all.
My legal friends say that this is perfectly correct because, of course, notions of legal truth and legal facts are not the same as scientific truth and scientific facts. And, sorry, clearly not the same as man-in-the-street’s truth and fact. I guess this is why it takes so long to study to be a judge or a lawyer, and why lawyers have such big salaries and judges have a job for life.
The judge’s written summing-up, perhaps the longest in Dutch legal history, available on internet but fortunately for Netherland’s international reputation only in Dutch, is stuffed full of similar stupidities, but one can only know that they are stupidities, if one has access to the documents submitted by all the experts and “experts” at the trial, and they are obviously not public. One thing which highly amuses me is that a law professor with a hobby in PC’s (he gives Excel and Word courses to fellow lawyers) was an official expert in statistics and was able to confirm the validity of another “expert’s” statistical computations, a guy who quit statistics two years into his PhD programme, thirty years ago, and is now also a law professor. Of course these guys are very decent fellows who are able to explain their findings to other legal minds very well indeed.
Be that as it may, from now on I want to promote the quotation “lies, damned lies, and legal facts”. It would evidently be a legal fact that this was said by a well known British prime minister, if I (a professor in statistics) say so in a Dutch court. However, I have been heard to say to my friends that I am really worried that this country is in danger of becoming a banana-republic (nonsense – we don’t have widespread corruption yet, do we? Anyway, it’s a monarchy!). This means that I am a Danger to the State and will probably never be allowed to give expert evidence in a Dutch court.
I can tell you that it is now a scientific fact that “lies, damned lies, and legal truths” is a quotation by a well-known Anglo-Dutch scientist which correctly expresses the current state of the use of scientific evidence in Dutch law courts.
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