The Mathematical Murder of Innocence by Michael Carter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Michael Carter’s The Mathematical Murder of Innocence is an important book. It is based on an actual miscarriage of justice in which a woman who had to of her children die of SIDS was convicted of murder due to fallacious statistical evidence given at her trial. Carter uses his novel to demonstrate why such evidence is flawed, which is most definitely a public service.
However, the novel has several failings. Perhaps the greatest one is the vehicle of a having a juror cross-examine an expert witness at trial. Despite the justifications given in the novel, this would never happen in reality. And it’s unnecessary. The protagonist could have easily been a defense attorney himself, or someone who was in the courtroom for another reason who heard the expert’s flawed testimony and went to the defense about it, or an expert witness hired by the defense to refute the prosecution’s witness. The other major flaw was the protracted nature of some of the courtroom arguments. While accurate, they tended to turn the book from a novel to a set of lecture notes or a textbook, robbing the story on much dramatic character.
However, even with these flaws, the book is eminently worth reading as an example of how probabilistic arguments may be misapplied to affect public policy or even personal freedom.
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