A petition will be submitted to the Minister and to the Secretary of State for Justice, requesting an immediate reopening of the case of the nurse Lucia de B., on Friday 2 November at 11.00 a.m. in The Hague. Mrs. de B. was convicted for 7 alleged murders and 3 alleged attempts at hospitals in the Hague from 1997 to 2001. More than 80 eminent professors signed the petition, including almost all the Dutch professors in statistics, medical statistics and probability. Among the renowned foreign scientists who signed the petition are: the British authors of the present standard academic text on statistics and law; the president of the Royal Statistical Society (London); two members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences; the president-elect of the International Federation of Societies of Toxicologic Pathologists; and perhaps the most eminent statistician in the world, Sir David Cox, Master of Nuffield College, Oxford. The petition only states that the evidence against Lucia is not convincing, on scientific grounds. No statement is made concerning guilt or innocence.
The petition will be submitted by Prof. Richard Gill (University of Leiden), who is president of the Dutch Society for Statistics and Operations Research and member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and by Dr. Peter Grünwald, mathematical statistician at CWI (the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer Science), Amsterdam.
Gill and Grünwald claim that the courts overlooked essential statistical and medical insights. This is also the conclusion of the Committee for Evaluation of Closed Cases, which presented their results earlier this week, after a year's study. That committee reported that there is disagreement among scientific experts, but refrained from stating who is to be believed. Gill and Grünwald have no hesitation in taking that step. They point out that (a) all competent statisticians, both within the Netherlands and internationally, who have studied the case, come to exactly the same conclusion as themselves: there is no strong statistical evidence that Lucia de B. had anything at all to do with the deaths at the hospitals (deaths of young babies with multiple and severe genetic defects in one hospital, and deaths of terminally ill in a geriatric ward in another); (b) two of the world's most competent medical expects on the subject of digoxine poisoning (and the only two who have been consulted) state categorically that baby Amber can not have died of digoxin poisoning; and (c), because Lucia's conviction is based on a so-called chain argument (much weaker evidence is needed for subsequent cases, after the first has been "proved" according to normal legal standards), the preceding now implies that the rest of the case has collapsed. They note, by the way, that the "chain argument" is actually an implicit use of statistical (Bayesian) reasoning; and furthermore, that statistical and medical evidence combined suggests that there never were any murders at all.
The petitioners are very aware that it is the Supreme Court, and not the Minister, who decides on reopening of a closed case. Because of this, Stijn Franken - Lucia's defence lawyer - will submit the petition to the Procurator General of the Supreme Court. For the same reason, the petition remains open for further signatures, till the Supreme Court has taken their decision. According to Mr. Brouwer, chief Procurator-General of the Netherlands and head of the Public Ministry, the report submitted to him by the three wise men only represents "half-time" - because of this, he refused to make any statement at all about the direction the case would go now.
- The petition will be delivered at: Ministry of Justice, Schedeldoekshaven 100, Den Haag; the petition-text can be found at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/lucia/.
- Joint press release Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and Universiteit Leiden
