Criticisms of Meadow's Law
Critics of Meadow's law state that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics, particularly relating to probability, likelihood, and statistical independence.
At the trial in 1999 of solicitor Sally Clark, accused of murdering her two sons, Meadow testified that the odds against two such deaths happening naturally was 73,000,000:1, a figure which he obtained by squaring the observed ratio of births to cot-deaths in affluent non-smoking families (approximately 8,500:1).
This caused an uproar amongst professional statisticians, whose criticisms were twofold:
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