Math on Trial by Leila Schneps

Author:Leila Schneps [Schneps, Leila;Colmez, Coralie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465037940
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

Lucia de Berk

It was not enough for Lucia to be banned from her job and her livelihood, and to be under suspicion of unspeakable crimes. She was painted as the most vicious creature that the public imagination could conceive of—a slaughterer of babies and elderly people, a destroyer of the weak, a vile monster. She had no way to defend herself other than to repeatedly declare her innocence.

On December 13, 2001, Lucia de Berk was arrested and charged with thirteen murders and four attempted murders. Even though it cannot have come as a surprise, she was stunned, stating that she had no knowledge of any of the acts attributed to her. She was remanded in custody while awaiting trial.

LUCIA’S FIRST trial began several months after her arrest. It emerged almost immediately that there were a few peculiarities about the accusations leveled against her. To start with, it was soon proven by her lawyers that there were two deaths on the list contained in the accusation at which Lucia had not been present at all. Either she had signed out and left the hospital before they occurred, or she had been out sick at a time that normally would have been her shift. There was also a case or two in which the death was so obviously expected and natural that they could not reasonably form the basis of any accusation of wrongdoing. Those cases, however, were quietly dropped from the trial. No one tried to calculate the differences they made to the damning “probabilities.”

Next, it was set forth by Lucia’s lawyers that not a single one of the deaths, or even the nonfatal incidents included in the list of accusations, had been observed to be in any way unnatural when it occurred. They emphasized the peculiarity of the situation: until the day when someone noticed that Lucia was present at a surprisingly large number of these events, there had been no grounds for suspicion of anything, of any kind, at all. In response, the prosecution argued that Lucia must have covered her tracks extremely well.

Finally, and this was perhaps the most difficult point, even once the deaths had been accepted as murders, there was no medical evidence to justify that claim. No traces of poison or violence could be found in or on the bodies that had been exhumed for the purpose,* and the medical witnesses called to the stand found it hard to show why they believed the deaths were due to murder at all. It was not as though such a situation was legally unknown—it had already occurred for the mothers accused of crib death, for example—but it was still uncomfortable. The prosecution made an extra effort to locate evidence of murder, sending for repeated medical analysis every bit of the physical remains of the long-dead victims that they could lay hands on.

In the case of little Amber, a jar in the hospital storehouse contained gauzes soaked with diluted bloody fluid from her body taken at the time of her autopsy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.