The Mathematical Murder of Innocence

The Mathematical Murder of Innocence is a riveting courtroom drama inspired by a true story where a mother, having suffered two cot deaths, was wrongly accused of murdering her babies.


“What if I had been on the jury…?”


Things heat up in the courtroom when a juror is invited by the judge to cross-examine the expert witness, a professor who says the chances of cot deaths are only one in 72 million.


“Thus, it has to be murder.”


 But, there’s more to this case than meets the eye… Readers must depict fact from fiction in this compelling venture into the inner workings of a courtroom.


Inspired by the teachings of Nassim Taleb, it is also an entertaining layman’s introduction to probability and the use and misuse of mathematical evidence in a court of law.


Michael Carter grew up in Norwich, then studied Engineering at Cambridge and Ocean Engineering at UCL, before designing and installing offshore oil platforms – just like the story’s narrator. He later moved to France and, after an MBA at INSEAD, he spent the rest of his career in senior management positions in electrical multinationals (CEO of Socomec Group and Vice President at Legrand), before retiring in 2018 to go sailing, mountaineering and write thought-provoking books. He lives in Grasse on the French Riviera.


Michael says, “When I read an article in a 2004 issue of The Economist about the Sally Clark trial verdict being overturned on appeal, I was fascinated and outraged by the faulty statistical evidence that the expert witness, Professor Roy Meadows had used against her in the 1999 trial. I got to thinking ‘If only I had been a juror at that trial, there would have been a different outcome’. Over the next fifteen years, I developed the idea, and I realised that I had a very good and real plot for a fictional book.”