Lucia de Berk case

The Lucia de Berk case was a miscarriage of justice in the Netherlands in which a Dutch licensed paediatric nurse was wrongfully convicted of murder.

Suspicions were raised when a five-month-old baby turned blue and died unexpectedly, only an hour after doctors had said that her condition was improving.

[8] Another key piece of the evidence was traces of poisonous toxins found in the blood of three children she had been alleged to have killed, who had been exhumed as part of the investigation.

[8][10] The prosecution also highlighted the fact that she had forged a Canadian diploma in order to qualify for medical training, and de Berk also faced further charges for this falsification of records and the book thefts.

[8][6] De Berk admitted during the trial that she had lied about her nursing credentials and had stolen the books as well as medicine and patient files.

One of the trial judges noted that the cases in question seemed to follow a particular pattern, saying: "Lucia says she believes she sees a problem and starts to alert colleagues and soon enough a crisis occurs, did you perhaps raise the alarm first so that you could then introduce death?".

[6] De Berk denied the charges, blaming the deaths and near-deaths on other staff in the hospitals or the quality of medical equipment.

[6] One of the victims, a six-year-old Afghan boy, had died from a lethal dose of a sleeping medication; de Berk testified to the court "of course it's strange, but I don't know how it happened".

[11] Of those that died it was concluded that they had been given an overdose of either potassium or morphine, and in each of the cases de Berk was the last person to be at the patients' bedside.

The idea that only weaker evidence was needed for the subsequent murders after two had been proven beyond reasonable doubt, dubbed chain-link proof by the prosecution, was accepted by the court.

There was a brief period when the child had been disconnected from monitors approximately an hour before death, which would have been the time when a lethal overdose of the drug would have needed to be administered.

[16][17] At the 2004 trial, besides a life sentence, de Berk also received detention with coerced psychiatric treatment, despite the state criminal psychological observation unit finding no evidence of mental illness.

[17][15] One of the various pieces of evidence against de Berk at the original trial had been the testimony of a statistician, who said that the odds that it was a coincidence that all the incidents occurred when she was on duty were 342 million to one.

Even that one had initially been thought to be natural by the doctors responsible for the child, but had been reclassified as an unnatural death within a day after other hospital authorities associated it with de Berk and her repeated presence at recent incidents.

[2] Gill and Piet Groeneboom then showed that there was a chance of 1 in 25 that a nurse could experience a sequence of events of the same type as de Berk.

[25]In addition to errors in the analysis, concerns were raised about the data provided by one of the hospitals, which appeared to show that De Berk was present at every single significant incident where reanimation (successful or not) was required.

On 7 October 2008, the court acceded to his request by acknowledging that new facts uncovered by Knigge substantially undermined the earlier evidence.

Additionally, the blood taken from the child for analysis did not originate from a proper sample but was squeezed out of a piece of gauze left inside the body after two autopsies had disturbed all of the organs.

The behaviour of the nurses, including de Berk, during a couple of medical crises turned out to have been swift and effective and to have saved lives on several occasions.

[13]: §7 De Berk's case has become a prominent example of the prosecutor's fallacy and general misuse of statistical evidence in murder trials, particularly of medical professionals.