The sad case of Sally Clark springs to mind.
In 1999, she was wrongfully convicted of murdering her two sons after it was erroneously concluded by Professor Sir Roy Meadow that the chances of both of her sons dying from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) were 1 in 73 million, and his now discredited eponymous law:
One is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless there is proof to the contrary.
The Royal Statistical Society criticised the statistical evidence on two counts:
- The incorrect assumption of independence between SIDS in siblings. This made the calculation used by Meadow - squaring the probability for a single SIDS incident - invalid.
- A misrepresentation of the statistics giving rise to the prosecutor's fallacy.
Furthermore, there were concerns raised by Ray Hill about the quality of the underlying data used to compute the chance of a single SIDS event.
After two appeals, Clark was eventually acquitted, but the experience of losing both sons, and the miscarriage of justice left her psychologically scarred and she died of alcohol poisoning in 2007.