Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer Page A

he could use it in his act, he heard that another comedian was telling an identical joke. Mysteriously, that comedian was never heard of again.
    Recently the joke appeared again, this time in Martin Amis’s 2003 novel Yellow Dog.
    What does he put this down to? Coincidence? Great minds thinking alike? Or do jokes get stolen?
    â€œI’m open…,” Brown says, “to litigation.”
    Before he rushes to court, Arnold might take note of the fact that the joke has also been attributed to Jerry Seinfeld as early as 1993. Several other American stand-up comedians also claim ownership. Clearly great comic minds think alike.
    Brown thinks the “coincidence” of jokes turning up in other people’s acts will continue until someone invents a device that can be placed in a gag, which will explode if it is told by another comedian.
    Some of the coincidences that come before the courts are no laughing matter.
    Sally Clark was accused of the murder of her two baby sons. The policeman’s daughter, who had always protested her innocence, was jailed for life in November 1999. She was convicted of smothering eleven-week-old Christopher in December 1996 and shaking eight-week-old Harry to death in January 1998 at the home she shared with her husband Stephen.
    The crux of the case revolved around whether it was conceivable the “crib deaths” of Mrs. Clark’s two children were coincidences.
    The prosecution’s expert witness, an eminent pediatrician told the court that the likelihood of two siblings dying of SIDS or “sudden infant death syndrome” was 1 in 73 million. This was damning evidence against Mrs. Clark and must have had a powerful influence on the jury.
    However, on January 30, 2003, after serving three years in jail, Sally Clark won her appeal and freedom. The convictions were ruled unsafe, as medical evidence that might have cleared her was not heard during her trial. The court also criticized the use in the trial of the statistic putting the chance of two babies in the same family suffering SIDS at 1 in 73 million. It said it had been “grossly misleading,” as the jury started from the incorrect assumption that double crib deaths in a single family were extremely rare. The assumption had been that the cribs deaths were independent events, and so the seventy-three million figure would have been reached by squaring the probability of a single crib death. But multiple crib deaths in one family are not statistically independent. Experts told the appeal court that the risk of a second crib death could, in fact, have been as low as 1 in 100. It was suggested that the prosecution’s expert witness had made a fundamental mathematical error.
    The court had decided that whatever the odds, 73 million to 1, or 100 to 1, the deaths of Sally Clark’s two children had been natural. The fact that she had lost two children was just a tragic coincidence.
    Just months after Sally Clark’s acquittal the trial began of another woman accused of the multiple murder of her infant children—a trial at which the pediatrician was again arguing that the deaths could not be the result of simple coincidence.
    Thirty-five-year-old pharmacist Trupti Patel denied killing her sons Amar and Jamie and daughter Mia between 1997 and 2001—none of them survived beyond three months. She denied she had smothered her babies or restricted their breathing by squeezing their chests.
    In Britain, approximately six hundred children each year die suddenly and unexpectedly at some time between their first week of life and their first birthday. In half of these cases, a clear medical reason for the death is found at postmortem—the remaining, unexplained cases are recorded simply as sudden infant death syndrome.
    At the trial of Trupti Patel, the pediatrician stated that “two crib deaths is suspicious, three is murder—unless proved otherwise.”
    The members of the jury, this