| >To have 2 of them (that we know about) stemming from prosecutions by one individual, I would have to say, is pretty remarkable. While it could just be a coincidence, the one common denominator in these two statistically rare incidents is Stephen Heymann. Careful. You are subtly reusing evidence in an invalid way. The reason that Heymann's record is under examination in the first place is that Swartz committed suicide while Heymann was prosecuting him. That's the observation that generates the hypothesis "Heymann is more aggressive than the average prosecutor, and this leads to an increase in suicides". So then we test that hypothesis by looking at Heymann's record and seeing if we find more suicides. So far so good, but what we can't do is then reuse Swartz's suicide to support that hypothesis. Appropriately enough, this is an example of the prosecutor's fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy). The key is that we have to keep an eye on the context of the original hypothesis. If someone had looked at Heymann's methods and said "Wow, that's going to lead to people killing themselves", and then looked into his record and said "Willikers! Get a load of this body count!", then they'd be right to count both Swartz' and James' suicides. But that's not how we got here, so the question has to be "Is the number of suicidal defendants prosecuted by Heymann — other than Swartz — significantly out of line with expectations?" And that number is one. To answer the question would require some data. I've tried gathering data from different angles, but I'm not sure it's out there. Maybe someone else can take a whack at it. |