Interesting Events

(1) In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died, an agreement sometimes called a "reverse mortgage". Raffray ended up paying Calment more than the equivalent of $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death. (Whitney, Craig R. (5 August 1997). "Jeanne Calment, World's Elder, Dies at 122". New York Times.)

Fact: Calment died 45 years later than Raffray. Therefore, the Raffrays did not gain anything from the contract, but ended up paying 45 years of a monthly sum of 2,500 francs. What a LOSS!

(2) The former American football star and actor, O. J. Simpson,was brought to trial for the 1994 murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson was acquitted in 1995 after the longest jury trial in California history.

Simpson hired a high-profile defense team led by Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. Cochran persuaded the jurors that there was reasonable doubt about the DNA evidence (then a relatively new type of evidence in trials) - including that the blood-sample evidence had allegedly been mishandled by lab scientists and technicians.

Later, both the Brown and Goldman families sued Simpson for damages in a civil trial. On February 5, 1997, the jury unanimously found there was a preponderance of evidence to find Simpson liable for damages in the wrongful death of Goldman and battery of Brown. In its conclusions, the jury effectively found Simpson liable for the death of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman. On February 21, 2008, a Los Angeles court upheld a renewal of the civil judgment against Simpson.

Fact:

- Why Simpson was not brought to justice in the first criminal trial?

- Because he hired a strong defense team. The team presented that "4 million women are battered annually by husbands or boyfriends in US; yet in 1992, according to FBI reports, a total of 1,432 (1 in 2,500) were killed by their husbands or boyfriends" and therefore they concluded that "few men who beat their domestic partners go on to murder them".

Well. The last statement by the defense team was true. But it was not relavent. The point here is rather the probability that a battered wife who was murdered was murdered by her abuser. According to the FBI report , of all the battered women murdered in US in 1993, some 90% were killed by their abuser. This statistic was not mentioned in the trial.

This second event is actually related to Bayer's Theory. A few more linked cases are HIV test report, or urine test report against drug uses for athletes (e.g. Mary Decker Slaney).