Legal Beagle by Graeme Edgeler

Nobly done.

Seconding Andrew's comment.

The retraction is nobly done. It is also noble of you to take the blame on yourself ("I am sorry that you have been misled by something I have written"), but I don't personally feel that it was what you wrote that misled me. I think it was reasonable for you to expect that the information the MInistry of Justice supplied was the information you asked for.

If you ask someone for a carton of chicken eggs, telling them you want to see if chicken eggs make as good a sponge as goose eggs, and they hand you an egg carton, it's not unreasonable to assume the carton has chicken eggs in it. When someone else goes back to them, and they say "oh, actually they were duck eggs"... is it really your fault you said a chicken egg sponge was almost as good as a goose egg sponge?

However, further investigations by Stuff have revealed those numbers are, in fact, bogus. The Justice Ministry not only failed to provide the comparable figures Edgeler requested, it also failed to flag that the figures were not comparable, despite knowing how he intended to use them. It also allowed the resulting incorrect conclusions to go unchallenged for a year.

I think this points to a bit of a concern about the supplier of the data surely.

Identity theft specialist and former ACT MP David Garrett continues to rely on the original and inaccurate stats referred to in the post above to support spurious arguments from SST's Garth McVicar.

In his long-term role as lawyer for the SST, Garrett sent "a string of abusive text messages" to the Herald's David Fisher, claiming that three strikes "works superbly". He forwarded statistics to back up his case.

However it seems that Garrett was unaware that the stats he referenced were based on bad data from the Ministry of Justice which had since been completely discredited.

Relying on innaccurate stats... vitriolic abuse and petty name calling... now we all know who the tosser is.

Full story here