RESOURCES & RESEARCH (Legal FAQ's)
POLIO & ICE CREAM, or, CONSISTENT WITH VERSUS CAUSED
BY
You will hear experts using the phrase "consistent with" to describe injuries or damages from an incident. "The fact that her voice has changed from this car wreck is consistent with the stress she has been through." That is technically truthful, in an expert's vocabulary, since "consistent with" merely means the fact of something is consistent with another fact. But in a Courtroom, the standard is "caused by." The fact that a clock on one room chimes at Noon and another clock down the hall is also chiming, are consistent facts. But neither clock caused the other to chime.
In the 1920's, children were dying of polio at an alarming rate. Something had to be done. At one point they thought cats were the cause and thousands were killed. Then the blame went to certain insects and all sorts of other possibilities. Since the rate of polio spiked up in the Summer, experts blamed ice cream. Yes, seriously. Ice cream demand spiked up in the Summer, as did the incidence of polio. There you have it. A connection. The spiked increased of each was consistent with each other. You can just imagine the news announcements everywhere, the public health alarms, the recall campaigns, picketing ice cream manufacturers for poisoning kids...
This is why Courts, and juries, are to disregard "consistent with" and wait for affirmative proof that something is actually "caused by" something else. We don't want to lose ice cream.