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> What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms? When serving as a juror in a criminal trial, I asked precisely this question of the judge.
by impendia 6y ago
> What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms?
When serving as a juror in a criminal trial, I asked precisely this question of the judge.
Her response was that the law does not prescribe a percentage.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoThis is actually a really tough problem, because it's even unclear which rate to talk about. If you look at "trial by peers" as a test, what error rates are we worried about/trying to make unreasonably rare? Sensitivity? Specificity? FDR? Posterior probability under what prior? One of the many many others used in stats? I might argue that FDR [0] is the right number, given that you want to look at the set of convicted people and say it's unreasonable to doubt that a randomly picked one of them is guilty. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate