Are jurors Bayesians? Should judges ban Bayes’ Rule from the courtroom? prior probability is reblogging this post because of our fascination with the Bayesian approach to probability and with the application of Bayesian methods to law and the legal process.
Bonus link: Fun with Bayesian Priors
Why are conditional probabilities so rarely used in court, and sometimes even prohibited? Here’s one more good reason: prosecution bias.
Suppose that a piece of evidence X is correlated with guilt. The prosecutor might say, “Conditional on evidence X, the likelihood ratio for guilt versus innoncence is Y, update your priors accordingly.” Even if the prosecutor is correct in his statistics his claim is dubious.
Because the prosecutor sees the evidence for all suspects before deciding which ones to bring to trial. And the jurors know this. So the fact that evidence like X exists against this defendant is already partially reflected in the fact that it was this guy they brought charges against and not someone else.
If jurors were truly Bayesian (a necessary presumption if we are to consider using probabiilties in court at all) then they would already have accounted for this and updated their priors…
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