Elsevier

Science & Justice

Volume 35, Issue 2, April 1995, Pages 127-131
Science & Justice

Scientific & Technical
Avoiding the transposed conditional

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    Interpretation of statistical evidence in criminal trials: the prosecutor's fallacy and the defence attorney's fallacy

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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    Accordingly, a competing defence proposition is necessary. To reiterate, the scientist offers no opinion about whether a proposition such as “He handled the knife” or “He stabbed the victim” is true or not because this would fall foul of the prosecutor’s fallacy (probability of the hypothesis given the evidence [46,47]). Rather, the scientist’s role is restricted to assigning the value of the DNA evidence in light of these propositions.

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