Monday 3 October 2011

Bayes and the Law: Guardian article

There is an article in the Guardian today that is the result of an interview I had with the journalist Angela Saini. It is about the issue of Bayes and the Law following the RvT ruling and it includes a reference to the consortium that we are putting together to improve the situation.
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6 comments:

  1. gyg3s4 October 2011 at 02:18

    More interesting, perhaps, is the answer to the question: in relation to the judicial system of England and Wales, what is the probability that a person who has been convicted of a crime committed that crime?

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  2. Norman Fenton4 October 2011 at 08:10

    >in relation to the judicial system of England and Wales, what is the probability that a person who has been convicted of a crime committed that crime?

    That is another question that can only be rationally answered by Bayes!

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  3. gyg3s5 October 2011 at 05:54

    ^ Quite.

    But if you tackle this problem, it will force scrutiny of the court process and make the relevance of your work all the more obvious. (Even obvious to some of the detractors at the bottom of the Guardian article).

    Just imagine if the probability that a person has been convicted of a crime given that he committed a crime is ninety-percent.

    Of a prison population of 88,000; 8,800 people would be in prison for crimes that they did not commit. Just imagine how disquieting the general populace would find this information.

    Change the focus of your research and find the answer to this question for me, please.

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  4. Norman Fenton5 October 2011 at 06:45

    We have already got the support of people at the Criminal Cases Review Commission to look at cases on file to do exactly this.

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  5. gyg3s5 October 2011 at 09:30

    ^ Brilliant.

    When do we expect to hear the results?

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  6. farnandas17 December 2015 at 17:26

    Nice post.

    ReplyDelete