Angela Saini
speaker
229 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2012
last heard Jul 2012
Angela Saini’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The producer was Ruth Alexander and the editor, Richard Varden.
Well, when lawyers and forensic experts start applying odds to evidence, it's so easy to get things wrong that they even have names for the different types of errors.
One's called the defendant's fallacy, for instance, because it favours the defence.
You may remember the trial of OJ Simpson.
in the US in 1995 for the alleged murder of his ex-wife.
So OJ Simpson had pleaded no contest to a charge of domestic violence and this could have made him look pretty guilty.
But his defence team claimed that this was irrelevant because fewer than one in a thousand women who are abused by their male partners end up being killed by them.
Now, if you look at the stats from a different direction, you'll find that if a woman is abused and later murdered, there's actually an 80% chance that her partner did it.
Exactly.
So the most common error that you see is the prosecutor's fallacy, one that usually favours the prosecution.
It's when the odds associated with a piece of evidence become confused with the odds of the suspect's innocence.
Well, let me give you a famous example from 1991 when a man called Andrew Dean was convicted for a rape in Manchester after he seemed to be a positive DNA match.
Now, the DNA evidence was pretty vital in this case because, well, there just wasn't that much other evidence.
Andrew Dean had no apparent connection to the victim.
He even had an alibi from his girlfriend.
But the jury was told that only around one in three million people would be a DNA match.
And that made the DNA evidence look pretty compelling.
The jury assumed that the chance of Andrew Dean being innocent must also be one in three million, so they found him guilty.
But for a crime like this, the pool of suspects could be enormous, bringing down the odds of Andrew Dean's guilt quite dramatically.
In a population of 20 million adult men, just for the sake of example, you'd expect there to be around seven matches.
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