What would be the probable consensus among judges as to what probability of guilt meets the criteria of beyond a reasonable doubt? 95%? 90%? 99%?
it doesn’t work that way. Guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Doubts are raised by the defense, and include alternative explanations for evidence, accusations of lying, mistake, or negligence, assertions of excuse or mitigation, etc. A jury must then decide whether the given doubt is reasonable. This is easy if the assertion behind the doubt is demonstrably true or false, or if the logic is clearly valid or invalid. It’s harder if the doubt rests upon an assertion or scenario that’s possible, but hard to believe. While one might assign a probability to a doubt in this category, no one will attempt to assign a number to the totality of circumstances. Such an exercise would be both pointless and unrewarding.
I suppose that a judge might tell a jury to try to estimate the “percent reasonableness” of a given doubt, and then say “anything over X percent is ‘reasonable,’” but I don’t know if it’s legal or constitutional.
It doesn’t “work that way” but it should. Every juror who decides what is beyond reasonable doubt is using a percentage number as a boundary, whether they explicityly realize it or not.
The courts have never put forth a number, which is one reason there is such absurd variation in jury verdicts (see OJ Simpson).
It would be fascinating to see a poll of judges.
They probably don’t do this because some jurors probably don’t understand percentages or can’t count to 100.
Thus begins my promotion of the concept of “pertenage.”
Pertenage: a fraction or ratio wherein the denominator is understood to be 10 (ten). For example, 0.9 equals a pertenage of 9, or 9 perten.
It is unfortunate that American juries have 12 members. We should seek to rectify this. Perhaps by adding two more alternates, reducing the pool to… ten?
Cheers,
- Bjorn240
Well I know it doesn’t work that way but that’s not what I’m asking. A juror weighs the evidence and either conciously or not assigns some degree to the likelihood of guilt. A person’s intuitive feel after considering all the evidence could be expressed as a probability of guilt. Regardless of how someone arrives at their estimate there should be a benchmark for what would be reasonable doubt. What if someone believed that beyond a reasonable doubt was 51%? I’m wondering what judges would consider that benchmark to be.
They consider the benchmark to be whether there is a “reasonable doubt”.
That is the formulation. There is no percentage applied. At least in my jurisdiction, a judge would be at serious risk of the jury’s decision being appealed if he were to set an arbitrary percentage doubt in his summing up to the jury.
I don’t know why I bother sometimes. I KNOW that’s not how it is. I KNOW no judge would discuss it in front of a jury. There isn’t a judge in the world who wouldn’t understand the principle behind my question. I guess I should just ask them.
People sometimes fall into a habit of using numbers in a sort of intuitive or symbolic fashion, forgetting that they are supposed to have literal exact meanings. They will assign a number to a thing to express how they feel about it, overlooking that the number can’t have any objective, literal meaning in the context in which they are using it.
To give an example, a local car customizing company in St. Louis used to run a commercial saying that it’s tinted windows reduced a car’s interior tempretature 25%.
Only temperature measurements are not a matter of quantity, so this didn’t actually mean anything. Maybe their ad meant that if it was 100 degrees farenheit outside, then it would only be 75 degrees inside. But what if the temperature was 60 outside? Would the temperature in the car be 45 degrees? If the temperature outside was 4, would the temperature inside be 3?
What if you switched to a Celsius thermometer? Since a degree on the Celsius scale accounts for a greater variation in temperature, would switching to Celsius mean you got even cooler when you used windows which reduced temperature 75%? And what if it was below zero outside? Would the interior of the car get warmer?
Years ago I worked at a Christmas dinner for the poor and homeless orchestrated by a minister who ran a shelter for the homeless. At the first planning meeting he said that, based on past experience, there would be about five thousand people in attendance, and, in his considered judgment, only “one percent of one percent” of the people would be discruptive. Later he pulled me aside to ask just how much one percent of one percent of 5000 was anyway. He was a little chagrinned when I explained that this would be one half of a person. The number had “felt” right and so he had said it, even though it had no rational meaning in that particular context
So it is when trying to assign a percentage to an abstract concept such as reasonable doubt.
Suppose you are as certain as you can be that something happened short of having actually seen it happen yourself;l that is, you know it beyond a reasonable doubt. What numberical value would you assign to the certainty you feel? Do you feel 95% certain? 99%? 99.9%? 99.99%? Ask four people and you are liable to get four different answers.
IIRC, the master once addressed the quesiton of what it means to say there is a “99% chance of rain”. Here percentages are being used in a literal sense. It means that in 99 of the past 100 instances in which measurements matched the present readings, it rained within a short time. Nobody has developed a system of that kind to ascertain the chance that someone killed his wife, or that both drivers in a collision were at fault, and it is a cinch that jurors are not trying to use any such system when they deliberate.
Courts don’t permit “reasonable doubt” to be defined by a percentage because there is just no exact way to do that. In some jurisdictions–in Missouri, for instance–they don’t even permit an exact definition of any kind, instead relying on the jurors to determine what is or is not reasonable in a particular instance–which is what jurors have to do anyway.
KidCharlemagne I did understand where you are coming from. It’s just that the system being as it is, your question simply does not compute. I think that a judge would understand your question (as I did) but they would not be able to answer. At all.
There would be no probably concensus. Judges have no idea what juries do in the jury room. They don’t know any better than you or I or the people Slipster is talking about how juries might translate the verbal formulation into a percentage, even assuming that juries do so.
And there would be no probable consensus either, by the way.
Sorry.
They surveyed judges, students, and persons called for jury duty but not actually serving on a jury. As part of the survey, the subjects were asked to state what probability of guilt (from 0 to 10) they would require for a list of offenses. The mean responses varied from 9.2 (judges’ certainty for murder and jurors’ certainty for manslaughter) to 7.4 (jurors’ certainty for petty larceny) and the median responses varied from 9.5 (jurors’ certainty for murder) to 7.5 (jurors’ certainty for petty larceny).
THANK YOU! I don’t understand why people have had a hard time with the asking of this question. Human’s are basically suped up fuzzy logic systems anyway and that ends up assigning probabilities. But here is the most important aspect. Even if you say it’s impossible to put a percentage of doubt it doesn’t mean you can’t put what a hypothetical percentage of doubt should be. don’t ask, thanks again, I thought I was losing my mind. It’s also pretty scary that judges are willing to convict and possibly send to the electric chair 8 people out of every 100. Makes you think.
Wow, great article. It’s pretty funny that the guy asked whether the exact same numbers are adequate that I did. 90, 95,99.
From don’t ask cite:
As commonly
explained to civil juries, the preponderance standard is quantified as any
amount of certainty greater than 50%, and proof beyond a reasonable
doubt must mean more than that.4 But how much more proof than a
preponderance is needed in a criminal case? The quantity of certainty is
never quantified; instead, it is kept quite vague. Is 90% certainty
required? 95%? 99%? Or could the amount of certainty be much lower,
say perhaps 75%?*
sorry if this isn’t word wrapped correctly - not too up on that kind of stuff.
Seems like one might use the criteria that social scientists choose when determining to either accept or reject a hypothesis; usually greater than 1% or 5% is enough to say than doubt exists.
Or scientists who use 2 standard deviations (96.5%?? I think)
While don’t ask’s link is interesting (quite interesting, actually), it doesn’t really speak to the central issue. When we refuse to answer your question, Kid, it’s not because we think you don’t understand, it’s because there is simply no answer. Each individual juror is allowed to determine for himself whether there’s a reaonable doubt; implicit in this concept is the fact that each individual juror is himself charged with deciding what doubt is “reasonable.” We don’t give the jurors much instruction on this point because we don’t mean for it to be quantifiable; it is an intuitive understanding by the jurors. That is what the jury’s function is – to intuit, based on all the evidence, what facts are true and how confident the jurors are on their determination of truthfulness. So any given juror, even if he could make the kind of precise measurement of his intuitive concept (which, as slipster illustrates, is actually impossible), would come up with a different number. It is not only inaccurate for a judge, lawyer or layperson to speculate on how much doubt is reasonable, it is also inappropriate, as this colors the perception of any potential juror who might hear it, and it’s up to that juror to decide this, just as it’s up to him to decide if the photographs really show what they purport to show or whether the defendant’s girlfriend is lying when she delivers the alibi.
–Cliffy, Esq.
What about something like DNA evidence?
Assuming it is collected in a proper manner (what that manner is, I have no clue), there is a certain percentage chance that the DNA belongs to more than one person.
It seems to me that courts have increasingly been willing to accept that DNA evidence of a person constitutes acceptable ‘proof’ that that particular person left that particular piece of DNA.
Does anyone know what percentage of people on Earth would share the same DNA? Or what percentage chance that there could be an error in the identification?
I suspect that ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’ in this case would be extremely high.
Maybe there are other forms of ‘scientific’ evidence that are generally accepted, but have a larger margin for error - ballistics or psychological evidence perhaps?
Just for fun: I believe I could “triangulate” a percentage out of someone’s intuitive feel.