Well, you don’t even know if she was refering to you. The thread is how many pages long? You were hardly the only person trying to argue that “statistical likelihood” had merit in the court room. Calling her a lying bitch when its perfectly possible she was talking about someone else strikes me as a classic case of protesting too much. The little disclaimer at the end of your post didn’t do much to hide the overblown “LYING BITCH!!!” accusation either.
You should have simply asked for a cite, and then prepared to defend yourself without calling her names.
I’m curious, though. Weirddave, why would you refute monstro’s point that no stats belong in the courtroom with that particular story? You should have been agreeing with her, since the detective’s logic almost got you jail time, and the judge threw out his testimony anyway.
Mentioning this story could very well be be a reason why she thought you were arguing that this logic had a place in the court room. Because that’s the interpretation I walked away with. Otherwise, why would you mention it?
In your technicolor nightmare of a post you wrote:
But so what? The testimony was rightfully challenged by your lawyer and discarded, right? So that means it was immaterial to your case and had not reason to have been introduced.
Which is what monstro’s point all along.
I think it’s rather unfair for you to call someone a lying whore–I mean, a lying bitch–just because they assumed your anecdote was meant to prove their postion was wrong somehow.
Weirddave, I didn’t put words in your mouth. Your words indicate that you saw no problem with what the detective did on your behalf. It was the line that ywtf highlighted in your post sealed the deal for me.
I’ll apologize: I misread your post. I thought you were saying the detective defended you by citing stats. Now that I reread that exchange, I see my mistake.
So on that point, I was wrong.
However, I’m trying to figure out why you’re now admitting that your defense attorney challenged his testimony. Wasn’t that, um, my goddamn point during my exchange with you? Didn’t I say stats like those don’t have any weight in a court trial of individuals? Why didn’t you bring that little detail up when I was arguing with you on the relevancy of statistics? It seems that we should have been in FULL AGREEMENT, not fight-to-the-death disagreement.
:shaking my head in utter frustration:
So, no, I’m not a lying bitch. But you, sir, are not a fair debater at all.
Kanin (who is a person, not a “site” – I think he may even have Ph. D. after his name, which we’ve been told in this thread is pretty good proof we should believe him) reported that in his smallish sample exactly 50% of rape reports by the college women in his population were false. This is the very first statistic I cited in making a suggestion of predictive value over actuarial time. You can of course question Kanin’s methodology or whether the college population was big enough, or whether his Midwestern university results map to Southeastern juco students. In doing so, I suspect you would adduce any evidence you had that the researcher or the academic journal in question were “biased” or “slanted,” and people would consider that.
That, as Bricker said, is all fine but “goes to weight, not admissibility” (and no, I am not for a moment suggesting that actuarial handicapping could, should, or would be admitted in a courtroom – I’ve never suggested it could). If that figure, or one roughly like it, were sound as to parallel populations that include a particular accuser, then actuarially, her accusation is just about equally consistent with [rape] or [not-rape]. Accordingly (in that hypothetical) the accusation data point itself would not definitively lead one to “side” with or against the truth of its allegations.
And I notice once again that the argument presented in the quote is couched (as mine never have been) in the strawman-version of “giving conclusive weight to one data point [here, the accusation] so as to believe/not believe her.” I’ve never suggested that, and it’s telling to me that those who have so vehemently insisted that actuarial trends do not and cannot influence our handicapping of particular outcomes have to caricature my arguments, as above, or as in “So you’re saying when I, a black woman, report rape, no one should even investigate it?”
OK, one last analytical post on why **Huerta’s **“if we know nothing but her race” theory is wrong (and in some cases backwards). You’ll see that he implicitly assumed that we knew one more thing (the relative frequency of lying about rape between Black and White women). Further, he neglected the fact that we do know one more thing (at least) about the particular woman in question— that she reported being raped by a White guy.
Consider Anytown USA which has a certain population of White and Black people. Let’s say it’s like Durham with about 50/50 Black and White people (although it doesn’t matter much). White on Black rape is less common in Anytown than White on White rape, and a White woman is 10x more likely to be raped by a White man than is a Black woman. Let’s say there have been 1,000 reports of such rape by White women and 100 by Black women in the last year (makes the math easy).
Now, let’s pick one random White woman one random Black woman and as ask which is more likely to have been raped by a White man in the last year. Clearly the White woman is more likely to have been rape, (since there are more reports of White on White rape. Further, we know nothing about the rate of false rape reports, so we have to ignore that factor.
Now, let’s pick one random White woman and one random Black woman and ask which is more likely to have lied about being raped by a white man in the last year. The answer is still the White woman. Why? Because we don’t know anything about the rate at which either type of woman lies about being raped by White guys, so we have to assume it’s equal. In that case, there should be 10x as many lying White women in the city as there are lying Black women. The only way to make it more likely to pick a lying Black woman is if you assume the % of Black women who lie about such rape is higher than that of Whites (in this case, it would have to be much higher). But remember, we don’t know anything else except the race of the women involved, so we can’t assume that.
Now, let’s pick one random White woman and one random Black woman from the list of women reporting rapes by White guys in the last year and ask which woman is more likely to be lying. The answer is neither— again, since we don’t know anything other than the race of the two women (and the fact that they reported a rape by a White guy in the last year). Each population has the same percentage of liars in them (we must assume), so it’s equally likely to pick a liar at random from either population even though one population is much larger than the other (1000 White women vs. 100 Black women).
Of all of these scenarios, the one which **Huerta **proposed is scenario #2, but note that he got the answer wrong— it’s the White woman who is more likely to be lying. But even if he was proposing scenario #3 (which best represents the case in question, btw), he still got it wrong because neither is more likely to be lying than the other. The only way for the answer to be the Black woman is to assume that Black women lie about being raped by White guys at a higher rate than White women.
How much higher? In scenario #1 and #2 it would have to be more than 10x higher, given the original assumptions. If we assume that White women lie at a rate of 5% (producing 50 liars out of 1,000 reports), then Black women would have to lie at a rate > 50% (to produce > 50 liars out of 100 reports). And if White women lie at a rate > 10%, then you’re stuck because you can’t produce more than 100 Black women liars out of only 100 reports. In scenario #3 it would simply have to be higher by any amount.
in the case at hand, we have an event, where there are several varying data points of interest:
a. black female accusor
b. White males accused
c. gang rape accused
d. event happened in Duraham SC which has a different racial index than the US as a whole
e. most participants in the event were college students which also has different racial index than the US as a whole
f. all males accused are members of team sports
g. accusor is employed
h. accusor is employed as a stripper
i. all participants are over 18 and under 34
these are items which have been reported on. there’s any other number of data points that exist (ie, height, weight, IQ, left handed/right handed, but we have no data and no stats on these).
But, for your arguement you selected:
data points A and B when selecting the pertinent (according to you) national crime data statisitics, ignoring other data points such as c, d, and e,
and
2, data point e (and only e) when selecting the pertinent (according to you) data regarding false rape allegations.
Why is it that in this case that occured in a more predominantly minority area than the nation as a whole, that the national data of one particular year is to you, the most pertient?
why is it that in this case where a gang rape allegation (a relatively rarer subgroup of the category rape) was made that gang rape data was not pertinent at all to you?
why is it that in this case where the pariticpants were college students, that only the data about college students (from a single, admittedly small study) was more pertinent than a large national data base, where, coincedentally, the data did not support your thesis?
you’ve yet to answer the poster who actually found specific data about white on black rape in exactly the city where this occured and noted that it occured roughly once a week - doesn’t sound ‘vanishingly rare’ to me, unless you’d characterize “mondays” as vanishingly rare, so a claim that a Monday occurred should be less credible.
Thank you, I accept your apology and issue my own for assuming you were delibertly misconstruing what I said. Maybe if there was more of this on both sides this thread would only be 12 pages long, no?
Because the point I was responding to, one that I still believe is a strawman, is that you were saying that stats would never be used in court. I provided an example that showed how sometimes they are. Incorrectly used? Of course, else I’d likely be typing from cell block J, which is also consistant with my repeated statements that stats are useless for determining the facts of any specific case. I’ve been saying this all along, and somehow it keeps getting ignored.
Which part of “data” “patterns” and “information” do you not understand as being plural, as indicating a multiplicity of factors (some based on past patterns) that are taken in the aggregate?
Where have I advocated giving dispositive weight to a single data point unless it were of the videotaped-confession category?
You really don’t get this.
You really don’t understand that “probable” cause and “beyond a reasonable doubt” imply and evidence that the justice system at some level engages in sorting and weighing of fact-pattern-probabilities every day.
I suspect that the difference here is one of semantics - when I hear some one say “that would never be used in a court of law”, I generally understand it to mean that “the judge would not allow it as admissable”, as happened in your case. I would not infer that the meaning was “no scurilous sonofabitch attorney would ever not try and trot out some irrelevant piece of information to attempt to sway the jury” (as what happened in your case as well)
Obviously there are cases where attorneys get stuff said in open court that the court orders the jury to disregard as irrelevant or inadmissable, but it’s not supposed to be used in court of law as part of the deliberations, finding of guilt etc.
so you were both pretty much saying the same thing, that that sort of information, would be deemed inadmissable, as you saw yourself (and was correct in your case).
Not true. I quoted and discussed his stat, and affirmatively said that his figures showed w-o-b rape to be “somewhat” but not “vanishingly” rare in N.C. (roughly 6% of the reported rapes of black women). This I did in response to Hentor’s 86-point-typeface assertion that there was nothing whatever to support characterization of w-o-b rape as in any way “rare” (actually, he mischaracterized my allegedly-unsupported-premise as being “w-o-b rape is rarer than b-o-w rape,” but that was never my point).
In my citation and discussion of Kanin, I already acknowledged that one can endlessly question whether that’s the best analogy. “False-rape-allegation-by-university-student-rape” seems pretty on-point and that’s why it is the very first thing I cited, but of course you could allege that this is not the correct parameter to look at, instead the most germane characterization of the fact pattern is . Okay, fine. That is what makes handicapping an art form as well as a science. But I hope you don’t venture into the horse track or the financial markets completely unguided by what’s happened there in the past, and what has not happened so often. (And yes, there’s equal grey area in those arenas too – in deciding what’s going to happen, most likely, in the current economy, do I give more emphasis to past analogous periods of low interest rates, or do I look to periods of high commodity prices, or am I swayed by . . . ). What I have found works in those arenas is typically a multivariate approach, hence my harping on a willingness to consider all data points.
If there were lacrosse-team-specific-rape-rate statistics, I’d thus look at those too, of course. I just don’t think there are.
A common tactic in this thread has been the use of certain qualifiers placed just so, in order to both misdirect the argument into strawman territory and mask the egregiousness of a particular action.
The latest example of one of these special qualifiers is “single”.
Huerta, the quotes I excerpted clearly show that you view “probablistic models” as a valid tool when deciding where to devote prosecutorial resources. I don’t care if it’s one out of many other data points, the fact that its used at all is wrong.
When your “probablistic models” are based on race and misapplied statistics, this leads to injustice. Plain and simple.
It brings me great pain that you can not see this, and you are supposed to be a lawyer.
Maybe it’s been getting lost because, at least for me, I’ve been arguing that stats are useless for determining merit, credibility, and plausibility. If you were arguing that they don’t merely determine the facts of a specific case, then I would still disagree with you. There’s a lot that they don’t determine, and that’s why they are irrelevant to accusations of individuals, by individuals.
I accept your apology, Weirddave, although I’m still scratching my head why you brought you up that example. Wouldn’t a better example had been an instance of a court case where a witness quoted statistics and their testimony was not stricken from the record? Maybe you would have done something to dispell my ignorance about how trials work if you had produced evidence of this. As it stands now, I still believe that statistics are not allowed–by a court of law–to be used to persuade jurors that the accused didn’t do X, Y, Z. And the very reason why this is so goes to the solid platform that I’ve been standing on: statistics drawn from populations cannot be used to judge the credibility of an individual’s claim.
Now that I’ve distilled my point from all the screaming and name-calling and you’ve distilled yours, do you still disagree with my argument?
It is not even a “somewhat rare” event, it happens once a week. It may be (and is) a smaller sub category of the larger “rapes of black women in Durham” but it’s not at all a ‘rare’ event. even a ‘somewhat’ rare, especially when you’re suggesting (as you are) that the ‘rareity’ of the event should lend some suspicion to the person alledging it.
I wonder how many of your supporters in this thread would agree that if a black woman gets raped by a white male once a week in that town, that your characertization of it being ‘vanishingly rare’ is fair.
eh folks? weigh in on that? apparently your guy will still conclude that an event that happens once a week in that town, should be used to doubt the veracity of this single allegation.
You are, I take it, a direct descendant of Alexandre Dumbass.
It does not take place “once a week” in “Duraham S.C.” or “that town” as you variously refer to Durham, North Carolina. The figures cited say it takes place (or is reported) about once a week in the entire State of North Carolina. If you can’t get the factual predicates right, I can’t argue with you.
There’s nothing “latest” about it. Every formulation of every argument I’ve made in this thread has been a variant of this – “in the absence of other dispositive evidence,” “taken with all other data points,” “not to afford conclusive weight to any single data point.”
Words have meaning, and I use them as having such meaning. It is not a fair criticism for you to characterize my deliberate stating of a position (and staking out what I am and am not saying) as some sort of rhetorical cleverness. You apparently want me to be affording race, or sex, or whatever, some undue and conclusive weight, so you complain that I have explicitly not structured my arguments as such. Well, that’s bass-ackwards.
Here, let’s imagine a contract: “ywtf shall pay Huerta $1,000 on December 1, provided, however, that she shall not be obligated to pay him if the Democrats re-take the House of Representatives this November or the price of platinum closes below $700 on November 16.” It is not appropriate for you to characterize my position as “you must pay me $1,000, no matter what, under all circumstances” and to dismiss the other possibly-operative factors as some sort of “just so” phrasing that serves only to “misdirect” the argument over whether the contract is absolutist and unfair to you.
That might have not been your point, but that’s one of only a few conclusions that one can draw from that dataset. When people use stats and talk about the “rarity” of an event, it’s safe to assume that they are basing that description on other data present within in that dataset, not on a general definition of “rare”.
To whit: If I read the statistic that says 10% of child deaths last year were caused by falling TV sets and 30% were caused by drowning , and then I conclude that the former event must be “rare” while not saying anything about the prevalence of the latter, I’m essentially saying that compared to the total number child deaths and to drowning deaths, the number of children who died by errant TVs is very very small. (It doesn’t have to be small in an absolutely sense…3% of a 10,000 is a lot).
If I see a figure that says 10% of rapes are white-on-black rapes and 30% are black-on-white rapes*, and I keep saying the the first event is “vanishingly” rare but say nothing about the prevalence of the second, then I shouldn’t be shocked when everyone accuses me of saying that “w-o-b is rarer than b-o-w rape” and giving major importance to this.
If the accused were black and the accuser were white, I don’t think anyone would be saying “b-o-w rape is rare”…even though it is rare compared to both "b-o-b and “w-o-w” rape.
Bullshit. If your need for a 'as close to the unusual characteristics of this particular case as possible" desire for eligible stats was clear and unconfined to a personal agenda, you would have selected the “gang rape” stat from the DoJ, since a “gang rape” allegation is a smaller more precise category of type of case this is (just as “college student” is a smaller more precise category of “rape accusor”). However, the category of “gang rape” showed more likly to be white males convicted than any other category which would have led credence to the accusor.
I believe there should be no doubt that you doubted the accusors story (as did I, before you launch that red herring). then you cherry picked specific data points, locating specific data that supported your preconceived conclusion, and *ignored abso-fucking-lutely anything that did not support your case, * even if it was on point.
again, you looked at national data about rape/race but rejected that same data base when you wanted data about false accusations.
And so we can endlessly argue over which is the “more precise” analogous case (as I already said).
[modesty]I think I was the first one to locate and cite the FBI nationwide 8% false accusation number.[/modesty]. Show me where I have ever “rejected” it. I instead adduced what I thought to be potentially more-focused or granular information reported on college students.