THE growing use by courts of statistical evidence such as DNA matches has
raised fears that misunderstandings by juries and the legal profession could
lead to miscarriages of justice. Now academic statisticians are teaming up with
the Scottish police to find ways of minimising the risk that such flawed
reasoning will lead to unsafe convictions.
In a £700,000, three-year project, the Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic
Statistics and Legal Reasoning at Edinburgh University is investigating what
aspects of probability-based evidence are most likely to cause confusion, and
how to present them to juries as clearly as possible.
The “match…
