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JRMayne comments on The Cameron Todd Willingham test - Less Wrong
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It is, in fact, illegal to argue a quantation of "reasonable doubt."
I'm a fan of the jury system, but I do think quantation would lead to less, not more, accuracy by juries. Arguing math to lawyers is bad enough; to have lawyers generally arguing math to juries is not going to work. (I like lawyers and juries, but mathy lawyers in criminal law are quite rare.)
Probably because the math isn't explained properly.
That said, I do agree in the sense that I think juries can still come to the same verdict, the same way they do now (by intuition), and then just jigger the likelihood ratios to rationalize their decision. However, it's still a significant improvement in that questionable judgments are made transparent.
For example, "Wait a sec -- you gave 10 bits of evidence to Amanda Knox having a sex toy, but only 2 bits to her DNA being nowhere at the crime scene? What?"
Illegal??
From wikipedia:
It's illegal for the prosecution or defense to do so in court. Apologies for the lack of context.
The 1971 paper that cites the .70-.74 numbers causes me to believe the people who participated were unbelievably bad at quantation, or that the flaws pointed out in 2006 paper of the 1971 paper are sufficient to destroy the value of that finding, or that this is one of many studies with fatal flaws. I expect there are very few jurors indeed who would convict with a belief that the defendant was 25% to be innocent.
I wonder if quantation interferes with analysis for some large group of people? Perhaps just the mention of math interferes with efficient analysis. I don't know; I can say that in math- or physics-intensive cases, both sides try to simplify for the jury.
In fact, we have some types of cases with fact patterns that give us fairly narrow confidence ranges; if there's a case where I'm 75% certain the guy did it, and no likely evidence or investigation will improve that number, that's either not issued, or if that state has been reached post-issuance, the case is dismissed.