AlexMennen comments on Casey Anthony - analyzing evidence using Bayes - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Zachary_Kurtz 07 July 2011 05:19PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (19)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: AnlamK 07 July 2011 07:06:17PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for posting this.

I don't know about Bayes but I think Occam's razor (simplest explanation for the data) indicates that most likely she's guilty of murder. Here are the relevant events (as evidence) that I'm thinking about:

  • Casey Anthony borrowed a shovel from her neighbor on June 18th 2008. Cayley Anthony was last seen alive on June 15th 2008.

  • There were search queries like chloroform, 'how to break a neck' (and others) found on Casey Anthony's computer - through reconstructed Firefox cache browser. The computer files were deleted to hide the data, so special software was used to reconstruct the data.

  • There was a month between the last time Cayley Anthony was seen alive and the time she was reported as missing. When she was reported as missing, it was the grandmother, Casey Anthony's mother Cindy Anthony, who reported it.

  • During that month, Casey Anthony was seen as partying and entering 'hot-body' contests.
  • In Cindy Anthony's call to 911, she describes the stench in Casey Anthony's car as a foul smell 'as if someone died in there'.
  • The body was found only a quarter a mile away from the house where here parents and Casey Anthony live.
  • There was a duct tape with the skeletal remains of the body. Same type of duct tape was also found in Anthony household.

I could go on and on and on...

The jurors acquitted Casey Anthony on the basis that there was no connection between her and the dead body of the child and that prosecutors weren't able to prove a link between her and the dead body of the child.

My reaction is that if you look at all the circumstantial evidence, the simplest explanation that fits all the data is that she probably killed her child. Yes, you can have someone just curious about chloroform searching google. Yes, it may also have been food rotting in the car. Yes, Casey Anthony may have borrowed the shovel for gardening - but if you string together all these explanations, the final conjunction of all of them just becomes a lot less probable.

Comment author: AlexMennen 08 July 2011 02:16:47AM 1 point [-]

Sounds like Casey is overwhelmingly likely to be guilty. It also sounds plausible, but unlikely (and maybe more evidence makes it less likely; this post is all I've read on the matter), than Cindy killed Cayley.

Comment author: AnlamK 08 July 2011 06:14:28AM *  1 point [-]

Let me note that most (all?) of this evidence is contested by the defense. Juror #3 Jennifer Ford, in her post-verdict interview with ABC news, said that she didn't believe the evidence based on chloroform.

The stench similarly was also contested.

I personally think that Case Anthony at least caused the death of Cayley that involved criminal elements. So, I am biased - I've made up my mind. I could change it if someone could explain all of the above in a more plausible way.

Judging by the public uproar, I guess that most people think she is guilty. Even the jurors themselves said that they 'were sick to their stomachs' in delivering the verdict, which is a strange display of human psychology.

Comment author: AnlamK 19 July 2011 04:55:48AM *  0 points [-]

If you (or anyone else) are still interested, I recommend this article . I think I'm pretty close to the position the author articulates.