Where do you think Pinker's analysis went wrong, if it did go wrong?
Pinker is not distinguishing between members of the audience and members of the jury.
For the audience, Pinker is basically correct. The prior probability that the defendant committed the acts charged is fairly high, given the evidence available to the audience that the government charged the defendant with a crime.
But the jury is given an instruction by the judge that the defendant is entitled to a presumption of innocence that must be overcome by the government. In Bayesian terms the judge means, "For social reasons not directly related to evidence, set your prior probability that the defendant is guilty as close to zero as is logically possible for you. If the probability of guilt is sufficiently high after hearing all the evidence, then you may vote to convict."
If a rationalist juror ignores this instruction and acts like a rational audience member, then the juror is doing wrong, as Pinker notes. But ignoring the judge's instruction is wrong, and Pinker is not presenting a great insight by essentially highlighting this point.
There shouldn't be any such distinction. The audience (I assume you mean the courtroom audience) should reason the exact same way the jury does.
The prosecution is required to make an explicit presentation of the evidence for guilt, so that the mere fact that charges were brought is screened off. As a consequence, failure to present a convincing explicit case is strong evidence of innocence; prosecutors have no incentive to hide evidence of guilt! Hence any juror or audience member who reasons "the prosecution's case as presented is weak, but the defen...
This thread is for discussing anything that doesn't seem to deserve its own post.
If the resulting discussion becomes impractical to continue here, it means the topic is a promising candidate for its own thread.