The Prosecutor’s Fallacy

Conditional Probability in the Courtroom

Ray Johns
Towards Data Science
7 min readJun 13, 2019

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The lasso of truth

Imagine you have been arrested for murder.

You know that you are innocent, but physical evidence at the scene of the crime matches your description. The prosecutor argues that you are guilty because the odds of finding this evidence given that you are innocent are so small that the jury should discard…

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