The Preponderance of the Evidence

Wait. Shouldn’t the question be “should you shoot and possibly kill the man who is about to become a murderer, in order to save a man who probably already is one?” ?

Sure, I’ll object. I reject the assumption that (absent an anarchic system) anyone has a right to kill a murderer. (If we don’t reject this assumption, then, among other things, we must conclude that most crimes committed against other prisoners in jail should not be punished — we should simply reduce the sentence of the assaulted prisoner and consider the other prisoner to have simply been speeding up the process of punishment.) Therefore, the father is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and this conclusion shouldn’t trouble us, because even with full certainty of the dead man’s guilt, or with a preponderence standard, we’d convict the father.

On the other hand, suppose I support your assumption about the right to kill a murderer. Then remember what you say in that essay — it’s quite reasonable to doubt that he killed a noncriminal who had done him no wrong (that is, the we suspect that he probably killed a murderer and so didn’t kill a non-murderer). In fact, it’s probably true beyond a reasonable doubt that he at least believed he was killing someone who had murdered his daughter, and so there is no mens rea. Therefore by the standard of reasonable doubt, he is not guilty and we don’t need to come to the conclusion you seek to avoid.

A gradient system doesn’t really make things better – it’s just a different trade off. Rather than some guilty people going free, you have a portion of innocent people who are punished because they might be guilty but probably aren’t.

The father has no right to avenge his daughter’s death.

If this idea troubles you, consider the murder of someone who has no friends or family. Does it follow that this murder should not be a crime because no living party is harmed? Of course not. The murder is a crime because cooperative institutions have evolved that protect even the friendless.

The father’s desire for revenge or recompense is completely irrelevant. The bailiff has a responsibility to shoot the father, and I see no contradiction in him doing so.

A few points:

– Yes, your hypothetical presents a bad situation. However, in matters of the justice system (and society in general) there are rarely perfect solutions. The “beyond reasonable doubt” standard will result in more (actually) guilty people going free. Conversely, the “preponderance of evidence” standard will result in more innocent people getting convicted (I shudder to think how many weak cases would be brought to trial if prosecutors knew they only had to meet the preponderance standard). You’ll have to do more than present one bad situation that arises as a result of “beyond reasonable doubt” to make your case: you’ll have to show that, on balance, a different standard leads to overall better results.
– It’s not clear to me that “preponderance of evidence” resolves your dilemma in any case. Under a more relaxed standard, you could still have to render a not guilty verdict if you felt the evidence indicated there was only a 49% chance the defendant committed the crime. He’s still much more likely than the father to be a murderer, but the bailiff would still have the duty to shot the father in order to protect the defendant.

Does “What on earth are you talking about?” count as an objection?

“Only the preponderance rule lets us escape the bizarre conclusion that we should kill the man who is less likely to be a murderer in order to save the man who is more likely to be a murderer.”

With the assumption that the prosecutor is a more reliable source of information than the defense. A dubious assumption. To be clear — the prosecutor may have a “Nifong” problem.

If I were the father — I would be more concerned with the state law — particularly those on the fully informed jury.

While denying an accused the right to face his accusers may seem severe — there are many situations where prosecutors will not proceed if they expect the jury has the right to nullify.

Nullification should be embraced along with full information on the role of a jury — it would allow most of us to honestly “Imagine you were the bailiff …”, and act accordingly.

Is the proposed rule that it is always right to shoot someone whose probability of guilt is > 50% but otherwise not?

Suppose that I possibly (possibly not) shoot someone whose probability of guilt in a previous murder is only 45%, but then at my trial the evidence against me only comes to 55%. So from the jury’s point of view, there is a 55% probability that I killed the other person, but in that case there is still a 45% probability that I killed a guilty man. So from the jury’s point of view, I probably did not kill an innocent man. That is, the probability that I shot an innocent man is 55% times 55%, or about 30%.

Am I to be found guilty and punished or not? It depends on what the rule is. There is a 55% probability that I am guilty of violating the rule against killing someone whose probability of being guilty is

Isn’t the whole point of the preponderance rule to avoid such a situation? And yet it appears to produce the same situation.

Recall the reasoning employed in the defense of the preponderance rule. The father, it is noted, has violated (or is about to violate) the reasonable-doubt rule – that is, the rule against killing people whose probability of guilt is less than 90%. For this the law says he himself is a murderer and thus should be executed. This law is critiqued from a standpoint outside the law. We are asked to consider the point that if the father shoots the defendant, then the probability that he has killed an innocent man is only 20%. I believe that this is the gist of the argument, expressed in the words “the man who probably is not a murderer”. The “probably not” refers to the 80% probability that the person he shoots in fact killed the child, and thus to the 20% probability that he has shot a person who is innocent.

So the argument is conducted by stepping outside of the rules and critiquing them from that external standpoint. The rule that is stepped outside-of is the rule against killing people whose probability of guilt is less than 90%.

If this is an allowable move, then it is allowable for me to make the same move against the preponderance rule, as I believe that I have done above. In the scenario I have sketched, there is only a 30% probability that I have shot a man who is innocent, but there is a 55% probability that I have violated the preponderance rule (which is a rule against killing people whose probability of guilt is less than 40%). Thus the preponderance rule produces the same kind of injustice as the “reasonable doubt” rule, which can be critiqued from the same external standpoint.

I thought about it. I know what happened. I used a less-than sign, which was interpreted as the opening of an html tag.

The objection is that your logic creates incentive problems for future potential avengers. By the law of large numbers, we would be indulging to private psychological benefits of revenge at the expense of lives of some innocent people.

What sort of court allows emotionally involved participants in with guns?

And of course your argument is an argument for non-lethal but disabling technology instead of the primitive ballistic devices now in use.

“Only the preponderance rule lets us escape the bizarre conclusion that we should kill the man who is less likely to be a murderer in order to save the man who is more likely to be a murderer.”

This is the sort of comment that gives economists a bad name. What if the jury had found the accused guilty, and the father still pulls a gun to shoot the man? Clearly it is not the preponderance rule that leads to the ‘bizarre’ conclusion that the bailiff should carry out his sworn duty and prevent the father from killing.

In this scenario, shouldn’t the father shoot the members of the jury too? This would provide some ‘costs’ that might prevent future jurors from making the wrong decision.

But, now, let’s suppose the jury found an innocent man guilty, and the defendant was wrongly sentenced to death. Shouldn’t the bailiff shoot the members of the jury? After all, this would provide incentives for future jurors to be more careful and get their decisions correct.

Why doesn’t the legal system weight punishments according to confidence in the verdict? The jury is asked two questions: “Guilty?” and “What punishment?” They are asked to answer each question without regard to the other.

Juries generally do have that latitude. If they’re pretty sure of a first-degree murder, but not past the “reasonable doubt” test, they can compromise and choose to convict for second-degree murder.

This requires, however, that the prosecutor has included second-degree murder charges among his list of charges.

If I were to try and contort this into the hypothetical of the original post, I would have the father shoot the prosecutor for not giving the jury a way out. Chew on that one! 😀

Here’s the link – http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070628135531.31cukrus&show_article=1

The father was an eyewitness to the original crime and he actually knows what he saw. Attempting to shoot the defendant in the courtroom may cost him his own life, and even his best case scenario will find him on trial for murder. It is highly unlikely that he would take this action unless he were, in fact, telling the truth in his testimony that the defendant did commit the crime. The bailiff knows this; the jury could not. Most likely the bailiff is now convinced that the defendant did in fact kill the girl, and that the father is correcting a grave miscarriage of justice, so he will only arrest the father after the fact and not try to stop him.

A preponderance standard (vs. a reasonable-doubt standard) would have much higher returns to the manufacturing of evidence, i.e., framing. Consider a defense team able to create reasonable doubt, but a much better funded prosecution team able to generate mountains of testimony and evidence — much of it tangential or circumstantial, perhaps, but any given jury of 12 random people may well interpret “preponderance” to be related to quantity and simultaneously fail to discount for quality or investment.

We can construct hypothetical arguments against any legal system.

Let’s take the facts in this case, but presume that the defendant is in fact innocent because the father is mistaken (eyewitness testimony is often wrong). Oh snap, the reasonable doubt standard works brilliantly!

As would the preponderance of the evidence standard.

The heights of rationalist thinking.

Don’t be an ass.