False Justice and Prosecutors' Fallacies

False Justice , by Jim and Nancy Petro, is an engaging, first-person tale of a former Ohio Attorney General's involvement in correcting ...

Beyond the Higgs Boson: The “Prosecutor’s Fallacy” Does Not Explain Why Experimenters Are Cautious About Announcing New Discoveries

A posting of July 6, 2012, " The Probability that the Higgs Boson Has Been Discovered ,"  mentioned the transposition of a p-value...

“Statistical Lawyer’s Tricks” with DNA Mixtures in the Trial of Tommy Whack

Maryland seems to produce more than its share of significant judicial opinions on DNA evidence. Perhaps this is partly the result of having ...

A Probability for Dog DNA

A pet peeve of many statisticians is the transposition fallacy—misconstruing the probability of the data given the hypothesis as the probabi...

Judge Richard Posner on DNA Evidence: Missing the Trees for the Forest?

In the cornucopia of court opinions, errors in the description of statistical concepts are a dime a dozen. Most never see the light of day. ...

McDaniel v. Brown: Whose Error?

The DNA analyst who miscomputed the siblingship probability and accepted the prosecutor's transposition of her random match probability ...

McDaniel v. Brown: Prosecutorial and Expert Misstatements of Probabilities Do Not Justify Postconviction Relief — At Least Not Here and Not Now

Originally posted to Double Helix Law, Jan. 18, 2010 (http://www.personal.psu.edu/dhk3/blogs/DoubleHelixLaw/2010/01/mcdaniel-v-brown-prosecu...

The Signal, the Noise, and the Errors

Published in September 2012, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver soon reached The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. Amaz...