Legal Narrative . Part II : A Foray Into Concepts

In judicial decision making, the doctrine of chances takes explicitly into account the odds. There is more to forensic statistics, as well as various probabilistic approaches which taken together form the object of an enduring controversy in the scholarship of legal evidence. In this paper, we reconsider the circumstances of the Jama murder and inquiry (dealt with in Part I of this paper: \The Jama Model. On Legal Narratives and Interpretation Patterns"), to illustrate yet another kind of probability or improbability. What is improbable about the Jama story, is actually a given, which contributes in terms of dramatic underlining. In literary theory, concepts of narratives being probable or improbable date back from the eighteenth century, when both prescientiic and scientiic probability was innltrating several domains, including law. An understanding of such a backdrop throughout the history of ideas is, I claim, necessary for AI researchers who may be tempted to apply statistical methods to legal evidence. The debate for or against probability (and especially bayesian probability) in accounts of evidence has been ourishing among legal scholars; nowadays both the Bayesians (e.g., Peter Tillers) and the Bayesio-skeptics (e.g., Ron Allen) among those legal scholars who are involved in the controversy are willing to give AI researchers a chance to prove itself and strive towards models of plausibility that would go beyond probability as narrowly meant. This debate within law, in turn, has illustrious precedents: take Voltaire, he was critical of the application of probability even to litigation in civil cases; take Boole, he was a starry-eyed believer in probability applications to judicial decision making (Rosoni 1995). Not unlike Boole, the founding father of computing, nowadays computer scientists approaching the eld may happen to do so without full awareness of the pitfalls. Hence, the usefulness of the conceptual landscape I sketch here. 1 \Not Likely", yet \True" In Part I, the story was told and discussed of a hate crime: a Somali refugee was burned to death as he was sleeping on a bench in a public park. Eyewit-nesses identiied the suspects, who were nevertheless released. What is peculiar about the eyewitnesses, is that they were football referees and linesmen eating at a restaurant close by. Here in Part II, we are going to ponder about what it is that makes this narrative so awkward in addition to its being strikingly saddening. What is it that makes this story stand apart? More …