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Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science

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Darwin College Lecture Series: Statistics and the Law

Recent cases involving multiple infant deaths and DNA profiling identification have highlighted some of the problematic issues that can arise when statistical evidence is introduced into legal proceedings. It might appear that the concerns of Statistics and those of Law have little common ground, but in fact both disciplines address the same fundamental task: the drawing out of sound inferences from evidence. I will describe the logic of probabilistic reasoning and its application to cases at law, and show how its all too frequent neglect or misapplication has led to serious errors and miscarriages of justice. Both Statistics and Law are faced with the problem of structuring and making sense of mixed masses of evidence. The modern technology of "Probabilistic Expert Systems" can be seen as an extension of the century-old "Wigmore chart" method, used by lawyers to organise the many items of evidence in a case and express the many kinds of relationship between them. This technology is now being used to provide a correct and efficient way of taking account of whatever limited evidence may be at hand, a task that could otherwise be impossible. An important area of application is the interpretation of DNA profiles taken from relatives when that of the suspect (in a criminal case) or putative father (in a paternity case) is unavailable. Finally I shall discuss the wider relevance of the use of formal methods of reasoning about evidence, in the context of an inter-disciplinary programme on "Evidence, Inference and Enquiry".

Speaker

Philip Dawid is Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University, having been Pearson Professor of Statistics at University College London from 1989 to 2007. He is Chartered Statistician and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, which has awarded him Guy Medals in Bronze and Silver; elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; elected Member of the International Statistical Institute; and a Member of the Organising Committee for the Valencia International Meetings on Bayesian Statistics. He has served as Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B) and of Biometrika, and is currently an Editor of Bayesian Analysis. He was President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for the year 2000.