Preperation for our presentation in week 11

It is now the end of week nine and i am writing this blog after a meeting with my group, which we did instead of having a lecture this week. We had planned to get started on the reading for our presentation which is on an article by Mandeep K. Dhami: Measuring quantitative Interpretations of reasonable doubt. I had already read through the paper and highlighted the parts i felt were most important. I found that parts were incredibly hard to understand this may be because it is written in a very technical way. In our meeting today David Harman went through it with us, and iv had another read through myself, i now feel happier now with the overall concept, which, when i think about it is rather straight forward and just commonsense. The only thing i have to try and do now is to condense it down into simpler terms for the presentation.
Reasonable doubt is basically the highest probability that the jury would have to feel that the defendant is guilty, in order to convict them. In most cases past research have found that this is normally around 90% probability. Therefore if a jury was 90% sure that the defendant was guilty its more than likely they would convict them.
The question this paper addresses is whether different methods of explaining the standard of reasonable doubt too the jurors leads them to give different verdicts.
It becomes apparent in this paper that describing reasonable doubt in words (qualitatively), rather than explaining in in terms of probability (quantitatively) results in more inter individual variability in their interpretation of reasonable doubt. If this is true then it raises concerns that jurors may find it difficult to reach consensus on a verdict.
Breifly, there were three methods used in experiments 1 & 2 to measure interpretations of reasonable doubt; two direct methods (direct rating and membership function) and one indirect method ( decision theory based). They also analysed these against the different ways the jurors were instructed about reasonable doubt. It was found that the direct and in direct methods did differ in their ability to predict verdicts. They seemed to appear to capture different aspects of the concept of reasonable doubt. Overall, it appears that there is alot of inter and intraindividual variability in jurors, and that their interpretaion of how sure they should be that a person is guilty in order for them to convict them can also vary alot. These finding should have a massive impact on the way jurors are instructed on reasonable doubt and on future researchers choosiong the method when studying standards of proof!
That explanation was rather vague and i feel i need to re-read the paper and read some of the other articals on the subject so that i am happy enough to present it to the class! our goup decided whos doing what, and i am explaining the results of the 1st experiment so i need to look at that part again!
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