 The likelihood ratio is helpful for assessing the strength of the evidence, as the preceding discussion about cold-hit matches shows. One major difficulty, however, is the choice of the hypotheses \(H\) and \(H'\) that should be compared. The hypotheses should compete with one another—say, in a criminal trial, \(H\) is the hypothesis put forward by the prosecution and \(H'\) is the hypothesis put forward by the defense. But this constraint leaves open the possibility for manipulations and misinterpretations of the evidence. Let us examine some of the main controversies in the literature on this topic.