&gt; the field of criminal justice needs a huge overhaul in terms of rigor. We need professional statisticians working on cases that involve guilt and innocence. We need to provide accurate probabilities to jurors. We need replication and peer review of lab results.<p>This misjudges the fundamental operation of the justice system. Talk about probabilities is there to sound good, not because the justice system wants to <i>use</i> statistical calculations.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;volokh.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;02&#x2F;wrongful-convictions-proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;volokh.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;02&#x2F;wrongful-convictions-proof-beyo...</a><p>&gt; So here we had a case where there were no other witnesses, no “corroborating physical evidence,” a “word against word situation,” yet the judge concluded that Montgomery was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt because the judge saw “no motive whatsoever” for Coast to lie (though it turns out that Coast indeed had such a motive).<p>&gt; My sense is that in such cases convictions are fairly common (though not universal), especially when there’s no obvious motive for the witness to lie, but sometimes even when there is.<p>This wasn&#x27;t just any word-against-word situation. This was a girl retroactively accusing the neighbor of raping her <i>seven years in the past</i>, when she was 10. No evidence was ever offered (nor could it have been, really); no support of any kind was ever required for her to have a young man thrown in jail for several years.<p>And my observation in passing earlier, that her accusation <i>couldn&#x27;t have been supported by any evidence even if it had been true</i>, is significant:<p>&gt; What’s doing the work in many of the convictions, I suspect, is that the very ubiquity of the risk makes factfinders realize that — if we were to constantly consider this generalized risk, in the absence of more specific information — a wide range of crimes couldn’t be effectively prosecuted. That’s especially true of child molestation and rape, but it’s also true of many sorts of felons’ possession of guns, robberies, and the like.<p>We&#x27;ve created a justice system that requires large numbers of punishments for crimes which could never be demonstrated under ideal conditions. It shouldn&#x27;t surprise us that we then don&#x27;t prosecute those crimes with statistical, or any other kind of, rigor.<p>Consider a very typical word-against-word: a traffic cop writes you a ticket for running a red light. You show up in court and say &quot;it was yellow&quot;. The cop says &quot;it was red&quot;. He doesn&#x27;t have to give evidence; his word is worth more than yours. Why?