Errors of the Justice System
In the Judiciary Branch of the American legal system there are two verdicts that are chosen from in a court case: guilty or not guilty. To find the possible errors and ways of reducing errors in the verdict of a court case people use statistics. Using the statistical method to solve the problems of making Type I and Type II errors in the U.S. justice system can help innocent people live freely and take the guilty, crime-ridden people off the streets.
When a cop arrests someone, he is rejecting the null hypothesis of the person being innocent. The null hypothesis in statistics is the presumption that was made in an event and to counteract that there is the alternative hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis is why a cop will arrest someone. It is the idea that a trait or happening needs to examined and looked over in any situation. Within the investigation of the attempt to reject the null hypothesis they must have beyond the reasonable doubt or standard of judgement. This means that they must find enough evidence to prove that the person wasn’t arrested for no reason or by chance and that he was in the wrong place and the wrong time. It’s interesting that in the judiciary system of the U.S. it takes just one proficient piece of evidence to reject the hypothesis yet it takes an “endless amount” to prove it right. This is why instead of saying that someone is innocent or that the null is correct we say that they are “not guilty” or we reject the alternative hypothesis.
The Term Paper on Testing hypothesis
Introduction to Hypothesis Testing 8.1 Inferential Statistics and Hypothesis Testing LEARNING OBJECTIVES 8.2 Four Steps to Hypothesis Testing After reading this chapter, you should be able to: 8.3 Hypothesis Testing and Sampling Distributions 8.4 Making a Decision: Types of Error 8.5 Testing a Research Hypothesis: Examples Using the z Test 8.6 Research in Focus: Directional Versus Nondirectional ...
The two types of errors to be made within the executive ( meaning the arresting officer) or judiciary branches (the tribunal) are type I and type II errors. Type I is the horrible mistake to be made of sending an innocent person to jail possibly through misidentification from a witness or a wrong assumption made by the jury. Type II is when the guilty person is set free from the factor of not enough evidence, misleading evidence, or the factor of the type I error. It is arguable of which one is worse and there are multiple ways of reducing the possibility of an error. A couple different strategies the justice system has used to reduce the margin of error are: a search for the largest number of witnesses as possible and increasing their amount of data on the situation. According to the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem the larger the sample ,the more normal and accurate the data will be.
Accuracy and precision are very important in the judiciary branch of the United States. Without the standard of judgement it is today ,room would be left for errors that could make a huge impact on the person themselves and the people that surround them in society. Statistics and the appliance to the court room are quite essential in achieving the accuracy and precision needed to figure out who is innocent and who is guilty. It is also a prominent factor in finding their errors which lead them to the right answer. As they always said, “Success will not come without failure.”