Doesn Paired Testing intrude on juries traditional role of assessing credibility based upon witnesses demeanor?
Humans — and jurors are human — are not at all good at deciding whether someone is lying or telling the truth. Extensive research has established that in addition to bias factors such as race, clothing, grooming, and diction, people rely on cues that are worse than useless — fidgeting, eye-contact, vocal projection, and so forth. The issue is whether to substitute a very low quantified risk of a wrong outcome for a much higher risk which because it is unquantified permits the illusion that it is low. If lawyers and judges took that illusion seriously, they would not call trials “crapshoots”. Maybe there is a clash between scientific culture and legal culture on this. Courts think quantitatively about some scientific evidence, e.g. DNA, but rarely otherwise. Some concepts, such as proof beyond a reasonable doubt are inherently fuzzy and it would be counterproductive to impose quantification onto them. The veracity of witnesses regarding facts where they must either be telling the tru